Member-only story
Cape Cod 1942
Horror fiction
He painted the sea and the sailing vessels rounding his perch on a Cape Cod cliff. The wind was always a nuisance, rattling his canvas and shaking his little pot of turpentine so that he built a type of adjustable frame onto his easel to hold the canvas in place. He reinforced the entire setup by tying bags of sand to the legs.
He painted the fog on mornings when it settled heavily over the cliff, obscuring his view of the sea, and he painted clear skies on sunny days over a calm, shimmering horizon.
When the wind made its way to the cliff, unhindered by the large, roiling ocean waves across the landscape before him, and when the sky filled with swift clouds shapeshifting from gray to black, then to a glowing pink in the evening, he painted.
He packed his lunch on most days, since his wife was a busy painter, preferring the warmth of her studio upstairs to the scraggy brush and bramble of coastal nature outdoors. When they went en plein air together on little road trips, she painted from inside the car, unless calm winds prevailed, in which case, she would find a shady spot away from weeds and tall grass.
She painted from within the tall shade of her husband’s fame and fortune, at times letting slip her resentment at his success, usually during their most volatile arguments about financial and…
