Prompt #10: Writer's Choice - Maps
Word Count: 304
Jefferson never thought drawing would be the thing he'd find himself in the most. After all, he never had much patience for art of any kind when he was younger. Alice was the one with the sense for it, the musical one, the aesthetically aware. But in this big, empty house; during these endless, frozen moments, he found a form of escape in the concentration his disorganized mind was forced into while he drew.
At first there were trees and fruit that filled his canvases. Awful, distorted shapes that bore no likeness to the models. But it wasn't long before he grew better. Memories followed – images of the world back home. Sometimes even a dazzling adventure of his portal hopping days snuck onto them. The first portrait he drew was of Grace, her sweet little face pulled in a beaming smile. Then he drew another one, and another, and another until the grinning charcoal-smudged silhouette was as lifelike an image of his daughter as it was humanely possible. Then, he finally dared to try and recreate Alice. He painted her as she stood in his memory – eyes blazing, hair flowing, sporting that smug smirk as if she was just about to say something extremely witty. It was surprisingly comforting when he realized that, after all this time, he still remembered the way her hair curled, the way her nose would scrunch up when she laughed, how he could perfectly recreate the exact shape of her lips.
Eventually, after he had filled almost his entire endless supply of empty canvases with paintings of his daughter and her mother, he discovered the activity had become an aching torture instead of relief. Alice was long gone and the hope of getting Grace back was slowly starting to leave him as well.
He turned to drawing maps instead.