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the-altered-sequence · 2 months ago

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"See You There" a short story. Read it below the cut here or on my blog here. ♥ A high-schooler receives rare advice from a mysterious stranger. This is a story for artists, new and experienced.

The young lizard girl sat at the art table on her own, scribbling in a sketchbook, holding her long green head in her hand. She was a creature of her own overactive imagination that she retreated to often. None of her peers were so unique—or as she’d say, weird. None of them were a made-up mammalian reptile with long ears or a prehensile tail, yellow flesh, and green skin. They were tigers, lions, wolves, dogs. A rabbit here or there, a bear, a beautiful bird. But she had invented a body for herself that spoke true to her strangeness. She wanted to be creative, but her plans backfired. She just felt weird. She furiously erased a drawing, almost rubbing a hole in the page, and thought, ‘I’m not creative, I’m just a freak who thinks she can draw.’

The door to the classroom opened. In walked another creature, older, old enough to be a teacher. The lizard girl glanced up at the person but paid them no mind. Not from apathy, but from a desire not to attract attention. The person walked up to the lizard girl’s desk, put their elbows on the teacher’s counter across from it, and leaned back. The person was not a normal creature. White fur, black outlines, an aesthetic of literal two-dimensionality that even the most boring jock at school couldn’t compete with. But the lizard girl found it hard to look away. Every position the cartoonish coyote took felt like they were scrawled into the world with markers or chunky oil pastels. Bits of the background showed through as if their creator couldn’t be bothered to fill them in completely. Their long patchwork jacket was starkly faded where the batik fabric showed through the myriad of patches and highly contrasted embroidery thread. The lizard girl thought they looked like a collage come to life. Their black jeans and black tank-top underneath looked just as ragged. The white design on the top was crusty and chipping, but the lizard girl recognized it.

“Hey,” she ventured. “I like your shirt. Is that…”

“Johnny?” The 2D coyote person said. Their voice sounded quite similar to the lizard girl’s, which startled her, but she didn’t show it.

“Yeah, I love that comic,” the lizard girl replied.

“It was my favorite when I was your age,” the coyote replied, chuckling at the adage they finally got to say. The coyote was definitely older, but not yet old-and-tired like math teacher Mr. Mitchell and his coffee-brown teeth. “That comic got me into drawing, actually,” the coyote person added.

The lizard girl’s long pointed ears perked up. She wiped her nose on her baggy sweatshirt sleeve, chewed to rags, and said, “You’re an artist?” Maybe the coyote was a substitute teacher, or a guest speaker. Usually they came in earlier than the students. The lizard girl liked to come early, too, to draw in peace. She absently covered her sketchbook with her sleeves. If this older creature was a guest speaker, then they were an accomplished artist or otherwise professed, which meant they could, under no circumstance, lay eyes on her inane doodles. Lizard girl was one of the most passionate artists in her class, but shame runs thick as blood in every teenager, and she was particularly heavy with it.

“Yeah, I’m a freelance fine artist,” the stranger said. “I sell paintings and stuff for a living.”

Lizard girl imagined the concrete studio apartment they must live in with three other starving artists. If the stranger was this badly drawn? They couldn’t be a very successful artist. Maybe they still live with their parents.

“Yeah,” the stranger went on, “It’s not a glamorous life or anything, but it’s good for me. Pays the bills on our little farm in the woods, anyway!”

The word ‘farm’ snapped lizard girl’s mind shot to when she was ten years old. She was learning computer programs to make your own tri-fold pamphlets, charmed by the clip art and the glossy photo paper that squeaked under her fingers. Lizard girl had made an “All About Me” pamphlet. It went over her favorite things: the foods she liked, her favorite animals, her friends, her hobbies, and lastly: her dreams for the future. (This was at her mother’s suggestion, perhaps to steer her into a mindset of thinking ahead.) Her future dreams were simple. She wanted a two-story house (she had never lived with stairs and found them exciting) in the country with a dog and chickens. Especially the chickens. “That sounds amazing,” Lizard Girl said. “That’s what I want, too.”

The coyote person smiled: a simple curving upwards of their almond-shaped eye outlined in greasepaint black. “Don’t give up on it and you’ll get it someday. But even if you don’t, whatever you end up doing will be good, as long as you stay true to yourself.”

Lizard Girl furrowed. Yeah, this person was probably either a sub or a speaker. She caught a whiff of the vacant pep-talk language that adults loved to spout. “Are you our sub today?”

“Nope,” the coyote said, putting their paws into their jacket pockets, “I’m just visiting.”

Weird, the Lizard Girl thought. Adults usually had a reason for showing up at school. The coyote person’s name tag they got from signing in at the office read, ‘Crooked Waters’.

“Is that your real name?”

The coyote looked down and said, “It’s the Old English translation of my surname. It means ‘one who lives by the crooked waters’, technically, but I like to shorten it.”

“Oh,” she said, “cool.”

“What’s your name?” Crooked Waters stuck out her three-digit cartoon paw for Lizard to shake.

Lizard shyly shook it. “I’m uh, well sometimes I go by Kirai online, it’s like my artist name, but, uh—”

Crooked Waters smiled. “Alright, Kirai…” They seemed torn for a moment, like a tempting question teetered at the end of their tongue. “Well, I’ll just ask. I couldn’t help but notice you’re kind of a unique critter. What was the inspiration for this?” They gestured to Kirai.

Kirai’s long ears perked up. “You’re the only one to guess it right,” she said. “I’m a made-up species, a tree lizard, it’s from a world I made up. They’re warm-blooded and have smooth skin but, like, reptile claws and stuff…” She stopped herself from gushing about her passion project any further. Crooked Waters probably wouldn’t care about some dumb fantasy world.

Crooked Waters smiled. “That’s awesome. So you’re an artist, too?”

“Uh, sorta,” Kirai replied.

“What do you mean, ‘sorta’?”

“Well,” Kirai said, looking at her hands folding and unfolding the sketchbook pages, “I like to draw. I dunno if I’m any good at it but—”

“Well it doesn’t matter if you’re good at it,” Crooked Waters said, treating the word ‘good’ as if it were ridiculous. “An artist makes art. That’s the only qualifier.”

Kirai couldn’t come up with a good counter-argument so she remained silent.

“Can I see your sketchbook?” Crooked Waters asked. The question was phrased easily enough but it sent jolts of panic through Kirai’s hormonal body.

“U-uh, well, this is my sorta, uh, work sketchbook, it’s got homework in it, we do sketchbook assignments every week, uh, here,” she frantically flipped past a few pages, “these aren’t anything, uh, okay,” she unfolded the sketchbook and displayed a page of drawings. Two anthropomorphic figures danced across the white paper, fully shaded in graphite. “This is today’s sketchbook assignment.”

“Wow!” Crooked Waters said, eyes widening, the three chalk dashes that made up their whiskers bristling towards the book. “Are these more of your creations?”

“Yeah, uh, they’re characters from the book I’m writing about it,” Kirai said.

“A book!” A toothy smile etched its way across Crooked Waters’ face. “Hey, how old are you?”

“Sixteen,” Kirai replied.

“This is very skilled for sixteen,” Crooked Waters said. “Are you sure I can’t flip through it?”

They sounded genuinely excited. Kirai hesitated, but then in a moment of clarity, figured this person wasn’t going to criticize their work (a fate worse than death) and handed over the sketchbook.

Crooked Waters thumbed through the book. Every now and again their 2D face would turn up in an implied smile, their ears would swivel curiously, their chalk whiskers flick. Kirai thought briefly their crudely-drawn body would leave charcoal smears or wet paint on her sketchbook. As they handed it back to Kirai, they said, “This is great stuff. Reminds me a lot of the work I did as a high schooler, actually. Thanks for letting me look.” They chuckled and added, “I remember how scary it was to share stuff with people.”

Kirai flipped the book closed and set it down. Now that the scariest part was over, she felt braver. “Does it get easier?”

“Does what get easier?”

“Letting people look at your sketchbook.”

“Oh yeah,” Crooked Waters said easily. “It gets way easier with time. And honestly, high schoolers can be so mean,” they laugh, “so there were some kids in my class I did not show it to.”

Kirai immediately thought of some of the football guys in her Art 101 class last year. She hated Art 101 because it had all the normies in it who were there just for the graduation requirement. They tossed the still-life fruit around like chimpanzees (one of them actually was a chimpanzee) and they’d hide it from the teacher when her back was turned, snickering. For students like Kirai, that behavior was disrespectful and stupid. She was better than that, she never acted out, she always did what she was told. Realizing this in front of such a cool, capable, professional artist made the blood flow to Kirai’s face. How immature! How lame! Real artists don’t just do what they’re told. They’re cool and rebellious, they have cool names like Crooked Waters, they have farms.

“Can I, um… Can I see what kind of art you make?” Kirai asked.

Crooked Waters shifted their weight and leaned back on the counter again. They carried a bit of extra weight in their breasts, stomach, and thighs, just like Kirai did. Kirai hated her body and all its squishy folds that never fit into pants right. But even though Crooked Waters bore the same body type, they carried themselves differently. Their clothes seemed to belong to them. Kirai wondered briefly if she and Crooked Waters might share some genetic background. “Sure,” Crooked Waters said, reaching into their strange jacket to procure a small sketchbook. “This is just my travel book, so there’s nothing super finalized.”

“That’s okay,” Kirai said, taking it. The book was made of some kind of leather, sewn with twine around the edges, and covered in stickers. All types of colorful creatures bounded and danced across the tattered cover.

“The stickers are all my design, too,” Crooked Waters added. “I print them on clear vinyl so they show the background better, and I use the sketchbook for product photos on my website.” They spoke so matter-of-factly about this wondrous thing: their artwork made manifest as a real-life object. People could stick them onto their things and carry the art forever?! Kirai’s mind spun. She imagined a huge printer in a warehouse with Crooked Waters confidently striding the aisles, two employees at their side, taking notes as Crooked Waters gestures and points out flaws in sticker production and snaps their fingers at the employees to run it again! This batch isn’t perfect! Crooked Waters’s artwork deserves the finest clear vinyl! Kirai beheld the colorful, confident artwork and swallowed. Maybe her art could be on stickers one day. She quickly smashed the notion with, ‘I can’t ever be as good as Crooked Waters. Their stickers look awesome, but mine would look like trash, and I don’t even know where to start with making something like that.’

“Everything alright?” Crooked Waters asked.

Kirai had been gripping the sketchbook a little too hard while her mind raced. “Sorry,” she said hurriedly and opened the book. The art inside was just as good as the stickers. Studies and life sketches exposed the hand of a master, confident marks and concise observations. Kirai shut the book and handed it back to Crooked Waters.

Crooked Waters eyed her as they re-pocketed the book. “What’s up?”

How could adults always tell when something upset her? Kirai fumbled her words and ended up with, “Nothing.”

“Look,” Crooked Waters said seriously. They grabbed a vacant stool nearby and brought it over to sit opposite Kirai at the desk. They were the same height. “Can I give you some advice?”

Kirai looked less like a lizard and more like a deer in the headlights. “Sure…?”

Crooked Waters gently held their cartoon hand out to Kirai, who almost put her own hand in Crooked Waters’s, but luckily caught on to their actual intention and handed them her sketchbook. Crooked Waters began thumbing through it once again. “Here,” they said, lying it down turned to today’s assignment: the figures in graphite. “This area here,” they gestured to a torso bent slightly, “this is great. It really shows how the waist in flexible, not just a static rectangle.” They flipped the pages a few more times. “Oh, paint pens? Those are fun. One of my favorite toys. I see you’re getting the hang of it. How many paint pen drawings have you done?”

“T-that was my first try, it was an experiment,” Kirai said quietly.

Crooked Waters beams. “Right on. Seems like you got a feel for it already.”

Kirai didn’t know how to respond.

“Can I ask you a sort of personal question, Kirai?”

Kirai’s walls went up whenever an adult tried to be ‘real’ with her or whatever, an attempt to really know her, as if they could understand. They always tried, but it never stuck. “Okay.”

“How did it feel when I asked to see your sketchbook?”

Kirai hadn’t expected that. Encouraged by an art question, she replied, “Kinda nervous.”

“Okay. But how did it feel?”

Kirai’s ears tilted quizzically. Didn’t she just answer that? “What?”

Crooked Waters patted their chest and said, “What did the feeling feel like in your body?”

No one had ever asked her anything like that before. “Uh, bad, I guess.”

Crooked Waters nodded, apparently satisfied enough with that reply. “And how did it feel the second time?”

“Not as bad.”

“There you go,” Crooked Waters said, “it gets easier.”

A flush of anger flowed through Kirai. She balled her fists. When she spoke, the words arrived choked and garbled with the beginnings of a sob, to her surprise and mortification, but the emotions pushed them out: “I mean that’s easy for you to say,” she gestured harshly at Crooked Waters, “you’re so good at art. My art sucks.”

“Not for a sixteen-year-old,” Crooked Waters said. “Besides, you’re barely starting your artistic journey.”

“Yeah but I feel like I should be better,” Kirai said, shoving her fingers through her greasy brown hair. “There’s artists I see online that are like, younger than me, even, and they’re so much better!”

“So?” Crooked Waters said so easily it just made Kirai boil harder.

“So!” Kirai said loudly, immediately self-conscious of her volume in the empty room. She huffed a sigh and said, “So why can’t I be good like them?”

“Because you’re not them,” Crooked Waters said gently. “Do you know them? Personally?”

“No…”

“Then you may not see all the opportunities and situations they had to help them improve. What if they’re rich and got sent to an atelier when they were ten?”

“Uh…”

“What if they were born to established artist parents, or have a private tutor?”

“Yeah, okay, I get it.”

“My point is that you can’t gauge your own progress with someone else’s yardstick,” Crooked Waters explained. “No one has exactly the life, body, or experiences that you do. Some artists never get opportunities. Some of them never even get to go to school! But they still made lots of art and strove to improve their skills no matter where they were at.”

“Like Grandma Moses,” Kirai suggested.

“That’s right, that old goose only started to paint when she was sixty-something! And she became one of the most beloved folk artists of the century. And you,” Crooked Waters pointed at Kirai playfully, “already have a leg-up on that old bird.”

Kirai giggled a little, but didn’t feel much better. She still felt a sinking feeling deepening in her gut.

“I see a lot of promise in your sketchbook,” Crooked Waters went on. “I’d hate to see you quit.”

“Really?”

“Yeah really.”

“I’ve thought about it before,” Kirai said. “Quitting.” She didn’t know why she felt compelled to tell this to someone she just met.

Crooked Waters folded their strange paws under their long, cartoon snout and blinked innocently, waiting for Kirai to continue.

“I was… well there was this project,” Kirai began, gesturing with her green hands in the air, “a big poster project for English. Our teacher said we had to make it as nice as we could, there’s points for the display and pictures and stuff, so for my group I volunteered to draw pictures about the poem we were assigned.”

Crooked Waters nods.

“So I did all the drawings and I spent so long on them but then this one kid,” Kirai’s heart raced, “Kyle. Kyle Pennington. He said my drawings didn’t look good enough, that they should have full backgrounds, but I was going for a storybook style and he just didn’t get it, and he said I was going to get them docked points.”

“What did you do?”

“I threw away all the drawings.”

“Threw them away?” Crooked Waters sounded genuinely hurt.

“Yeah,” Kirai said. “I did! But then I didn’t have time to do them all over again because it was Sunday night so I had to pick them out of the recycling and try and get the wrinkles out and then I stayed up way too late finishing them because they weren’t good enough and I didn’t wanna be the one to get everyone’s points docked.” She took a big breath.

“Did anyone else in the class do handmade art for their poster?”

“Yeah, one other group did,” Kirai said.

“How was it?”

Kirai didn’t want to be mean, but she knew the art was sub-par. Crude. Ugly. “I don’t think they were artists.”

Crooked Waters tossed their snout back and laughed a big coyote laugh. “That’s such a nice way to say it. But okay, so the art wasn’t as practiced?”

Kirai nodded.

“So for an English class,” they said slowly, “you painstakingly drew pictures for the project, basically twice, when hardly anyone else did.”

“Y-yeah…”

“How’d you do?”

“Huh?”

“Oh the poster,” Crooked Waters said. “How did you feel about the final piece?”

Truthfully, Kirai had it up on her wall in her bedroom at home. She didn’t know why she hung it at first, but she liked it up there and hadn’t taken it down yet. “It looked better than it did before.”

“Be honest,” Crooked Waters said kindly.

Kirai furrowed and said with venom, “Well I liked it, I dunno what Kyle’s problem was.”

“What did Mr. White say?”

“He said it was good,” Kirai said resentfully. “We got an A.”

“So it sounds like your assessment of it was more in-line with reality than Kyle’s.”

Kirai nodded. “Mom said he probably didn’t have an artist’s eye.”

“I’d agree with mom there,” Crooked Waters said. “So who’s Kyle?”

“Just some jock from my English class.”

“Sounds like you’re not friends,” Crooked Waters said.

“No. We aren’t. He’s a meathead,” Kirai said.

Crooked Waters laughed and replied, “And you don’t want a meathead’s opinion polluting your mind, right?”

Kirai puffed air out of her cheeks and said resentfully, “I guess so. But it hurt still. I hate it when people say mean things about my art.”

“True,” Crooked Waters said, tilting their black-and-white head down. “It does still hurt. Why do you think it hurts?”

Kirai felt the familiar flush of frustration rising again. “It hurts because I made it! I spent a lot of time on it and he just said, ‘no it isn’t right’. I’d like to see him try it.”

“For real,” Crooked Waters chuckled. “Did it sorta feel like he was insulting you, too? Not just your art?”

“Yeah!” Kirai said. The bitter joy she felt from an adult finally touching upon something real made her feel more real, too.

“I remember,” Crooked Waters said. “I remember feeling that way, too.”

“But you don’t anymore?” Kirai asked. She imagined Crooked Waters, cool as a cucumber, dressed in something expensive and nice at a gallery opening, gracefully shutting down the critics and being above it all, confident in their abilities and status as a fine artist.

“Nah,” Crooked Waters said, leaning back in the creaking stool. “It still hurts my feelings sometimes.”

The wind fell from Kirai’s sails.

Crooked Waters continued, “You know, I felt how you felt way back when I was in school. Some kid in computer class said my Paint drawing of Johnny looked like a raccoon.”

“That’s mean,” Kirai said.

“Sure it was. I mean it was clearly not a raccoon! Right at first I felt like attacking her, screaming, drawing pictures of Johnny murdering her,” Crooked Waters said with a smile.

Kirai laughed. She’d done the same thing in middle school, drawing characters she liked (or versions of herself dressed like those characters) murdering bullies or other annoying classmates in hyperbolic ways. Machetes, meat grinders, gratuitous ink splatters of blood. She now thought the behavior and drawings were cringe but felt a delightful twang of satisfaction hearing that someone like Crooked Waters did the same stuff.

“The drawings didn’t help a lot, in hindsight, but what did help was thinking about her differently. I figured eventually that she was rude to me because she was hurting,” Crooked Waters said.

The 180 gave Kirai pause.

“The fact that she felt the need to put me down was probably because that’s all she got at home,” Crooked Waters went on. “Imagine showing a drawing to your parents and they just say, ‘Looks like a raccoon.’” They intoned it with a snobby voice.

“Raccoons are cute…”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah.” Kirai did know. “That reminds me of a friend, actually.”

“Oh, yeah?” Crooked Waters said.

“Yeah. My friend Sonja. She tried to get into drawing because I was into it, so she did a really good Pikachu and showed her dad, but her dad told her it sucked and she should give up.”

“Did she?” Crooked Waters said soberly.

“Yeah,” Kirai said. “No matter how much I told her that her dad was mean and wrong, she hasn’t drawn anything since.”

“See how powerful that is,” Crooked Waters said, sitting back and sighing. “See how powerful punishment is at shutting people down?”

Kirai nodded.

“But that girl in my computer class,” Crooked Waters said, “she was probably just saying exactly what she’d been trained to say by her own family. It’s sad, to me, because when you shut someone down, sometimes they stay down. Imagine if Sonja had kept drawing.”

“She’d be as good as me probably,” Kirai said.

“Exactly.”

“Hey Crooked Waters?”

“Yeah?”

“How can I grow up to be like you?” As soon as she said it, Kirai wanted to take it back. How embarrassing. Only little kids said stuff like that! But there must have been something about this strange adult that coaxed the delicate question from her.

“Like me?” Crooked Waters laughed. “Like how?”

“Like uh… I mean art is what I like doing the most, so, how can I make it my job?” Kirai asked.

Crooked Waters smiled at her. It was a sort of smile that told Kirai more adult platitudes were on their way. “Well, first of all, discard any assumptions you have about my life, it isn’t that glamorous.”

Kirai, glad to be wrong, obediently erased her daydreams of confident-capable-Crooked-Waters ordering around gallery attendants and staff.

“I got where I’m at because I worked hard,” Crooked Waters said. “I practiced a lot and I never quit.”

“That’s it?” Kirai asked, bewildered. That couldn’t be it.

“Well, sure, and having parents and friends who looked out for me helped a lot, y’know, no man’s an island and all that,” Crooked Waters waved their cartoon paw flippantly, “you don’t get anywhere alone in life. I have friends, family, lots of cool animals, and a little farm and gardens and stuff. I’m broke a lot but really, I got all I need. And that’s pretty cool.”

“That’s awesome,” Kirai said dreamily. She’d never burdened herself with unrealistic goals like some of her peers did: she had no ambitions to be a firefighter or a doctor or run for president. She just wanted to make art in peace and watch a flock of chickens bustle past the kitchen window. “So you think I could…”

“Lemme give you some more advice,” Crooked Waters said. “Can I see your sketchbook again?”

Kirai thrust the book at them.

“Can I write on a page? Just a little spot, I won’t take up too much room.”

“Uh, yeah, anywhere that’s blank, I don’t care.”

Crooked Waters opened the sketchbook like a holy text and carefully chose a page with minimal drawings, mostly notes from art class. They procured a ballpoint pen from their long sleeve and began writing. Kirai tried not to show that she was craning her neck to spy what Crooked Waters was doing. When Crooked Waters handed it back to her, the cover was closed. They rested a crudely-drawn paw on the book and said with a sparkle in their doodle eye, “Don’t read it until I’m gone, okay?”

“Alright,” Kirai said. She’d play along with the adult’s game, whatever it was.

By then, the class bell was imminent and students were trickling into the classroom. Crooked Waters stood from their stool, returned it to its place, dusted off their patchwork jacket, and said, “Wellp. I better get going.”

Kirai puzzled over this for a moment. “I thought you were a guest speaker or something…?”

“Nope,” Crooked Waters said easily. “Just visiting. But hey,” they grinned at Kirai. Long striped bars of cartoon teeth were scrawled across their coyote nose. “Keep it up, alright? And have a good crit today.”

“Bye, it was nice meeting you,” Kirai said lamely as she watched them turn to go. Crooked Waters pushed the silver bar on the green classroom door, strode outside with their sketchy tail swishing, and disappeared down the hall. The bell rang.

Like a shot, Kirai slammed her sketchbook open and turned to the notes page. In purple ink, Crooked Waters had written a quick message:

Punishment is poor motivation. Find joy in everything you make. Haters don’t know any better—be nice to them and even nicer to yourself. You will go far. I know you will. ...but only if you never stop.

See you there, ♥ Crooked Waters

Kirai beamed at the message. As more students filed in and flopped into their seats, Kirai folded her sketchbook closed. The last part of the message perplexed her: see you there? What did that mean? She shrugged it off. Adults were weird. That one especially. Something else sat oddly with her as class began: How did Crooked Waters know her English teacher Mr. White’s name…?

The art teacher, Mrs. Armstrong, passed Kirai’s desk and smiled her toothy horse smile. The palomino was in her red, flowery sundress with matching horn-rimmed glasses. “Drawing already?” She sang.

“Yup,” Kirai said blithely, tucking away her drawing pencils and eraser. “And all ready for the crit.”

“That’s what I like to hear,” Mrs. Armstrong said, tossing her blond, braided mane. She clapped her hands together and called, “Okay, class, circle ‘round, sketchbook assignment time! Back of the room!”

Various groans from 20-30 teenagers-only-recently-awoken rolled out of the class. Except from Kirai, who felt a strange and uncharacteristic surge of energy. She was first to the back counter. For once, she set her sketchbook out with aplomb.

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