Shiver

by Naomi Rochelle Garnice

A photograph is a picture of something someone has seen; a painting is a blueprint of something they've felt. His paintings hang on the walls and make the rooms go on for miles. The brush strokes smolder and arch into gaunt expressions that ache under screens of shade and oil. He turns the lights off and the candles burn and move the figures out of the darkness and when they fade and the shadows fall across the face on the wall and make it something real. Those paintings are contentions of hope and desperation that he's made into something beautiful and bound to those walls. It's the only way to see him up close and that makes it harder to look away.

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Naomi Rochelle Garnice is the author of many other stories only slightly longer than this.