Willow Farrow's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Willow had promised the road council a mural by first frost, and she had brought thirty gallons of paint to a highway she could not picture. The longest road in Lacuna ran forty miles from the salt flats to the outer gate, and she had told every traveler she met that she would paint it into a welcome home. Now she stood at mile marker one with a dry brush and no image in her head. She tried the old tricks. She sketched a river on her palm. She sketched a face. She sketched her own hand sketching, and tore the page. Briar and Thistle had left her a jar of swamp water for luck. Jolt Jinx had wired a work lamp to a car battery so she could paint after dark. Starlight had walked the shoulder with her for two mornings, waiting for the vision to arrive. It had not arrived. A mural needed a shape before it needed a stroke, and Willow could not see the shape from the ground. She left the paint under a tarp and climbed the hill above the second mile. An old windmill stood on the crown of it, stone base, wooden sails locked still by a bent brake. She had passed it a hundred times. She had never gone up. The door gave with her shoulder. Inside, a ladder ran to a hatch, and the hatch opened onto the cap. From there the highway unrolled below her in one long gray ribbon, curving twice, dipping once, meeting the sky at the salt flats. She saw it whole for the first time. She saw where the road bent toward the river and where the shoulder widened for tired drivers. She saw the six farms along it, the three bridges, the empty billboard at mile twenty. The mural was not one picture. It was a route. She would paint the road as a river, and every place a traveler slowed, she would paint what waited for them there — a lit window, a full table, a hand raised in greeting. She climbed down with the plan set and her hands steady. At the base of the hill she uncapped the first can. The brush touched the concrete barrier at mile marker one and left a stroke of deep green. The mural had begun, and now she had forty miles to finish before the frost.