Cobalt Blue by Peggy Payne received is the 2014 bronze IPPY for Visionary Fiction. Here's an excerpt!
Moonlight was all over the room when she woke, the board floor
grooved with shadows. She was in an instant fully awake. Surely such brightness didn’t come in at this hour every night, or every full moon, the air full of a wafting happiness that passed through
her again and again. Tears sprang up in her eyes; such startling joy: she felt awash in liquid light.
Last night’s clothes that she’d thrown over the back of the chair, jeans still holding the curve of her hips, blue-and-white top, dangling bra, together formed an image of falling water, a torrent seen from a distance.
Her bed seemed floating in light as palpable as clear brilliant water. And in the center of the room a loose coil of shining blue spun. Spiraled upward. Gone. A trick of moonlight against the mirror? In the reflection there, she saw clearly her face, the full upper lip, almost smiling, wide-set heavy-lidded eyes, narrow shoulders, the tops of her breasts.
She widened her gaze to take in the room. What she saw stopped her breath. The sharpness of every object, the jar of mascaras and eyeliner pencils, her canvas shoulder bag on the doorknob: astonishing, as if instantly made real from what had been merely a sketch. Her eyes lingered over each detail, memorizing its new face, awash in gratitude for its existence: the windowpanes, the half-open door to the closet, the woven light and dark of the straw hat she never wore.
Her normal dry routine, daily work schedule, her silent house, the plodding line of clients and errands and repeating scenery had shrunk to no more than a vantage point, a place to stand to take in what was before her.
Her body, naked against the sheet, thrillingly naked to the air, felt boundless. Weightless. Prickly desire to rub her mouth over all she saw, to drink the colors, to die of sex, made her stomach quake, the need in itself a pleasure. She wanted to dissolve into the sensation. She willed it, begged it, to push into her, enter her through every pore…
When she woke again, the bedroom looked ordinary in the grey pre-dawn. Well, of course; what had she expected? The full-moon extravaganza had ended. What she could remember felt dream-like: bright light that was somehow exciting. She sat up, chilly, on the side of the bed, sheet clutched around her against the damp air. She was ungodly thirsty. Her hand, reaching for last night’s water glass, trembled.
“Stop it. I mean it, stop.”Again she’d spoken aloud. To no one. No sleeping hulk waited to rouse and mutter a response. Not for almost 3 months now. No Charlie to reach half-blind from the pillow for the mug of coffee she’d brought him.
Still 2 hours before the alarm would blast, sitting here wide-awake. Though in recent days she’d stayed in bed hours late, dozing and staring. She stared at the pillow; it didn’t beckon. Her legs were jumpy. The studio was starting to pull at her. First time in as long as she could remember. She’d already begun work in her mind.
This itch to get there, to melt onto the canvas as if she were made of paint: it wouldn’t last. She should go, though, get something done before the rising urge faded, as it would.
She pulled on yesterday’s clothes, the need to work intensifying, in her right hand and the length of her arm, in the dry-feeling rims of her eyes. Stepping bare feet into clogs, she put on glasses instead of contacts, grabbed the first thing, windbreaker with the broken zipper, for the April early-morning cool. No, she hesitated, then put it back; she wasn’t wearing this today. Reaching to the farthest hanger in the closet, she pulled out her old satin Shenyang jacket. She’d neglected this once-favored item: tart chartreuse with red lining; it had seemed to require more energy to wear than she’d recently had available. She slipped it on. Much better.
No time now to make peanut butter toast; no more time to waste: she had to get to the canvas before this wave let her go and she lost her nerve. There was no question which picture; recently it had been afloat again in her mind.
On the porch, the still night air felt moist against her flushed face. She drove a fast four miles to town, pictured her clunker of a car as lunar-powered, running on the night's white moonlight. Her face, her cheeks had not begun to cool by the time she slowed through the meandering lanes of Pinehurst, then wheeled into the dirt parking lot.
Inside her studio, she flipped on the overheads, making the windowed opposite wall into a dim mirror. Out of the corner of her eye, if she looked, she could see herself lift the wide horizontal canvas she’d feared so long, locking it into her easel; could see the rust-colored blur of her hair, her compact young-ish shape moving quickly to get set up. She imagined her parents, Mom and Zack, hovering out there beyond the window, confidently watching. And she a nervous child before her first piano recital. She mustn’t get self-conscious now or she’d tighten up and wreck everything.
She unscrewed a tube, squeezing yellow out onto the plate, unleashing the aroma of oils. In front of her, charcoal scratches crisscrossed the white. That much she'd done, long ago, years ago; she’d painted so many commissions since then. And done anything else she could do to avoid this picture. Now here she was, propelled out of bed to paint it; she’d say it was her calling from God, if she believed in such things
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