Blood And Guitars

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Having gotten my fill of blood for the night, I dropped Mark off at his house and drove back to The Waking Moon. I climbed the stairway up into the loft and put on some loud music. The piece I’d started the night before was waiting just as I’d left it. I donned one of the aprons hanging on the wall and picked up a brush. This particular piece was of an ancient Egyptian pyramid at night. This piece was black and white, although that isn’t a very descriptive label considering a gazillion shades of grey exist in between that really make an image come to life. I patted paint onto the canvas, creating a moon in the sky. Then I added the face of a woman on the surface of the luminescent moon.

I worked for an hour, maybe a little longer before the painting was complete. I set it aside to start drying. It would be dry to the touch fairly soon, but not dry enough to varnish for six months. I set it aside where it would be safe and then pulled out a painting that had just reached the six month mark earlier this week. Working with oils made keeping a steady supply of paintings in the studio a fickle thing. But I’d been painting long before I opened The Waking Moon, so I’d had enough pieces varnished and ready to go on display to make it work. I just had to keep the process going. On occasion I put a painting up for sale and just arranged to have it delivered once it was dry enough to varnish, even though that was often months down the road.

I carefully twisted off the lid of a jar I had sitting on the table in the corner. It was full of turpentine and the dissolved remnants of some crystal that I had suspended in cheesecloth from the lid. The result was damar varnish that I used to coat my paintings to protect them from dirt, dust and damage. You could buy varnishes at any painting supply store but I preferred to make my own so I could control the quality. We vampires are often control freaks. This was the most obvious way that tendency showed up in my everynight life. I thinned the varnish slightly to get the right consistency and used a horsehair brush to apply it to the canvas, being certain to coat the entire surface. When I’d finished, I had enough varnish left over for one more piece which worked out perfect, considering I only had one more left that had dried for the required period of time. I varnished that painting as well and set them both aside.

I realized that I was running low on crystals and a few other supplies, and I was in serious need of a new horsehair brush. I dug a piece of paper and pen out of a drawer and spent a few minutes making a list of things I needed to pick up at the art supply store on Belcher. That meant that I’d be going out during the day sometime soon. Shopping during regular business hours was one of the downsides of vampirism. Someday, maybe I’d find a vampire who owned an art supply store and I’d convince them to open for an hour or so each night. I sighed, knowing that wasn’t likely. It wasn’t that there weren’t other vamps who were business owners. There were plenty, but opening a shop or store of any kind in the middle of the night would only draw unnecessary attention, and that was something the Synod would frown upon.

I was feeling restless, and wished I had something more to do, but I didn’t have any great inspiration to start another piece so I took off my apron and went back downstairs into the bathroom to scrub my hands, trying to get the paint from underneath my fingernails.

Knowing I was done for the night, at least with painting, I grabbed my keys and locked up. The sun would be up in an hour and hopefully I would be lost in sleep when that happened. I drove straight home and went into my bedroom where I undressed and pulled on some pajamas. The windows were blacked out to prevent the sun from shining in and disrupting my sleep during the day. I climbed into my silky black sheets and let my head fall on the pillow. My eyelids were growing heavy and my nerves were dulling as the moon descended to allow for the new day. It was like the intangible tentacles of my senses were growing numb at the tips. Sleep would come easily. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine what my next painting should look like as I drifted off.