Third little lie ♰ You dream you've heard a lovely song; all night you're haunted by its theme

[beingdifferent]

[Open spam]

[Today, Esther is inside the art room. It’s quickly become her favorite area on board, a place where she really gets to create and experiment and play. Drawing and painting are small pleasures, and after experiencing a snippet of her earlier captivity she found herself almost grateful. Almost. Not grateful enough to forgive having to relive that time, but that realization is tucked away in her mind as soon as it’s made. There will be time for all that later; for now, she has artwork to make.

And she’s singing:
“When you wake up the notes are wrong,
The song has vanished with a dream.
Well that‘s the story of my life.”

Facing an easel Jesse helped set up, she dips her paintbrush into the light brown paint and adds it to the canvas with broad controlled strokes. A few more lines sung and a little dark brown paint later the color takes recognizable shape: it’s a bear, out of place in an urban environment with tiny simple people around him. As she adds a pair of large eyes to her picture, Esther narrows her own in concentration. The bear’s muzzle takes on a small frown.

All her pictures tell stories.]

Comments

[surrenders]

[She's started making this a real part of her world, when Jesse's there a lot of the day and she has an inmate who she doesn't need to follow. Lua's work gets more and more complex as the weeks go on, and she usually is concentrating hard enough - when she isn't distracted by Jesse - to let the kid do what she wants and not say anything to her. She's been looking harder at Kevin, anyway, like how she thinks Jesse's been looking hard at Anya.

Today, though, she gets a real good look at the picture and has a real hard listen to the kids' conversation, so she's starting to wonder. She knows a kid can start young after the stories Ladd told her, so Esther might belong, but that doesn't mean she isn't still a kid. She takes a look at the bear in the city while she's cleaning up a mess of paint and slivers, almost like she's just passing it by.]

You come from a place like that?

[beingdifferent]

[The question seems to surprise Esther, and she turns away from the bear (who is now looking longingly at some children running in front of his cage), then begins to add lines of gray in the background.]

No. I've only been to the city a few times. [The gray lines soon thicken to become skyscrapers, dwarfing the bear like so many metal mountains.]

[surrenders]

[Kids draw what they know or what they see inside their heads, she's heard. Get her talking, like kids usually do, and Lua's set to just pop in a question or two as she drops her paper into the trash and tries to make up a reason to stick around.]

Where is it, for you? The city.

[beingdifferent]

A long way from my house. But once we went to the zoo there and saw the bears. Mostly they were just sleeping, but one looked at me.

[surrenders]

How'd it feel?

[Were you scared? is the first question she thinks, and almost asks it, but that assumes too much. If Esther's here, she can't have been too sheltered a kid: at least smart enough to know it can't hurt her.]

When was it for you, anyway? When you showed up here.

[beingdifferent]

Exciting! That was the first time I ever met a bear. [For a child's fantastical, liberal definition of "met" anyway.]

I'm sorry? I don't understand. I've been here only a few weeks.

[surrenders]

I meant back home. People come here, it could be about any year, and everybody's different, right?

[beingdifferent]

Oh! Now I see. When I came here it was 2009. [A fact that just makes her appearance all the more odd, but she smiles to put the concerns at ease.]

[surrenders]

[Her eyelids flicker a little bit wider, but there's no unmistakable sign of surprise. Esther seemed a little old-fashioned even for Lua, but she's definitely strange now that she's met kids like Regina's sister.]

So there's not too much you had to learn here.