Phil Parisi

Something had been triggered in her, but it was definitely fading.

And then we sat down in the studio space she'd fashioned upstairs, and she did maybe an hour of sketching my hands.

Not as much as she wanted, but she really was tired.

She needed to sleep.

I left, and a couple of days later, she sent me a text to show me how my hands had come out in her sketches.

Just a nice, typical courtesy.

It made me newly concerned.

Tess was highly trained in anatomical drawings.

I'd seen her stuff before.

It was technically flawless.

But the way she'd drawn my hands was very unlike her style.

She'd sort of curled them, even though that's not how they'd been posed.

And they were thinner than my hands really were.

It made them look old somehow.

The oddest part was that she'd reimagined them resting on the seat of a chair.

You could see the back of it rising and fading into nothingness, just a suggestion never to be fully filled in.

I just texted back something kind of frivolously complimentary.

But I looked at those hands a few times and never stopped finding the image odd.

There was a strange hint of mortality in the image.

There was no good way to bring this up, so I dropped it.