Webs

1

Lord Roger Rennold moved out of the city a week after his 45th birthday. He had come home that evening, drained of energy, desiring nothing more than to take off his shoes and shut his eyes. He opened his front door to a lit house, yellow candles glimmering and guests scattered about his floors. Rennold paled, dread wrinkling his skin as people took notice that the special guest had finally arrived.

"Where have you been?" his wife asked in a low voice as she moved toward him in a purple silk gown. "Don't tell me you forgot."

Rennold looked at his wife's face with flushed features.

"You know I hate these things," he said.

"Like I care. Now stop looking like you walked into a haunted building."

He tried to swallow his dread and attempted to pull on a smile, giving a quick face-to-face conversation with his patrons.

He stopped in the drawing room and looked at the scene displayed before him and wondered when he had gotten so bitter. Groups of people sat in the dining room and drawing room, engaged in local gossip, admiring Catherine's taste in décor. Rooms full of faces he didn't recognize. He did not attend the social gatherings anymore where new faces circle in and different bonds are made. He no longer took an interest in the chatter, watching the thoughts and opinions play on repeat.

After he greeted all the guests who offered him kind words and congratulations he found himself standing at the end of the dining room, exhaustion hitting him again. Catherine stood at the other end of the room with a mocking grin. He wondered then when his wife had grown so cruel. He grabbed a bottle of rum from the kitchen and snuck upstairs.

Rennold took a seat in a lounge chair in his study, bottle resting loosely between his fingers. He looked over to the shelf-lined wall stuffed with papers and textbooks and novels. Some he had had with him since childhood, picture books he kept in the right-hand corner, pages of colorful animals and young children, curly letters constructing simple words designed to teach a molding mind. There were leather-bound books on history and philosophy, textbooks collected from the university stuffed with notes, and boxes stashed with letters. He never tossed any of them, the papers in an organized timeline that mapped out his life. There was a telescope by the window and a large wooden desk with an ornate inkwell and quill pen set. Along the other wall was an easel, worn and chipped, with canvases stacked behind it.

Rennold looked at the canvases and felt disappointment wrap around him. So many paintings sat unfinished, collecting dust; such beautiful images in his head, some replicated beautifully, others forming only as sketch marks—a single silhouette or stripe of landscape taking a small form before the images became too blurry, growing with frustration that he couldn't pin them down. The glass of the windows were dirty, smudges across the surface, and scratches around the pane. He found it harder to draw inspiration from the streets.

There was a shout from below, the guests carrying on in Rennold's absence, and he pushed himself from his chair and approached the artwork that used to be his life's work. He had known from a young age that being an artist was not an option for him, but that didn't stop him from picking up a brush. That's what he noticed most about his work as he tracked the canvases through time: his loss in the use of color. His earliest works were almost all finished, displaying open skies and the detailed landscapes that he grew up in. Flowers blooming, horses grazing beneath an oak tree. His paintings were sloppy in the beginning, an untrained hand and simple eyes not yet capturing detail or understanding how colors behaved when blended. But skill began to shine through his work, practice leading him to create images that looked captured from the eye. He would copy some of the details, in others he would create his own take on the scenery. There was one piece he remembered doing when he was 12. It depicted his mother's large garden that bloomed at the end of the house he grew up in. There were vegetables and fruits grown together, and among the leaves and vines, he created massive bugs crawling across the plants. Beetles crawling over squash and large grasshoppers munching on the leaves of a strawberry. His mother's face was painted in the corner, her eyes comically big and her mouth open in shock as she watched her plants being devoured.