Intaglio Dragons All The Way Down

chapter 2: Tuesday Morning

Ava was dreaming again, but this time she knew where she was.

She floated above the green field, her mind adrift on the wind. Her attention flowed and eddied in this place, moving from the sun-bright leaves down to the shadowy trees that followed the curve of the river. From there she moved to the bobbing seagrass that covered the sandy slopes, finally trickling out to the misty ocean beyond.

Ava smiled. Asleep, her lips in dreaming shadows did too.

‘I’m free…’

Below her, resting, two figures remained. One was Cole. ‘My Thomas…’ She could see the breadth of his shoulders, the curve of his jaw. The other was her, blue-lipped and broken. It didn’t scare her to see herself lying still and silent in the bed of grass. She knew she was already dead (that she’d hovered near death since the winged carving had come down atop her during the storm). Ava waited there, watching them together, her soul content. Cole leaned forward, clutching her hand.

“I love you, Ava,” he sobbed. “I have always loved you... I always will.”

She knew she was mere moments before pulling up and away with a rush of release, her body over the landscape, just long enough to recognize all that it was. A new start for Cole: a beginning.

She followed his gestures, memorizing his face. Needing it to find her way back, the way she’d done before. Though back to where, she wasn’t exactly sure. She only knew that he was the key. Where he was, she needed to be, too.

“No... please, no...” Cole gasped. “Don’t leave me.”

The wind rose, flicking a stray tendril of Cole’s still-wet hair around his eyes. It intrigued Ava, the differences between the Cole she knew and this one. His hair was longer, the wind pushing it into his eyes, making him grimace and blink. She found herself soothed by that all-too-human gesture, the way his face wavered and changed.

Without warning, Cole lifted his head, catching sight of someone or something walking up the beach.

‘Oh! That’s new...’ Ava realized, unsettled by the change.

There was a small figure, growing larger with each step. Ava’s attention focused in on it. ‘Her…’ A pale woman, her sodden hair hastily plaited. She was another survivor of the shipwreck. Her face was bruised and battered, the bottom of her skirt hanging in rags.

“Hullo…?” the woman called as she neared. “D’you need some help there?”

Cole sat up, wiping his face, seemingly confused.

Ava was torn in two directions. She could feel herself dissolving, her being returning to the millions of vibrations that formed all things. She fought the pull this time, needing to see who this was. Below her, Cole climbed unsteadily to his feet.

“Can I bring you some help?” the woman called again. “Can she be moved? I could get some’un to help you.”

Cole shook his head, laying Ava’s hand against her chest with tremulous fingers.

“There’s no point,” he answered brokenly. “She’s already gone.”

Ava was fading to nothingness even as he spoke. She struggled against it like a fish on a line, her departure slower than the last times. For the first time ever, she clearly saw Cole’s reaction to her death, his inconsolable grief. His whole body quaked with the impossible truth that she was gone. Under the yellow-leaved trees, the sound of rushing wind – like rain – was rising. Ava’s attention began to recoil just as the woman stepped out from the blue shadows of the woods. She was fair-haired and young, her concerned eyes resting on Cole’s downturned face.

‘My god!’ Ava’s mind announced. ‘It’s Hanna Thomas!’

With a rush, she was pulled backwards and up, the figures below and her own body, broken like driftwood, fading into three small dots until only the snake and the coins were visible.

The wayward peace she’d once known was tinged with grief. A feeling of loss soaked through her thoughts as her vision expanded in an ever-widening arc of green. For the first time, she wanted to stay.

: : : : : : : : : :

The phone wouldn’t stop ringing.

: : : : : : : : : :

Ava was late for class. She’d slept through her alarm, only waking when Cole had called her cell phone. He was in the printmaking studio waiting for her. Pulling on her jeans, layering one long-sleeved, one short-sleeved shirt, then donning her leather jacket, she headed out the door, swearing. She’d been up until midnight finishing her latest essay for Wilkins’ class. The two Art foundations classes had become the bane of Ava’s existence.

She jogged down the stairs, backpack in hand. It was laden with books for her afternoon classes and it banged hard against her shin as she ran. Ava swore again, hoisting it to her shoulder, and pushed open the front door with her hip, stepping out into the snow. There was a new prof teaching the first of her two foundations courses: Art of the Ancient World. It wasn’t that Ava hated the woman, per say, it was that Professor Aichens – with her carefully articulation, insistence on thoroughness and her propensity to repeat herself endlessly – drove Ava nuts.

Cole teased her about it, of course. He’d taken this course in his first year of university (as most fourth year Art students had). He’d volunteered to proof all of her essays if she was willing to trade favours in return. Ava blushed, remembering. That aspect almost made the writing worth it, but she had to force herself to attend each day. Only imminent graduation (or failure) kept her there.

Reaching her vehicle, Ava fumbled for her keys. She found them under crumpled receipts and a half-empty bottle of water at the bottom of her pack, swearing until she got them in the lock. The door squealed open and Ava tossed her supplies onto the far seat before climbing in. Frost had settled deep into the vehicle. She rubbed her hands against the cold, not having time to wait out the chill.

With another blast of swearing, she started the engine, hunching her shoulders and heading back outside to scrape the windows. Minutes later, she clambered inside while the buzzing engine slowly dropped to a steady purr. The truck was old and irascible... and being twenty minutes late to class was better than having the beast die altogether halfway there. She did not want to walk in this weather.

Wilkins was teaching her second art history class this semester, which made it ten times worse than the first. It was Art since 1945, and Ava regularly kept late hours to keep up with the readings. There seemed to be as much written about the art, and what the dialogue meant, as the paintings themselves. Clement Greenburg had been the first of many. It drove her crazy, the convoluted doubletalk of artist and medium and historian. Though she loved the process of creation and the images themselves, she found it difficult to put her thoughts into words. She knew the dark history behind her own artwork, but Wilkins’ focus on discussion made the class a struggle to manage. It was even harder to dissect about someone else’s process with alacrity.

She thought of the completed essay sitting in its folder, printed and ready to submit. The process to complete that essay had been a hell of a lot easier than the first. After a week of late nights in the library, Cole had taken pity on Ava and brought her his carefully-written notes from the previous year. (He’d offered more than once, but she’d always refused.) Seeing them that evening, after hours of writing a paragraph and then deleting it in frustration, she’d burst into tears of relief. It’d turned out that a translation from Wilkins’ inflated rhetoric into simple language was exactly what she had needed.

Cole’s descriptions made sense.

Since that day, Ava had been making her own observations alongside Cole’s; her purple pen appeared like a second language overtop his black script, taking notes for the first time ever in Wilkins’ class. The phrases and scribbles and sketches swirled like clouds meshing with Cole’s meticulous notations, leaving a multi-layered rendering of ideas, more detailed than the original.

Her second essay received Wilkins’ highest praise: “I hadn’t thought of it that way.” She hoped this latest essay would do as well.

Feeling the first bloom of heat from the truck’s heater, Ava popped it into gear. She headed onto the icy road, aiming for student parking near the Arts Wing where the Printing studio was located. She and Cole had only one class together, and it bugged her that this was the class she had to be late for. Of all her courses, printmaking was the one she enjoyed the most. It was a two-dimensional medium, but Ava had been surprised to discover how meticulous the process was, compared to painting.

Ava made it to the campus without incident, heading into the heated parking garage and swiping her pass at the gate. A space in the parking garage was one of her splurges, though with the age of the Beast, it was almost a necessity in the winter. She was late but not too bad, as the prof tended to give sketching and collaboration time for the first bit of class. Crossing her fingers that today would be no different, Ava pulled her bag off the seat and sprinted toward the building. Her lungs burned with cold, skin tingling within seconds.

The first few days of the semester, the class focused on mono-printing: spreading ink across the plate with the brayer, then wiping away the lighter areas with fingers and rags. It was a form of printing designed to capture that tenuous moment of creation. Ava loved it; Cole endured. By the end of the week, they’d started to branch into other aspects of printing. Today their first long-term project began. The phone in Ava’s bag rang and she ignored it, running faster.

‘When I said five minutes, Cole,’ she thought in exasperation, ‘I didn’t mean it literally.’

She headed up the back entrance, hoping someone was outside the fire exit taking a mid-morning smoke break. Rounding the corner, she got the first warm whiff of tobacco and grinned. She’d guessed right.

“Hold the door,” she bellowed.

The woman up ahead pulled the door back open with a chuckle. In seconds, Ava was inside, making good time to the printing studio. Down at the end of the hallway, she saw their prof – a small, slightly-built woman with short, grey hair – stepping into the classroom. Ava loved Giulia and her informal approach (first names being a requirement with her). Ava gingerly walked into the large printmaking studio, hoping she hadn’t drawn any attention to herself. She stepped up to Cole and eased her bag to the floor, sitting next to him. His hand gently squeezed 'hello' on her shoulder just as Giulia called everyone to put away their sketchbooks.

“Thanks for the call,” Ava whispered, smiling as Cole's hand ran down her arm to capture her fingers under the table. “I totally slept through the alarm…” she added. “Dead to the world.”

Cole chuckled.

“Have I been keeping you up too late?” he teased.

Ava smirked.

“Both you and Clem.”