The Art of the Kiss

by Holly Schindler

  At that moment, the song playing on the radio stopped.

  But not because the radio had been turned off, not because the two Tommies onstage were about to start playing some instrumental piece.

  Because—it surely sounds like I’m making it up—the song on the radio had simply faded to its final chord. And its notes had given way to my voice. To my recording. Here it was. The latest of my fairy tale pieces. The one I’d put together in honor of Murio’s party.

  “What’s a good fairy tale without a ball?” I asked as the entire room grew quiet around us. “Oh, it’s the climactic moment of any tale. Where hope is at its zenith. You go—whether you’re Prince Charming or Cinderella—because you believe that something you need to change will change. Your life will greet you at the door. Your dreams will be yours for the taking.”

  Those were my words—I’d crafted and spoken them—but I was hearing them for the first time. Seeing their impact on Sharon, watching them dance across her face.

  The old Prince Charming in me and the ever-beautiful Cinderella in her were still very much the fairy tale couple we’d always been.

  Long past the sunset, maybe.

  But it was all still here.

  I grabbed Sharon.

  And I kissed her.

  ~This Kiss~

  How many kisses in life are truly memorable? How many shake us, wake us up, make the world feel like a different place entirely?

  They’re first kisses, usually. Love is stumbled upon—revolutionary.

  This kiss had to have been the ten thousandth between Michael and Sharon.

  And yet, it was so powerful, it made the night sky explode with enough brilliant stars to light all the grand balls in progress across the globe.

  A few blocks away, the fifty-year-old image of a first kiss, Sharon’s masterpiece, was darkened by a shadow.

  Because, quite simply, it had been eclipsed.

  This new kiss—the one that had just taken place in Murio’s—was, in fact, the powerful one promised in the more poetic passages of fairy tales.

  A magical kiss. A transformative kiss.

  A kiss that completely filled in their rut. Changed their landscape.

  A kiss that reminded Michael and Sharon they were the complete twosome—and could still count on each other. Their magic was alive, even after having gone missing for so long. Resurrected, just like Sharon’s busted old camera decades ago.

  Yes, magic still breathed. It wasn’t locked in some inanimate object. It was real. It was alive. It was theirs.

  All those tiny little delicate pieces broken over the last fifty years were being swept up by the emotion of the moment. They were sliding back into place.

  Not exactly as they’d been before. Nothing is. But there was also a chance that this time, the pieces would be stronger.

  It was a kiss, in short, that had the ability to change everything.

  ~Michael~

  With Sharon’s lips on mine, I saw us the way Sharon must have always seen us: in snapshots.

  Our whole lives, one image after another. Bleeker’s, the square, Independence Day. The work—hers and mine. Upstairs, each night. The day in. The day out. Beginning and ending in a flash. Murio’s. Her dad’s house. His basement. Our portrait. The Art of the Kiss. Sunday dinner. Peter. The studio. Her classes. Mesmerized faces. Traffic jams. Time moving faster and faster, until the images mimicked the stills in an old flip book. My notebooks. Her portfolios. Faster, faster. Black and whites. Her Ugly Period. Sadness. Then sunrise. The carrying on. Yesterdays. Empty store aisles. My retirement.

  The junk closet.

  She was right. Life really is a series of seemingly disjointed snapshots. And it’s not until you’ve sifted through the entire lot of them, all those short little slices of life, that you finally realize what it was all about. You see what it amounted to.

  You see your story.

  ~Sharon~

  A flash washed over my face.

  It didn’t feel like a flash, though. Not right then. It felt more like the explosion of a firecracker.

  As I pulled away from Michael, I found Heather holding her camera chin-height and smiling slightly. She’d taken our picture, as I’d taken Ryan and Fayth’s a moment ago.

  Slowly, her smile fell and her face turned vivid shades of shock. Horror. Sadness. Not unlike the face she’d shown me when she’d witnessed Fayth and Ryan’s kiss. She wasn’t looking at me, though. Or Michael.

  “Amanda?” Heather murmured.

  I followed her gaze to find that Heather’s friend was holding a camera toward me. An old one. With familiar dents and scrapes.

  “That’s—” I started, reaching for it.

  “It’s yours. Isn’t it? You’re Sharon.” Amanda glanced fearfully at Heather. “I hid it in the back of the car. I was afraid the kids would find it. They like to tear up the closets. I—”

  “You took it.” Heather said it definitively. “You took it?”

  “Heather,” Amanda pleaded. “I—”

  “What did you do?” Heather asked. “When?”

  “I switched them when I brought you the clothes,” Amanda admitted. As Heather backed away, Amanda scrambled after her, insisting, “I was scared. You were—you were taking off. My oldest friend. I couldn’t stand the idea of losing you.”

  “You don’t want me to succeed? You want me to stay the crummy friend. Is that it? The one who can’t get it together. The one you love upping time and time again with your fancy life.”

  “That’s not true. Don’t you get it? I didn’t want you to leave me behind. But I don’t want to hurt you, either. Look, here it is. I’m bringing it to you. That should count for something, shouldn’t it? I brought the camera back.”

  I watched Heather’s face wrench with utter pain.

  “Go away, ’Manda,” she murmured. “You have to leave me alone. Now.”

  The crowd in the bar surged, nearly engulfing Heather.

  Amanda attempted to follow, but with tears already rolling, she decided instead to edge closer to her confused husband.

  I couldn’t let Heather get away. I could feel the crushing tides of two heartaches trying to swallow her whole. Prince Charming had chosen someone else. And her best friend had shown her own villain’s face.

  Sure, Amanda had tried to make up for it. But sometimes, once you’ve seen the villain in a person, you stop being able to see anything else. It happens all at once, and irretrievably, like they’ve just snatched off their mask.

  Was Heather crumbling? I couldn’t let her.

  I followed, calling her name. Finally grabbing her arm. “Scrimshaw!” I shouted.

  She turned, eyes red, a long tear trailing down her cheek.

  “Remember? Your grandfather’s pipe.”

  “What?”

  “The squiggle of a man. Dread Pirate Roberts. How tough he was.”

  “That was him. Not me.”

  “But he’s in you. So is your mother. The one who promised good things would come if you were kind.”

  She sputtered, rubbing her forehead. “Good things,” she muttered, like it was a lie, a sales pitch for snake oil. A scam she’d fallen for.

  “You were good for me, Heather. More than you realize. Because you helped bring me back to everything I’d let drift out of my reach. My photography. My—my love. Myself. Without you, I’m not sure any of it would have happened. And now, I’m telling you, I’m here for you. The whole night, if you need me. But the thing is, you don’t. You’ve grown so much. Working together down in my darkroom, I’ve seen it. I know all about how people can grow in basements.”

  I paused to smile, to wipe her tear.

  “You can have this camera,” I said, pushing the old dented, banged-in Nikon toward her. “But trust me when I say you don’t need it. You’re the one who made my camera work.

  “I’m no fairy godmother. I can’t snap my fingers and make it work out for you. It’s in your hands. But I believe you can do this. With my old
camera—or any other.”

  I cursed myself for not being as good with words as Michael. But maybe my words didn’t matter. Maybe the most important words were Heather’s.

  “You made up a wild and lovely story about your grandfather,” I shouted at her over the crowd. “But you made up an even crazier story about my camera. Didn’t you? All that stuff about the camera kicking your hand and showing you the way. Stories are important. Especially the ones we tell ourselves. So make up a new one about you. A wild legend about how this night will play out. Take a deep breath. And then get out there and make it come true.”

  My heart felt like it had swelled to the point that there was no longer enough room for it in my chest.

  I squeezed the camera tighter. Pushed it a little closer to her. It wasn’t so much that I even wanted her to take it. I was trying to edge her closer to a decision.

  Just like Michael had done when he’d brought the camera down from the junk closet.

  “I have to do it on my own,” Heather finally muttered.

  “You were, anyway,” I told her. “In the park. The camera wasn’t talking to you. You were talking to yourself.

  “We don’t ever think we’re enough, do we?” I asked. “We assume we need help. We need magical wands. We need special gadgets. We do that all the time. We believe in forces outside us more than we believe in us. How could that be? We find strength in rabbit’s feet and four-leaf clovers, but not ourselves?”

  She shook her head in the same way you might when trying to shake off the pain of a finger that had been smashed in the door.

  I watched her advance the film in the Nikon she’d shown up with, the replacement Amanda had admitted to switching out—the one that was still, for the most part, an unknown. She raised it to eye-level and began to search the crowd.

  Michael slipped into place at my side.

  Look, I know back at the beginning of all this, I discounted magic. Called it kid stuff. But right then, with Michael beside me and Heather forcing her way out onto the dance floor, I felt it. That tingle inside that can’t be anything else but magic.

  He squeezed my hand and nodded, knowing exactly what I had on my mind.

  I gave him the old camera, the one that had started everything. With my newer DSLR in hand, I forced my way through the crowd and scrambled onto the stage. At the footlights, I had a view of everything, the whole bar. I could see Heather and the circle she was clearing so she could take her pictures. I was struck by how much she reminded me of the dancing woman clearing space for herself all those decades ago.

  But I could also see Michael, and Amanda begging her husband to leave, and Fayth and Ryan slipping by Cody the Wolf as he held the entrance open for them. I could see Murio at the bar with his son. The whole big picture, all the moving parts, the past and the present.

  I raised my own camera. And sent my flash to wash out across the entire scene.

  From the

  Studio Walls

  ~

  Hands, Then and Now

  It hung in a new frame near the center of the store. Two hands—Sharon’s and Michael’s—fingers braided together. After a few seconds of staring, you realized you were actually seeing four hands—because you were looking at two pictures, one superimposed on the other.

  Sharon had used a bit of that modern digital “trickery,” as she had once so dismissively called it. The old image of their hands taken just after Sharon and Michael were married remained in its original black and white. The new shot, staged to perfectly mimic the old, had been taken in color—wrinkles, sunspots and all. She’d played with layers, played with levels of transparency. Until she came up with the right mix.

  Finally, she’d found it, the image she’d been trying to nail down since hearing her husband’s voice, still strong but somehow deeper and perhaps a bit more hesitant than she’d ever heard him, on her favorite jazz station. Here it was: a single shot about nothing more than the simple passage of time.

  According to Michael, one of the bests in a long line of career greats.

  But no one was coming to stare. Not to the store. Not anymore.

  No traffic jams outside.

  “Now what?” Sharon asked out loud.

  “Didn’t you say you’d promised all those folks you caught kissing a print?” Michael asked.

  “You think me sending out a few pictures will keep our front door flapping open?”

  “All I know is, a promise is a promise,” Michael told her. “Envelopes are where they’ve always been.”

  So she printed the kiss images, all of them. And she began to mail them out, one by one.

  She expected nothing in return.

  Until one afternoon a week later, when her door really did open. And the older couple from the square, who had jokingly accused her of being a spy, stepped in. “We’ve been here before,” the wife said, her eyes bouncing across the images on Sharon’s walls. “It’s been so long. If I’d known it was you...”

  The three of them dissolved into surprise and small talk and memories, appreciation for the old images on her walls and for the print she had remembered to send.

  When the door opened again, a few days later, it ushered in the two boys from the high school.

  Then the 5K runner.

  The woman with the Schnauzer.

  “Why did you expect anything different?” Heather asked in the basement as they developed her newest batch of shots, interrupting Sharon’s uncharacteristically long-winded story of all her studio visitors. “If you’re kind to the world, the world is kind back.” Once again a firm believer in her mother’s proclamation, it seemed.

  Sharon had related this story too. Told Michael all about being schooled by the waif who just a short time ago hadn’t been able to get so much as a sliver of her act together. She laughed as she spoke. Their apartment was frequently full of laughter now. Full of stories that started always with something like: “You’ll never guess what I saw today,” or “You’ll get a kick out of this...” Even the forks clanking against dinner plates sounded like giggles.

  “Kind to the world,” Sharon repeated as she placed a serving of Michael’s pot roast on her plate. Shaking her head like the idea was oversimplified and naïve. Little more than a superstition. Wishful thinking.

  But Michael asked, “Why wouldn’t they come by to thank you? Why wouldn’t they want to be close to you, Shar? Best place in the world to be.”

  His words had warmed and encouraged her all at once.

  Still. What did it all add up to? A few nice words from her husband. A few pings on her phone. A handful of visits. Was that it? The extent of everything? Or was it a sign? Could it be that the world really did have more for her than a cold shoulder?

  She created a social media account and posted the image of her hand and Michael’s, then and now.

  And slammed her laptop shut, afraid she’d overestimated the photo’s importance.

  But while she wasn’t looking, she got a few likes.

  A few more.

  A few shares.

  A few more.

  A kind of digital traffic jam formed—more likes, more discussions, her name floating to the top like a bubble in a glass of champagne.

  The ringing of the studio’s phone shocked her.

  “Is this Sharon Minyard?” the voice asked. Before she could answer, he continued, “I have a proposal for you. I’ve been a fan of yours since I was a little boy, and I was so excited to see new work coming from your talented eye. I’m sorry—I’m probably getting a little ahead of myself. I should start with an introduction. My name is Charles Liu.”

  ~This Story~

  This is the story of a man. And a woman.

  And a dream.

  Not an old dream tucked away on a shelf in a junk closet. Not a dream that has already come true, and is now relegated to being nothing more than a hazy memory.

  A new dream.

  It intersects with another dream, one that Charles Liu tells this man and thi
s woman about during a meeting at his office in downtown Fairyland. A childhood dream, Charles says, one to make people feel the way his father had once felt looking at Sharon’s Art of the Kiss. A dream to bring that kind of smile to as many people as possible. He’s no artist himself, he insists, but he can be part of it. Provide his business and marketing knowledge. Everything he’s learned about print media through advertising campaigns.

  A book. That’s what he’s proposing. Michael’s words, Sharon’s images.

  They could all three enter the publishing world. Hopefully, this book could be the first of many.

  “Just imagine what we can do,” Charles exclaims, coming out from behind his desk to shake their hands.

  A new goal. A new project. A new dream.

  “Quick to press,” Liu warns them. “We need to capitalize on some of the attention Sharon’s been getting online.”

  To celebrate, where would they go? Why, Murio’s, of course. Sharon and Michael order drinks. They toast their beginning.

  They talk—one of those wonderful aimless conversations that meander, going nowhere specific and to the perfect places all at the same time.

  On the other side of the bar, Fayth and Ryan are on the stage. The Tommies have become Murio’s official house band. This weekly gig has become part of the new pattern in Fayth’s and Ryan’s lives, their own regular swinging back door, their own rhythmical comings and goings, the days in and out.

  They, too, have found their satisfaction. It is the dresser drawer Ryan has in Fayth’s place and his own favorite recipe for eggs with salsa on Saturday mornings. It’s occasional long drives to the old cemetery, and songwriting sessions, and plans for the fall when Fayth will be back in front of a classroom again.

  It doesn’t have to mean that they’ve begun to dig themselves a nice little rut.