The Pacifist [COMPLETED]

Soft Bits

Rachel

Rachel couldn't remember the last time she had woken up with her creative spirit pulling her out of bed, so she didn't hesitate and let it lead her to the garden shed, a bolt cutter in hand. She eyed the padlock, then looked back at the house. As it turned out, her parents were in fact not home. She was both happy, but also a little disappointed that she could have stayed the entire night with Mr. Maxwell and had had nothing to worry about. Their absence without notice was strange though. Still, Rachel didn't question it because the good part was that she could go into the garden shed uninterrupted.

She lifted the bolt cutter to the padlock and took a deep breath before cutting into it. The lock fell away, leaving her surprised that she had managed to cut it in one try. A small part of her had hoped that maybe her father wasn't so shortsighted and the lock had been some type of high end model that wasn't vulnerable to bolt cutters. But there she stood, with nothing but a door that had begun to rot on its hinges. She pushed it open and was met with the stench of mold. There was no doubt everything would be damaged.

The first step she took was tentative, the concrete floor swallowing up the sound of her footstep. One step at a time, she made her way to the middle of the shed and stood between the two abandoned works stations. Dust covered prints laid haphazardly on a worktable at one end and an easel with an empty, moldy canvas stood at the other. A smaller table was next to it with some of Rachel's first photos on it. Unlike her sister's table, however, the prints were laid out with obvious intention. The windows and walls had kept up well over the years, making sure not even the smallest draft would disturb the unintentional time capsule, but they were also the cause for the mold as moisture was more persistent in seeping into the space and less persistent in leaving it.

A shelf with tubs and tubes of acrylic and oil paint sat against the wall behind the easel and she went to inspect her neglected inventory. Of course, even with the humidity, most of it had dried up. Rachel found unopened tubes and was excited to see the paint was still usable after squirting out some onto the table with her photos. They had settled and needed to be mixed so she found a brush and worked the paint until it was smooth and free of clumps. Before she realized it, she was painting onto the moldy canvas, filling it with splotches of sienna red, and pea flower blue and wishing that she had colors to better represent the promised painting.

She was panting by the time she stood back and looked at her work. "I'm back, Cara. I'm back," she whispered to the shed.