#very heat wave no shirt paint splattered skin etc.

[museumgiftshoperaser]

Paint the Devil on the Wall

(first little snippet of the opening of my big bang fic)

The first artwork Eddie ever falls in love with is a piece of graffiti on the dumpster behind the church. He’s ten, maybe eleven and his mother pushes him across the parking lot on Sunday morning. They’re running late and pretending not to be, but the Indiana sun soaks sweat through his mother’s nicest blouse. A telltale sign of rushing and cheap polyester.

Would you look at that, she tuts anyway, like judging other people will guard her from nasty looks from the right side of the picket fence. Her yellowed nails hook into his shoulders. I bet it’s those Peterson boys again.

So Eddie looks.

It’s a corner of town he’s seen a hundred times, but just like that it’s new again. Angry blue and black lines swoop across the metal into bold letters spelling out SOON. Loud like advertising, enticing like early morning cartoons. Messy, but on purpose.

His mother must see the crease between his brows, maybe the longing in his eyes because she adds you don’t draw on things that aren’t yours, baby.

Inside, with his knees on the hardwood and his eyes closed, those bright letters light up the inside of his eyelids like a promise. Soon. He doesn’t know what, or where or how, but he thinks it’s coming.

Later that night he scratches the same swooping letters into his bedside table with a ballpoint and a vision. Pushes so hard the plywood dents in the shape of his marks and learns how good it feels. How a room can be a canvas. How he gets to pick the colors.

His stepdad smacks him over the head for it when his mother finds out so he figures nothing in his bedroom is really his. But maybe he knew that already.

It’s a decade later now, and Hawkins, Indiana is over seven hundred miles away. He doesn’t believe in God anymore, maybe never did and he no longer believes in Art. But he believes in Soon like nobody’s business. Gets the word tattooed over his wrist his first week in New York and never looks back. The money. The boys and the white, chalky lines across every black surface he can find. Everything. Soon.

It’s coming.

All of which is to say that this is not a love story.

At least, not yet.