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Laura Volkening Things We Used to Do Exercise: Critique All three of my sisters paint. We used to coddle each other during our critiques, saying to each other I love the texture, and the colors sing. We were taught this from our mother, who whispered words like feathers in our ears at night. How lucky she was to have such gifted girls. We’re all in our final year in grad school now, Elise the youngest and Marguerite the middle. I guess after my fourth year applying, Tyler finally decided they would want me. Elise got in no problem and Marguerite took a year break in the middle so here we all are, competing for the same fellowship. Hoping that they’ll come up with two more for all three of us to have and spare us the trouble of loans and debt.

Elise paints like Pollock. Paint dripping into fantastical images that escape you until she steps away, covered in cadmium red and ivory white. Marguerite paints like poetry. Her figures so realistically portrayed, the windows and tables so real that you see more than the even and well blended skin tone, but instead it’s as if you can feel the person breathing, your hair moves with the wind when you see it.

We all share a studio space at the college. I guess they thought it would be interesting to see what the sisters would create when in the same space. Well, I guess they were right, because when I take off my smock and see what has happened on the canvas that day. It is neither mine, Elise’s or Marguerite’s. I used to paint with a cubist influence, figures abstracted, legs disjointed and faces hard to determine. But now I paint as we. My under-layer, figures like that of Vermeer, and comparable to Caravaggio, but only able to be seen through a dripping and smeared coat of paint that just looks like Elise’s side spatter.

So, How Did You Two Meet? Exercise: Ed, a Nobody She had been raised as a military brat, moving all across the South East. She managed to go to secretarial school, which placed her at an architecture office upon graduation, and she stayed there for five years, happy to sit still for the first time in her life.

Her fourth year at Architecture and Design Alliance, Ed who came to sell ink cartridges every month, asked her out. They stayed happy for some time, meandering along in parks, movies, dinners, and parties. For their one year anniversary he took her out to Bella in the Italian district of Philadelphia, where the waiters take turns singing Opera off the second floor balcony to the guests. It was beautiful and had been a place she had been wanting, and begging him to take her to for months now.

While eating her eggplant Parmesan she saw him for the first time for what he was. Ed, who eats his lasagna with a salad fork. Ed, who has been selling ink cartridges for eight years. Ed, who has only had steady girlfriends, never once asking a girl to come back for coffee and not call her the next day. Ed, a nobody.

“I think we need to break up,” Linda said.

He fumbled a little and then asked if they could finish the dinner and talk about it at home. So they did, along with the rest of the wine and his extra cup or two of brandy. At the apartment he quickly closed the door and pinned her against the bookshelf, screaming that if he couldn’t have her no one could, as small trinkets fell off the shelves. He grabbed a steak knife at some point, but was unable to get the courage to actually do anything with it before passing out. Linda slipped out the door once he was snoring, his head resting on the dinner table. She moved the next day, quit her job and left a note with no forwarding address. I guess my Dad would look great to anyone who just had to deal with that.