The streets shimmer in a mirage. Light bounces between broken windows and cracked pavement. The heat tamps down from all sides. I walk south along an unfamiliar block, one shoulder to the sun, my bag damp against my back.
The studio was too hot and humid by noon. Paper curled at the corners. Black ink dried on the slab of plate glass before I could use it. I couldn’t pull a clean image from a block.
My fingers feel swollen. I need to walk.
Around the corner, a breeze. For a moment, the smell of future rain. Maybe this evening.
Then I see him.
Me.
I tell myself I’m not dreaming.
He emerges from a wedge of dense shadow that doesn’t belong to this time of day.
He is thinner. He's wearing a heavy wool coat. Hair, shorter. Skin patched over his face and eyes. But the mouth is mine. The way he tilts his head belongs to me. The way he watches everything. Unblinking, unflinching, unafraid. Too direct. It’s how I look at myself in dreams I never talk about.
Neither of us stops walking. We pull together like two magnets on a thread. We meet at the narrowest part of the sidewalk. We stand between a boarded-up storefront and a lamp-post shrouded in fliers.
The sun glints off glass above us. The light falters. Shadows twitch.
“Why now?” I ask, not sure I’m speaking aloud.
He shrugs his shoulders. “You’re too comfortable.”
“I’m working.”
“You’re hiding.”
His voice is flatter than mine. Colder. Like the inside of a dark stairwell.
A truck approaches, scattering sun and dust and noise. The street returns to silence after it passes. The heat and humidity thickens.
“I’m not you,” I say.
His laughter is cruel. “We’ve always been me. Your half just prefers the version that lives in a forest and sleeps with guard dogs.”
He leans in. His shadow crosses my face. I smell turpentine. Ash. Wet fur. My forest studio.
“I know the things you don’t want to paint or print anymore,” he says. “The things she wants you to. It’s too much.”
I blink.
He steps back and walks on. His shadow drags behind him. I imagine it blends into mine. I don’t watch him go. But I feel him cross behind me as I turn away.
When I return to my friend’s studio, the heat is unbearable. I try the fan. Nothing.
I open the windows. Her etching press sits silent under a cotton drop cloth.
I peel off my shirt and stand in front of the workbench covered with unfinished wood blocks. The carved ones rest beside the ink slab.
Nothing moves. Even the dust hangs still.
I look at the uncut blocks. The tins of fresh ink. Stacks of unsigned prints.
I think of the velvet blackness of ink.
Then, just the blackness.
Outside, thunder. The sky darkens.
Behind me, a whisper. Nothing clear. Just the shape of my name.
Then silence.