by Vivian Venus
She wiped the bristles off with a blue shop towel and delicately dipped the tip into a pre-mixed combination of cadmium red and yellow ochre on her pallet and then raised it to her canvas. After three hours of work she was nearly done with the plein air painting, and just on time too. The afternoon sun was reaching up into its highest point in the sky, and the blot of shade her beach umbrella provided was barely enough to keep her comfortable in the desert heat. The light had changed over the vista, but Ryn had already committed the scene at its most beautiful moment to her memory. She would put the finishing touches on now, and then add the details back at her camper.
She took a step back and crossed her arms as she examined her work. It was good, not spectacular, but she was sure it would be able to sell in town. Ryn thought of Gretta, the old lady who owned the local art gallery. “A beautiful, talented young girl like you shouldn’t be selling your work in an old place like this,” she had said kindly. “You deserve to be off doing something great. More folks should be seeing your paintings. I’m always surprised you’re not out in some big city gallery, Ryn.”
That was exactly what Ryn had come to the desert to get away from. The memories of the galleries, of the city, where everything seemed to be tainted with memories of him. When she learned just what kind of a manipulative, abusive, wicked scumbag he was, that just destroyed everything. He had been cheating on her with one of the other artists he had been managing, girl who was in his own words, “the next biggest thing,” and that it was “nothing personal.”
Here, her work was free of the pretentiousness of the city art scene. It was free of him. And best of all, nobody knew her. She liked it that way, it gave her a chance to mend her mind and concentrate on what mattered most. She loved that she could paint as much as she wanted and could support herself enough on that. But still, Ryn felt like there was something missing. She painted and painted, trying to find what it was that was lacking. But no matter how much work she did, or how much she improved, she still felt like there was something she couldn’t grasp.
Just a couple more things… She added a bit of color to the shadow underneath a red rock vista, and then peeked her head out from behind the canvas to take one more look at the landscape. Movement off in the distance caught her eye.
What was that?
She squinted. Was her eye playing tricks on her? Was that a…?
No, she wasn’t seeing things. There was a man out there, stumbling around in the heat. A naked man, sun glinting off sweat covered skin. Ryn watched as he came closer into view. She could see his face now; he looked exhausted and dehydrated. She grabbed her water bladder and hurried down the rocky hill where she had set her easel towards the man. He turned and saw her, and their eyes locked. She shivered as his blue eyes caught her dark brown ones, and he looked at her in a way that seemed like recognition. Then he collapsed onto the dirt.
He lay cheek to the ground, his eyes closed and breath shallow. What was he, some kind of a drug addict tripping out in the desert and wandered off from his car? The road was miles away. He could’ve come in on a 4x4, but why the hell was he naked?
“Hey, are you okay?” she asked, shaking his shoulder. He had an athletic body, and she felt his muscle twitch under her touch.
She cleared her throat and tried not to stare at anything indecent, and then with some effort managed to turn him over. “Hello?” No response. She sighed and tucked her arm behind his head and stuck the tube of her water bladder into his mouth and opened the spigot. Water filled his mouth until he coughed and spluttered, spilling all over his chest. Ryn saw that he was wearing a necklace – a teardrop shaped piece of metal with some kind of gem in the center. The man’s eyes opened and he gave her a delirious look.
“Hello,” he said.
“Yeah, hi. Come on, get up, I can’t carry you out of here by myself.” She grabbed him by the arm and grunted to pull him up, then supported him on her by wrapping his arm around her shoulders. She could feel his bare skin radiating his body heat against her, and she unexpectedly found her heart beating faster. “Come on buddy, let’s go,” she said as she struggled to keep him up as she started the long walk back to her camper.
CHAPTER TWO
Warning! Altitude dampening thrusters unstable. Advising readjustment to surveillance altitude immediately…
Warning! Thruster malfunction! Prepare for emergency landing…
Daggen Trys slowly opened his eyes, and immediately began to recall what had happened. What a foolish mistake. He should’ve known that his ship would be unstable while cloaked at such a low altitude. It was only a geological surveillance ship, after all, designed to operate outside the atmosphere. All he had wanted was a closer look. No problem, he had thought. He would only be in atmo for a short amount of time, and then he’d go back to his post.
As his senses recovered, he realized that he was lying in a bed. Where am I? Then he remembered the face of the girl. That’s right, she had found him. He heard movement, and he slowly tilted his head down to look. He winced as pain shot through his muscles.
She was there, her back to him as she worked on something. She’s doing that thing, he thought, and struggled to sit up to get a better view. He watched her silently as she created the world with her tool, with each movement adding more life to the image. Daggen had seen her do this before from out in orbit – in fact it was what she was doing when he first spotted her down in the desert below his ship.
Humans were off limits, he had been briefed. Surveying them was left to others. When Daggen had caught her on his scope, unexpected and tiny in that vast desert, he couldn’t help but look. She was beautiful, like the light of a supernova, and she drew him in. Before long his daily routine was colored by her appearance. He would wait for her, sometimes watching her work instead of paying attention to his own function. Her work enthralled him. He had never seen anything like it before.
He tried to sit up further and groaned in pain. The girl turned around and set down her tool. “You’re awake,” she said briskly. “Good. I was half expecting you to overdose or something in my bed.” She stood up and picked up a bag from a chair and then threw it onto the bed. “I bought you some clothes from town, since you didn’t seem to have any.”
He groaned. How embarrassing.
“Apologies,” he said, sitting upright, the blanket sliding down off his bare chest. “And thank you for saving me. My name is Daggen. Daggen Trys.”
“Ryn Tilley,” she said, turning back to her work. “Daggen, huh? That’s an interesting name. Daggen, what were you doing out there in the desert all alone? We’re miles from town and miles from the road, but you don’t have any sunburns.”
Daggen blinked. How could he explain that he was from another world? That he had crash landed on her planet? He cleared his throat. It was better that she didn’t know, anyway. He had already breached protocol by bringing his ship down from orbit. Now he was in her bed. Eventually one of them would be here to fix things.
“I…got lost.”
“You got lost. Without water or clothes.”
“That’s right.”
“Okay,” she shrugged. “I guess you have a right to your privacy. I’m gonna go outside and catch that sunset. You should put those clothes on and I’ll drive you back to town.”
Daggen thought of his ship, crashed out in the desert. It was fixable, he just needed a bit of time. “I don’t think I should go to town.”
Ryn stopped in the doorway. “Why not?”
Daggen scratched his head. “I can’t really say.”
“Jesus. Are you some kind of escaped convict or something? Because I’ll kick your ass right now if you are.”
He couldn’t help but laugh. “I’m not.”
Ryn glared silently at him for a moment before stepping out of the door. “Just get dressed already. I’m going to take you back to town, because you aren’t staying here.”
She shut the door of her camper behind her and stepped out into the warm de
sert evening. The sun was dipping towards the horizon, and the golden light of sundown was starting to make its way over the rocky vistas. The dirt crunched beneath her boots as she got her easel off the side of her camper and set it up to do a quick sunset impression. She thought about Daggen as she mixed her palette. It didn’t make any sense to her. She was alone out here with him. She should’ve driven him straight into town and dropped him off at the hospital the moment she found him, but for some reason she felt compelled to take him home to her trailer and patch him up herself.
Ryn kicked herself. Yeah, the guy was attractive. Was that what this was about? Was she seriously doing this because he was hot? She dipped her brush into the oil paint and then furiously set to work, putting down broad impressionistic strokes of bright color.
Maybe a little bit? Damnit. He’d be out of her life soon anyway. She quickly finished with the lay-in and started refining some of the details of the painting.
Inside the camper, Daggen threw off the sheets and found that Ryn had wrapped bandages around his abdomen and chest where he had been bruised and cut. Then he got out of the bed, picked up the bag of clothes and got dressed. He found a mirror and examined himself, chuckling at his appearance. “Dressing like a human,” he said. “Daggen, you’re breaking all the rules now.”
He wondered when the enforcer would arrive. Sometime soon, probably. He felt a little guilty for breaching protocol, but at the same time he felt this incredible welling of energy inside him. Up until now, Ryn had just been a figure on his scopes, someone he would see every day but could never speak to or meet. And her work – her “paintings” as she called them. He walked over to some of the canvases that were sitting propped up against the wall and crouched down to look. They took his breath away. As he looked at them up close, he marveled at how the image broke down into a series of unrecognizable strokes of color and form. He had never seen anything like it.
A certain painting sitting in a black frame called out to him. Unlike the others, which were all of the desert landscape, this one was a whirl of color and shape, not of anything defined. Daggen could tell there was something special about it, but he needed to dig deeper. He focused on the work, reaching out with his mind, using the special ability his people carried to understand the energy and process used to create something, whether it be artificial, biological. When Daggen surveyed the Earth’s surface, he could feel how the tectonic plates moved and how the red hot magma was shifting beneath the crust and all the minute intricacies of how the earth was formed. As he extended out to the painting and examined it with his abilities, Daggen felt a blast of overwhelming energy. He gasped and stumbled back and fell, like a hand had reached out from the surface of the canvas and hit him. His heart was thudding in his chest, and he felt tears building in his eyes. What was that? He wiped his eyes and tried to slow his breath. The feeling that was contained in this object, the emotion.
The door to the camper opened. “What are you doing?” Ryn stepped inside, her expression suspicious.
“This…painting,” he said. “It’s special isn’t it? It’s different than the others. The energy behind it. Loss, betrayal. Sadness… But also something else. You’re waiting for something.”
Ryn found herself somewhat shocked at his analysis. Could he really have seen that all in this? She turned the painting around so that it was facing the wall. “I painted it at a very difficult time in my life. I’m surprised that you noticed.”
“How could I not,” he said.
“Do you know a lot about art, Daggen?” She stepped back outside, and he followed her.
“Not a thing. There is no such thing where I come from.”
“No such thing? Just where are you from?”
He hesitated, not wanting to reveal too much. “It’s quite far from here.”
Ryn brushed a strand of her dark hair back behind her ear and crossed her arms as she looked at him, trying to figure him out. She hated how secretive this guy was, but she had to admit that she was intrigued by him. “There’s not some secret government base around here, is there? You’re not some escaped spy from another country?” She smiled.
Daggen chuckled and shook his head. She wasn’t too far from the truth, in some ways. “That painting…” he started.
“Is none of your business,” Ryn said pleasantly as she motioned to follow her to her truck. “Come on, I’ll take you back into town.”
Daggen held up his hand. “No, it’s alright. I’ll go on my own.”
“Into town. You know it's more than ten miles out, right?”
“Not to town.”
“We’re out in the middle of nowhere.”
Daggen smiled guiltily. He felt bad to have intruded on her in his delusional state after the crash, but eventually the enforcer would be here and she wouldn’t remember a thing. He would be punished, but it was fine. Meeting her face to face had given his life an energy that it had been lacking for so long. He now only wished he could stay longer and talk with her more, see her painting up close, but he had already done too much. “I’ll be fine. Thank you for saving my life, Ryn.” He turned and began to walk off into the desert towards the site of his crash landed ship.
Ryn stared after him, completely mind boggled. What the hell was wrong with this guy? He had to be mentally ill or on drugs. She thought about forcing him to get in the truck with her so she could take him to town, but she decided against it. It was his life. She had already done what she could for him.
Ugh.
She ran back into her camper and grabbed a wide brimmed hat, headlamp and her water bladder and rushed back outside. “Hey, idiot!” she yelled as she ran to catch up with him. He turned around, and Ryn thrust the items into his hands. “At least take these, so I won’t worry about you.” She turned heel and grabbed the sunset study off the easel and then deftly collapsed the wooden frame, then lifted it up and set it back against the side of the trailer before going inside. Daggen smiled to himself watching her, and then turned to walk back out to the desert. The sky was a deep purple as the sun gave a last look at the earth before it dipped below the horizon. He marveled at the sight. He had never seen a real earth sunset before.
CHAPTER THREE
Daggen looked at the items that Ryn had given him and smiled. He would treasure them. The pendant on his necklace glowed brightly, creating an orb of light around him that allowed him see perfectly in the dark and his body, now fully rested and adjusted to Earth’s climate, wouldn’t need water or sustenance for days. His ship wasn’t too far, anyway. Just a several miles out, hidden with a cloaking device.
He thought about the punishment he would receive for breaking one of the strictest protocols an Earth assigned observer had. Only the very highest ranked scientists, the very elite, could contact humans. He would likely be grounded back home, stuck in the yards assembling new ships. It was worth it. Getting to meet her was worth it.
Daggen had trained since he was young with the sole goal of adventuring off planet to the far away world of Earth, the home to an emerging alien civilization. He had studied the human race since he was just a child, and it had always been his dream to meet a human. He had put forth his best effort throughout his education to become a human researcher so that he could be planted among them, live out life as a human being, start a human family, do the things he had dreamed about since he was a boy. But in the end, he couldn’t pass the rigorous tests for the assignment, and not because of a lack of knowledge. Too much of a dreamer, not serious enough, the officials had told him. He was talented and made the Earth observation program, but only as a geological surveillance researcher. He would never be allowed to fulfill his dream.
It seemed that way until the day that Ryn appeared, her form appearing on his scopes like a glimmer of light in the darkness of his tedious life.
He thought of Ryn’s attitude and chuckled to himself. He wondered if all human women were that way. He liked how she handled herself, how strong she was. He could sense as much ju
st from when he observed her, so it felt refreshing to him that his senses had been accurate.
There weren’t many women on his planet. Daggen had been a constructed birth as they called it, a baby born from artificially created genetic material, just like most others. Being around Ryn, even for just that short amount of time, filled him with this marvelous energy like her very presence was building him up and bringing him to life. The smell of her that lingered around him when he had woken up in her bed had made his head spin like he was intoxicated, and he found himself wishing he could smell her wonderful scent again. He laughed as he realized how he felt. He had been so affected in this way but to her, his arrival was just an unusual event that would probably be forgotten in a few days time. He was nothing special, just some man lost in the desert. A story to tell her companions over drinks.