Restoration Story
Matthew Ryan Fischer
Jane
sat on the floor drawing pictures in a notebook. She always carried a notebook
with her. Somewhere, stacked up in storage, she had nearly a hundred such
notebooks. She drew something nearly everyday. She wasn’t social, didn’t have
any friends and had on occasion been known to go weeks at a time without
communicating at all. Except for the notebooks. If you knew how to look for the
answers, she would communicate though the notebooks. But her father seldom
asked. He was far too busy a businessman, always buying and selling something
or shipping it or receiving it. He had his own notebooks, but those had numbers
written in them. He had very little time for arts and crafts, but he loved his
daughter and supplied her with as many notebooks as she wanted. She didn’t want
much else.
The
world was crumbling, but there was no time for panic. There was work to be
done. Jane’s father oversaw movers who sorted and packed mementos into boxes.
Jane didn’t pay any attention to what they were doing. She believed him when
her father told her that they would be moving. She didn’t listen to the ‘how’
or ‘why’ but she knew it was happening. She didn’t think about it, she didn’t
talk about it, and she didn’t make herself available to be talked to about it.
She just drew another picture.
Jane
sat and imagined and drew grass. She was afraid she would never see grass
again. She understood that she was going to live in a box and that sounded all
too much like a trap. She had no interest in small spaces and being
constricted. But no one had asked her what she wanted.
Jane
worried about what would happen to the people she knew. She worried about her
father and about the fate of the world. She worried about the future and where
they would end up. She didn’t like to worry. It was too scary. It was much
easier to draw in her notebooks and not think about such things.
The
Sistine Chapel was gone, but she had preserved Michelangelo’s ‘The Creation of
Adam’ in one of her notebooks.
She
was cuter than she knew.
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