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#Post#: 124--------------------------------------------------
Scrape Away your Blues
DIR By: StoryGod
Date: January 10, 2020, 5:03 pm
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There were two scrapers in the south art room. Marion said a
prayer as she stretched the orange. translucent film over the
design masking taped to a piece of cardboard. She was making a
negative of that design that would create positive holes. The
design La Legion d'Honneur Francaise voted on required three
screenings onto colored poster board. They had worked diligently
to get supplies.
A girl called Irina had done all the talking. Irina who had
short curly hair and glasses with green frames looked vaguely
familiar. "I swear I saw you somewhere else before we showed up
at Legion d'Honneur meetings."
"I don't know where..." Irina replied. She was in eleventh grade
so it couldn't have been in any classes, and besides her
electives were in the usual 3pm slot, not the alternate slot
like Marion's.
"Did you go on a historical trip to White Plains?" Marion
ventured.
"The only trip I went on was the Metropolitan Museum of art and
that stupid bagel restaurant. I swear those Suite Advisors and
teachers want to make us blow up like balloons."
"I liked the bagel restaurant."
"You're young yet...I'm sorry."
Irina and the art teacher who did not want material wasted,
watched Marion like a hawk as she taped some scrap wax material
to a small piece of cardboard and then took a scraping tool and
carefully removed some small patches. "I guess you know how to
do this," Irina replied.
"It's not rocket science. It's just scraping wax," Marion
answered.
It was an escape from school work, but it was an important
extracurricular, and other high school kids managed with them,
so she could too. Back in her private day school in Texas,
scraping silk screen wax had been an odd kind of fun. There were
also black and white scrape boards used to make white on black
designs. Marion wondered if they had such things at
Kotiah-Yovanovitch.
Scraping silk screen wax was also an escape from wondering and
worrying. The mail took seven days to make a round trip. They
did not call it snail mail for nothing. It was back to the days
of the pony express or horse and buggy. The Wells Fargo stage
coach rumbled over the plains instead of the armored car heading
down the highway or the airplane crossing the sky. The ship was
probably rotting at some slimy police dock. Mom and dad might or
might not write back. She had sent off a second round of
letters. Letters every three days would mean more letters. "I
will lead by example."
"Want me to put on Spotify?" Irina asked from far away. Marion
agreed. She had enough music in her head, but perhaps Irina had
a carefree life.
"At least I have a roommate who is a good example," thought
Marion. She needed to spend more leisure with Zia, though they
would swim this afternoon. Zia was serious about learning to
swim. You had to consider that important when you thought about
it.
As for Marion, she was not sure what she would do if her parents
did not write back. She'd probably become a total pest and
bother the lawyer for news on them. "Don't run away mom and
dad," Marion told her parents in her mind. "Hang in there. It's
just a few months, and yes a few months is fucking forever."
#Post#: 140--------------------------------------------------
Re: Scrape Away your Blues
DIR By: StoryGod
Date: January 30, 2020, 8:50 am
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Ms. Constantine, the art teacher's face flashed bright red! "We
don't pour gasoline on silk screens to clean them!" she
proclaimed. That was what they had done in Malta. Marion could
still recall the smell and the cold early spring air, because
they cleaned silk screens outside the middle school art room.
At Kotiah-Yovanovitch, they used a special solvent though they
still worked out of doors. Marion was grateful the rain stayed
away Monday afternoon as she helped prepare three silk screens.
Irina, the eleventh grader with green glasses, considered Marion
too green to transfer any of the designs, even though she had
done most of the scraping for them. They prepared three silk
screens that day, and then applied the white to one of them and
made twenty-five posters which they set to dry in a special,
rear closet.
Marion was allowed to make a few of the posters, but she was not
experienced enough to do it really well like Irina. "Do you want
to be an artist when you get older?" Marion asked the eleventh
grader. "I'm an artist now," Irina replied.
"Artists starve," Marion thought, but she kept the idea to
herself. The posters had pink background and a modernistic
white, blue, and red design. Because the paint took time to dry,
the posters had to wait twenty-four hours for the next
application.
When the silk screen was finished, it was Marion's job to clean
it. This time she knew that she used solvent not gasoline. She
even looked at the ingredients. There were a bunch of long
chemical names ending in "ase," and the remover itself smelled
somewhat lemony in an industrial sort of way. "I guess when I
take chemistry, I'll learn about this stuff," thought Marion.
Suddenly Marion wondered if either of her parents had taken
chemistry in high school. She knew they hadn't paid attention,
which made her sad. It would be three or four days until she saw
a letter from them again. That was too much time between
letters, too much time to think weird thoughts.
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