windows. Maggie once tried to emulate Shanae’s style, spreading a green quilt over her matchbox bed, but
Theo would not allow it. He considered bright colors dangerous because it drew attention: their
furnishings had to blend into the shadows in which they lived. Disappointed, Maggie consoled herself by
dying her wooden clogs yellow with a little turmeric.
Maggie walked inside and climbed on the open shelf beneath the bathroom sink. It was empty, save
for Shanae’s cotton ball jar. Maggie’s eyes welled with tears at the sight. It was impossible, but she felt that
Shanae had left behind the cotton for her. She opened the jar and transferred the white puffs one by one into
her backpack. When she finished, she glimpsed a flash of red behind the jar. She saw that it was Shanae’s old
lip pencil, used down to a nub. She recalled the rich crimson on Shanae’s lips. Maggie picked up the pencil
and tucked it carefully into her bag.
Neal was still snoring when Maggie slipped out of the bathroom. As she made her way back, she
glanced at him again. Pastel chalks and balls of paper, crushed tightly in frustration, dotted the floor around
his couch. Every morning, after Shanae left for work, Neal would sit on the floor by his couch and draw.
Maggie knew he fancied himself an artist, but on countless afternoons, she saw his efforts end with him
smoking weed and falling asleep on the couch. Maggie now noticed that one sheet of drawing paper lay intact
on the floor, clipped to a wooden canvas. After she made sure that Neal was still asleep, she walked over to it.
It took her a moment to patch together the eyes, nose, mouth, and the cascading braids into a familiar face,
but Maggie soon realized she stood before a pastel portrait of Shanae. The portrait was a monstrosity
rendered in despairing blues and vengeful grays, displaying an almost leering ignorance of the beauty of its
subject. Maggie stood, shaken to her core. Such hollow parody could only be made in the hands of a spiteful
former lover.
Maggie had never intruded on Shanae and Neal’s life before, but now she slipped off her clogs and
climbed on the canvas. The fear of discovery melted away in the face of a moral urgency. Standing barefoot,
she pulled out the lip pencil from her backpack. Maggie positioned the pencil with both hands, letting it
hover above Shane’s lips, and pressed down. Her strokes, light and timid at first, grew bold as she did. She
scurried up and the down the portrait and added streaks of red into Shanae’s hair. Then, she took out a cotton
ball, shredded it into strips, and rubbed the portrait over and over. When mixed with the blues and grays
underneath, the red transformed into a muddied purple, a fine approximation of the lavender-dyed tips of
Shanae’s braids in real life. As Neal’s snoring softened to a shallow hum behind her, Maggie knew her time
was up. With a last look at her work, she packed up her things and put on her clogs. Back in the kitchen
cupboard, Maggie found that she was covered head to toe in gray and blue powder, and she could hardly
recognize her wild, excited eyes in the mirror.
The expression on Neal’s face when he discovered the portrait was delicious. The utter shock and
befuddlement—Maggie witnessed them all from the cupboard. Waking up from his nap, Neal rubbed his
eyes with the back of his hand and stared at the portrait for a long time. Then, a curious thing happened. He
sat back on the floor, picked up a chalk, and began to work.
Maggie waited until Neal had retired to his bedroom that night to see what he had done to the portrait. Neal
left the canvas leaning against the foot of the couch as usual, and when Maggie walked up to it, she stared,
enraptured and in shock. Neal had darkened Maggie’s lip pencil strokes with rich, red pastel. He yoked a
lavender hue to the muddied purple that Maggie had made with her lip pencil and cotton, gently highlighting
13
Cauldron Anthology