Art Class
/A. L. Biltucci
I am hunched over a watercolor painting,
trying to find the right shade for a sugar maple.
He sits next to me watching. I am flattered—
my male peers usually don’t pay much attention
to me, a shy country girl with a pudgy body
since puberty. My lanky limbs and linear form
are long gone; I often miss that body—
its uncomplications. I paint two lavender
mountains and a few white-tailed deer.
I add a yellow duck in the middle of a lake
but soon realize adult ducks are not yellow
like the rubber ones I used to play with
in the bathtub. I remember a windup orca
whose flukes patted the bathwater, making ripples
across its surface. I should be painting an ocean scene.
A lighthouse standing sentinel, protecting hulls
of vulnerable ships. I feel his presence but concentrate
on erasing that duck with a few large drops of water
and my finger rubbing the thick paper so hard
I create tiny rolls of turquoise and seafoam.
He leans closer and nudges—no punches—
my left breast. Did they knock together? He laughs.
I snap back against the chair. Now with perfect
posture, I look him in the eyes. I should have said,
What the hell are you doing? Instead, I lean over
my painting again, this time trying to replicate
a mallard, its iridescent green head, its beige
and brown back. But I can’t. I leave the lake empty.
Later, he corners me near the sink where I’m washing
brushes, asks me to go out with him, which usually means
a movie in the gritty small town theater with sticky floors,
and sex in a dark and dank basement, or so I imagine.
I say no—again and again. No matter how much
I want my first boyfriend. No. Should I tell the teacher
he hit my breast? Should I tell my mother? Is it even
worth mentioning? It’s no big deal, right? I say nothing.
Several years after high school, I hear he raped
a girl—level two sex offender. If I had told
someone, would that have prevented the rape
of a teenaged girl? No, a friend tells me. No?
A. L. Biltucci is a PhD student studying English and Creative Writing at Binghamton University. Her poetry has appeared in Blueline, Written River, Narrative Northeast, and Cathexis Northwest Press. A native of rural upstate New York, the Mohawk Valley and Adirondack Mountains often inspire her work.
