Pigments ground to create an aqueous solutionJulia made a call to an Auckland politician who’d bought an expensive painting from the gallery. She turned away from my blank expression as she asked him to contact the prison governor and locate Mother. I slipped into the bathroom while they made uninteresting small talk, not wanting their cluttered speech to fill the vacancy in my head.
My hands gripped the sides of the sink as I stared at my image in the mirror. Wide blue eyes looked back at me, a fringe of dirty blond hair bouncing against my eyelashes. Julia said I was handsome, but the word meant nothing. “It’s just a face,” I told myself. A functional face with useful parts, eyes, nose, mouth, and ears.
Yesterday’s cravat refused to twist in the right places. The fabric remembered the
