I wake, though I don’t remember falling asleep.
The couch holds me, suspended above the dream I think I woke from. Fog penetrates the studio, smelling like stale popcorn. The stove stands cold. The dogs lie near the door, heads lifted, watching something I can’t see.
I sit up and reach toward the work bench. The bench isn’t there. My tools, gone. The fresh block I left there, vanished. My hands close on nothing. No wood. No edge. Just the dense space of things missing.
As I look up, the far wall begins to glow. No flipped switch. No projector sounds. The light of a movie screen brightens. An image flickers once, skips, then locks in place. It hangs there. Still and fragile. The way old film freezes when it breaks, just before it burns.
A boy. A modern Icarus, captured by projector light. Destined to burst into flame.
He stands in the middle, turned to look to his right. My left. A mirror to what I see.
His hair, down to his shoulders. He wears a dark school jacket, a thin, wrinkled tie, a white shirt. His mouth stays closed and says nothing.
Behind him, I see narrow slivers of the edge of a parking lot. A sidewalk. A piece of lawn.
He doesn’t move or look at me. He watches something beyond the edge of the screen. Not a person yet. Maybe a shape. A place his eyes lock on to and won’t leave.
I watch him watch.
Something shifts. And the longer I look, the more certain I become, someone else is there. She’s there. Not inside the film frame, but near enough to change the tenor of his responses.
I can’t see her. But I feel her. She anchors him to the scene. She anchors me to him. She orchestrated this meeting. She is the curator of the scene. I understand now, she is the muse.
For a moment, he stands still, until the image around him begins to break apart. His collar melts. A hole burns through his jacket. The grass catches fire at the edges. The screen locks.
His eyes remain transfixed; seeing something unfinished.
A subtitle appears on the screen for a moment: “He would have been ours.”
The celluloid melts, burns and flashes bright white.
The light drains from the wall.
The fog evaporates from the room.
The studio returns. Bench, table, stove. A new wood block waits on the workbench. The dogs hold their positions.
I notice two soft smudges of gray ash on the studio floor. Footprints of someone who once stood there long enough to leave their impression behind. I leave them as found.
Later, I sit at the workbench to carve. I feel something inside the block press forward. Not an image. Not a figure. A presence waiting.
The movie screen is gone, but I remember what it showed.
The three of us together for the first time and all the space between us.