It was the day before the end of the week. I was his gift for another twenty-four hours, and that would be all.
As usual—strange, how quickly things can become usual—he got ready to leave in the morning.
“Paint,” he said. “I left you a gift in the studio.”
With that, he was gone.
When I walked into the art studio, a terrycloth robe draped around my naked shoulders, I gaped at what I saw. A huge canvas, fifteen feet on all sides, lay flat on the floor. I’d filled up most of the smaller canvases in the room, and what had been a room of total white was now cluttered with my pieces. But this canvas was perfectly untouched, and so large that for a moment my mind dizzied with the possibilities.
“Think,” I murmured to myself. “Think.”
My hands gathered their materials as I thoug
