"Painting Haiti" by Michael Jasper

michaeljasper.net

The approach I used for this story was a change of pace for me -- I didn't outline it at all, but tried to write it by focusing on the character's conflicts, internal and external. Those conflicts led me to Haiti and back, which was a fascinating journey. The final results were quite surprising. I may have to try this approach again, although, I must say, this poor story has been revised about a million times, and rejected about as many times, until I found the right editor to help me figure out what was missing. Thanks, Kathy!

"Painting Haiti" was first published in Paper Cities: The Anthology of Urban Fantasy in April 2008.

Painting Haiti

In spite of the tinny sound of the alarm blaring in her cramped room for the past ten minutes, Claudia kept on working, thinking: just one more dab of color here, one more brush stroke there, just a bit more shadow in the background. She needed a little bit more, of everything: time, colors, inspiration.

Maybe one of these nights she'd give up a shift and just paint all night and sleep in the next day until noon, then eat a huge breakfast just up the road at Big Ed's. Pancakes, grits, country ham, and all the coffee she could pour down her throat. But she knew that would never happen. Money. She needed the money, and so did her family back home.

"Malpwòpte," she muttered, glaring at her cheap alarm clock and then at her painting. With a sigh that turned into a laugh, she realized she wasn't sure which one she was labeling a piece of shit. Probably both, she figured, turning off the alarm clock with a bit more force than was necessary, enough to make the small framed photo of her grandmama almost topple over before she caught it.

On her canvas, something was finally taking shape there in dark-hued lines of her oil-based cityscape, after three hours of painting and scraping and repainting the yellow streetlights, shadowy alleyways, and chain-link fences overrun with weeds. She'd been close to giving up on this one, and she couldn't afford to waste paint. Not with rent due on Friday for her room here, in a house ten blocks from the Capitol Building.

Repeating the Creole curse word, savoring each spitting syllable, Claudia pulled off her old flannel shirt and scrubbed her paint-spattered hands with it. Dark red, deep blue, and black paint smeared onto her brown skin.

As she stared at the swirling tattoo of tacky oils on the back of her right hand, she felt her eyes unfocus. The shape reminded her of something she'd seen late the other night at work. Something glimpsed from the corner of her eye as her speeding taxi zipped down a one-way street downtown. A blurred figure wearing a black hat and a dark blue jacket, disappearing down a red-bricked alley. Moving fast, chasing someone down or running away from someone, she couldn't tell.

"Superstitious fool," she scolded herself. "It's nothing."

To be continued...

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What the critics said:

"“Painting Haiti” by Michael Jasper concerns Claudia, an immigrant from Haiti living in Raleigh, North Carolina. An artist struggling to survive, she’s left one violent country to deal with the street violence that’s taking the lives of those around her. Claudia’s now-deceased grandmother haunts her as a paint smudge that keeps reappearing on her hand. Surreal in a lucid way, this story captures the nightmare that Claudia suffers through. A well-told tale with a visual arts sensibility."
— Marshall Payne, The Fix

"I initially heard of Michael earlier this year when his SF novel “The Wannoshay Cycle” was released, but this short is the first time I’ve actually sampled the author’s work and is more of a suspense/horror tale that follows a financially struggling artist whose past comes back to both haunt and free her… Not one of my favorites, but the story was well-written and I appreciated the painting & voodoo elements."
— Fantasy Book Critic