Spinning Pins

The master asks for portraits first. Every family member. Five children, the lady, the master himself. They are to be surrounded by possessions, suggestive gems and pursuits, and also swathed in the land, leaves arranged around their bodies.

He is not well taught. She can see that in his shoulders. The quality of his work seesaws one week to the next. He puts the grey of dawn around the mouth of the third son, renders books too narrow to read, paints the master's eyes like steelhead swimming upstream. Curtains are blocks of red strokes.

For the second child, Martha, he puts his easel next to the window and drapes a black string crookedly around her neck and breast. Her generous creamy sash, her careful lace--he takes her unformed gaze and paints it knowing, only a little fear in it, mostly just looking back and holding a peach. He keeps her face intact but makes her arms too long.

The weaver, his lover, stands behind him in a corner speaking into a tiny recorder in her palm. Or she scratches captions to his canvas onto a scrap of paper. Her father had been a homesteader here, four miles upriver where the valley is tighter.

Paint cracks in waves toward Martha's body.