eerieindiana | Eerie, Indiana fanfiction: Sunset

Written for Day 8 of the

31_days October challenge. The prompt was "paint the sky scarlet"

"I don't draw things the way they are; I draw them the way I wish they were."

Sara Sue sat on the roof of her family's huge red barn, watching the sun go down. The barn's timbers were old, but strong and straight and free from any signs of damp or rot. She knew, because she had drawn them that way. The wooden boards had soaked up the heat of the day and now it radiated up through her jeans and her checked shirt, worn to flannel-softness by careful shading with pastels and water colours. She could smell the good clean scent of the warm hay beneath the white roof. The bales smelled the way she had thought they would as she filled a canvas with sketches of the neat golden stacks.

The skyline blazed scarlets and oranges. Her paints and easel stood to one side, momentarily forgotten. She had been thinking about a dog, something huge and slobbery and full of blind, stupid devotion. She'd started to draw him, the rough outline of a lolling tongue, the faint suggestion of a shaggy coat, when the sun began to set.

The air was full of the evening sounds, the birds settling in for the night, the insects starting their twilight chorus. In this flat country, the sky was vast and the day took it's leave in increments. Sara Sue had painted the burning sky a dozen times, but she'd never signed it. It was like the dog; it was something better left to the world outside the page.

She heard footsteps on the shingles behind her, and she shuffled to one side to make room.

"I'm getting a dog," she said. "A real one, not one made of paper."

"What will you call him?" said Harley.

"RealDog," said Sara Sue. "I'll call him RealDog."

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