Thank You for Ten: Short Fiction About a Little Theater Read online

  *

  The eyes. She stared at them for close to ten minutes. There was no more avoiding this part of the project.

  No kids this week. No laughter and hollering. No Heidi. She was all on her own again, facing the most delicate part of her project.

  "One is in better shape than the other, my friend," she told the painting as she leaned up against the ticket counter. "I've been close enough to them over the last few weeks to know that. I probably should have worked on them first but," she walked toward the painting, "I'm nervous, okay?"

  She climbed up onto her stool again and put her own eyes close to the cracked ones of the oil painting. No matter how closely she examined them, she couldn't reduce them to mere paint blotches; it felt as though they looked at her. Perhaps the best part of the entire painting, she thought.

  "I could make any of half a dozen mistakes on most of you, and only certain people would ever notice. But your eyes…if I don't get it right, everyone will know forever, won't they?"

  The right eye had a longer crack than the left. Both were faded, probably from a time when a display light shone too close to them from above, she figured.

  "I don't want you to worry though," she said. She pulled a small magnifying glass from her pocket and examined the eyes more carefully. "Being nervous means I care, right?"

  She descended the steps and unpacked her things. This time she had a small pouch with tiny brushes and other tools she had yet to use.

  "You're in good hands," she said. "Hopefully you don't doubt that by now."

  The ever present quasi-grin suggested he didn't doubt it one bit.

  She began extracting the proper tools and chemicals from the pouch to begin the delicate work.

  "It's weird in here without the kids, isn't it?" she asked about fifteen minutes into her precision operation on the right eye. "I don't know much about kids. I knew they'd be here a few times when I took this job, though. I wondered if they'd distract me too much. But they were fine."

  She blinked away some of the fatigue from her own eyes and leaned back in to continue.

  "They're kind of inspirational though. Like Sarah. Been through some kind of hard time. Then coming here, and getting better. Little by little. I think that's wonderful."

  She held her breath a moment during a delicate pass. When it was finished, she spoke again.

  "I couldn't do theater, I don't think. Though maybe the set painting stuff, like Sarah. That sounds fun. But there's something about it that opens people up. Is that what you're doing? Hmm? Get people to relax, and be open? Is that what theater does? Or is it just about having fun?"

  She stepped down from the stool and took a few paces back to see her work from a distance, moving around the room to view it from different angles.

  "Maybe having fun is the key to being open? I think that's another problem I had with Jack. I still think about him. He'd only have fun when it was scripted. When he knew when it was going to happen. And he'd never have fun, or never let himself have fun when things were stressful or serious. That's the most important time to try to laugh, isn't it?"

  The eyes looked back at her as they always had, the barely-there grin somehow providing another answer to one of her questions.

  "You're right," she said. "Different things for different people. Fair enough. Just like painting. Art in general. I guess we tend to see what we want to see. Or need to see?"

  The wisdom of the grin again was not lost on her.

  "Well," she said, climbing the stool again, "what I need to see is getting back to work here. I'm getting edgy. But, so far so good. Shall we continue?"

  She talked of Sarah. Of Jack. Of her professor that got her the job. Her plans for the internship. Her fears about same. It was her most talkative session with the painting, possibly because she was the most nervous this time.

  The hours got ahead of her.

  "My lord, is it almost lunch time already?" she asked a bit after noon. She hopped down from the stool and began to clean up in haste. "I'm supposed to meet with my professor to talk about my capstone project."

  She looked up and sighed. She'd only ever gotten to the one eye, though it was the worse of the two.

  "I'll come back, though. I wouldn't leave you cross eyed," she said, with a hurried laugh. After cleaning up she took one last look at the eye from a distance. "If I'm allowed to say so on my own behalf, I think I nailed it."

  She closed the curtain and turned towards the house. "An extra week, just for one eye," she called over her shoulder. "I wouldn't do it for just anybody you know."