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365 Days

A short story

By Sara WPublished 3 years ago 9 min read
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My alarm blares like a siren and shoots my heart rate to an unprecedented level. I reluctantly peel off my eye mask, fumbling to obliterate the source. I don’t really need to get up, I tell myself. I am drenched in sweat, despite the cold temperature, and I can visibly see the cloud that is my breath. I remind myself that this living situation is temporary, one way or another.

It’s day 351.

I tiptoe up the stairs with great agility, so as to not active the creeks in the floorboard, in my mission to evade waking my mother. Truthfully, I want to avoid the same conversation I have every morning. But alas—

“It’s interview day,” my mother sings cheerily.

“I know. I’m on it,” I say, trying to hold back my distain for her jaunty mood. I am on my final weeks living in my mother’s basement. We had made an arrangement in which after my graduation, I had one year—365 days—to have my finances in order, or my mother will give me the boot.

My mother enjoys displaying her unconventional love for me through her “tough love” and overbearing dictatorship over my life choices. Much to her disappointment, I have been pursuing art most of my life, and I spent my entire share of my father’s estate on my Fine Arts degree and supplies. My mother believes she can best support me towards a better life by withdrawing her financial support. As the final weeks of my living arrangement near an end, she has set up an interview for me with a wealthy businessman from New York, for a chance at a “real” career instead of as a “starving artist.”

“It’s interview day, child. And this is what you will wear.”

My mother hastily urges me towards the kitchen table. Here, she has laid out an ostentatious outfit: a moody grey blazer with a burgundy silk undershirt, topped off with a faux fur peacoat. Her eyes are glued to mine with anticipation. I wince at the thought of how much of her earnings went into obtaining such an outfit.

“Jeremy will be at the market in thirty minutes. This is our only connection. His father owed your dad a favor, so don’t muck it up. I know this will be good for you,” my mother says sternly.

My mother ushers me to get dressed, and watches me attentively as I leave the house. She does not trust me to be open-minded, and for good reason.

That afternoon, Jeremy unapologetically strolls into the café thirty-five minutes late, and opens with a charismatic, “Hey, let’s just be ourselves. No business talk.”

Following this socially adept conversational opener, Jeremy quickly shifts his attention towards his devices, alternating between his pager, smart watch, and tablet, with occasional glances at me to check in that I am still holding onto his sentence. It takes little time for the conversation to turn towards his business backstory. I learn that Jeremy is a self-starter, and his company, EkoPower, is worth millions.

EkoPower sells vehicles at a third of the market price, with triple the carbon emissions. The company is expanding globally and rapidly, and the added work requires a new hire to run the advertising campaign. Advertising and networking are two of my greatest weaknesses. Jeremy, on the other hand, seems to have endless connections, and knows many celebrities from Oprah Winfrey to Salman Khan to Bill Gates—people, he assures me, I may meet someday if I’m so lucky. My mind begins to wander….

“I want to keep the image clean,” Jeremy snickers. “You know, we need to be careful with all the pro-environmental activists out there. I need someone experienced with discretion, and your blandness will do just the trick in detracting attention. I’m going to pass your name along.”

Jeremy tosses a pristine $50 bill on the table alongside his barely touched eggs benedict and cold expresso, and bolts out of the café with the same vigor I have when disabling my alarm. He leaves little of a good impression on me, but he does leave something behind that is well worth my morning: a little black book with his initials ingrained J.B.W. I chuckle at the idea of his using a pen to handwrite in this journal. Maybe his assistant wrote it for him.

I flip through the first few pages of his little black book. In it holds the names, emails, and phone numbers of a long list of celebrity contacts. I sit down at the table a while longer, grappling with my shock that Jeremy described me as bland, and his jarring belief that I could deceive people. I do not think I am willing to deceive people for such a disastrous cause.

I arrive home, dejected, wondering if in two weeks’ time I will be sitting in a crammed office supporting an anti-environmentalist agenda and taking Jeremy’s dirty money.

I see only one remaining option to avoid working for EkoPower and that is to market and sell my artwork to the contacts in the little black book—contacts who have the means to afford it. Only, I cannot sell my artwork as Cynthia Brevscoff. I have no name in the commercial art world.

I begin my deception, ferociously creating my world-renowned, lucrative art curator identity: Ava Armaro. I work through the night creating the aliases and backstories for the many artists Ava endorses. Art collectors love a good story. I paint over all my signatures with those of my newly created artist names. There is child prodigy Alberto Ricci, Pop Art enthusiast and a forerunner in bringing printmaking into the mainstream. There is Michaël Dubois, a political street artist from Normandy, and there are six others. These characters need to be unidentifiable, but interesting; nothing that a shallow online search would uncover, but intriguing enough for the wealthy to invest in.

I have to wait until a decent hour to call the hundreds of contacts from J.B.W.’s book. When I do call, I am surprised at how many people go along with my inquiry to sell the artwork. I suppose just having their personal phone number affords me great credibility. Four contacts want to meet me next month for dinner at various places around Europe. I tell them yes, with no possible means of getting there. It is a lost cause regardless because I do not have a month to wait. I go through the list alphabetically and, here in the G’s, I reach a woman from France by the name of Michelle Gibert. She tells me she is hosting an auction at one of her mansions in Malibu in three days, and wants a mirage of artwork to plaster her walls. One of her curators cancelled on her. The auction is on Wednesday night, and she offers to fly me out and pay for the cost of transporting the artwork. I say yes, and with this response, I am truthful.

Michelle Gibert hangs up the phone. I am simultaneously intoxicated with delight, and jittery with suffocating guilt. In a matter of seconds I feel the crash, and my confidence begins to deflate like a slashed tire. I reflect on the local gallery shows I have done throughout my life, where guests would migrate to cheese and cracker platters as if the attraction were the food. The guests would pose in front of my work and then leave with no more than they came with. And then there was me, dejected, cleaning the space at the end of the night. I would discover my mother stroll in three hours late, asking whether I made money and being unsurprised when I told her no. I cannot help but wonder if this will reoccur.

Wednesday morning springs up quickly. My legs begin to shake as I board the ramp to my first flight ever. A slight humming noise permeates my ears as I walk through the tunnel leading to the airplane. I am quite sure I am going to be sick when I see the size of the thing.

By the time we land in Malibu, I am sweating through to my blazer. I am wearing the same outfit my mother picked out for me the day I met Jeremy; it is my only suit, and I think that by wearing it I somehow have my mother’s support. I dry my armpits in the airport bathroom. Here, I catch my reflection in the mirror as I am awkwardly contorted over the air-dryer. My sweaty bangs cling to my face, and my mascara has near worn-off around my puffy eyes. I am an obvious fake, I think. I flirt with the idea of turning right around and crawling back home; succumbing to the life my mother thinks best for me. Snap out of it. Snap out of it, Cynthia, you are Ava now, and you sell art for thousands of dollars.

I step foot into Michelle’s mansion, and I am glad I have come. Michelle’s mansion is sensational. It is filled with all the luxuries in life you convince yourself you would never want for yourself, and, by the end of the night, wonder how you could get by without. There are heated floors, 16 bathrooms, an indoor swimming pool, a trampoline room, fruit fountains and endless tables of untouched food. I sheepishly help myself to some macaroni cheese balls and chocolate fondue, ignoring my lactose intolerance. Michelle’s guests are unintrigued by these same luxuries; however, they are intrigued by the novelty on the wall. I watch in amazement as guests begin migrating towards my paintings, and away from the untouched food tables.

When it comes time for the art biddings, numbers fly out as thoughtlessly as a child blurts out the elephant in the room. I smile to myself at the success of the night because I have managed to avoid speculation and questioning and my art is soon to be auctioned. The crowd is loud and impenetrable, yet Michelle miraculously finds me. She stands beside me just before it is time to auction off my artwork under the name Alberto Ricci. Michelle lightly grazes my elbow and introduces me to a tall, lanky woman around her arm. I do not catch her name, but she reaches in and kisses my flush cheeks, and I hear her remark, “And I just could not believe Michelle was able to get a hold of a Ricci painting on such short notice.”

Michelle nods in agreement. “This artist,” she whispers, “has quite the riveting backstory, don’t you think?”

My eyes fall to the floor as I wonder if my real story would spark the same captivation in the crowd. My rosy cheeks turn chalk white, and the nauseous feeling I had when boarding the airplane returns. My hearing fades in and out, and I just barely manage to hold down the macaroni cheese balls and chocolate fondue I had so greatly enjoyed the first time around. I just want this to be over.

I take long, smooth breaths until my breathing is calm, and I refocus. The crowd is ferociously and feverishly bidding on my work. By this time tomorrow, I will be home and will have enough money to rent my own place and continue my art career—“Sold!”

My painting, *Alberto Ricci’s* painting, sells for a whopping $20,000. The lucky buyer? A man named Jeremy B.W.

humanity
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About the Creator

Sara W

Sara is a recent psychology graduate, and writer. Sara finds creative writing compelling because there she has the honour of telling, imagining, and interpreting her characters’ most intimate and defining moments in their life stories.

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