Read Online Sunruined: Horror Stories by Andersen Prunty - Free Book Online Page B

from a tree, the memories swirl back into the autumn of her mind as she sits thinking.
    She slowly surveys the room. It truly is picturesque in its decay. Easels burdened with blank gray canvases surround the middle of the room like dark monks preparing for séance. Stacks of books, magazines, photos, and old drawings are limp heaps in the corners. Two stark gray filing cabinets are locked against the wall to her left. The walls are bare, absent of pictures, no life clinging to them. Dust is the only substance that clings to anything. Dirt dust, incense dust, dead cancer cigarette dust. Dust is death, she thinks, we rise and fall into dust.
     
    After nearly a week, they had finally moved all their stuff into the sizable but dilapidating house. Samuel Bean, secretly tortured artist and alleged master of mayhem, disturbance, and vandalism at Raven Creek High School was finally settling down at the ripe old age of twenty. Married to the former Gina Blanc, aspiring dancer and general wallflower of Raven Creek High School, they made a good couple. She appealed to Samuel’s quiet, artistic side, while responding well to his exuberant energy in bed.
    Most of Samuel’s stuff had been haphazardly sorted into the upstairs studio. His boxes of books covered the vast wooden floor, canvas-burdened easels standing erect on its surface. He left the middle of the studio open so Gina could practice her dance. Samuel enjoyed watching her. He enjoyed watching her thin, well-defined muscles rippling beneath tights or, sometimes, nothing at all. She seemed to float around the room. The silent beauty of a butterfly pleasing his eyes and sinking further into his heart.
    After they had been there for a few months and were somewhat practiced about coexisting with one another, Samuel decided to sit down and begin painting again. He was mad to get back to it. The art had been eating away at him.
    Once he began painting he felt somewhat out of practice. It seemed that everything he started ended up looking like something else or something that resembled excrement. Searching for a reason, he came across the only explanation he could think of.
    The pain was gone.
    All of his works had been driven by pain. Pain and ugliness. Gray death, black suns. There was no happiness inside of Samuel Bean.
    A testament to Samuel’s artistic rendering of pain was Gina’s refusal when he had asked to paint her naked. “I’m sorry, Samuel. I really mean no offense. You just… well, you have a way of making things look, uh, ugly .” She quickly reached out to catch his plummeting ego, “I’m not saying it’s not good. It’s brilliant, it really is. It’s beautiful in its own way. But I really just don’t want my feelings to be hurt.”
    Samuel, looking at things objectively, understood what she meant. He still argued to do it, mainly because he thought it would be a huge turn on, but she was unwavering in her stance.
    Gina’s observations had been something that Samuel had lived with ever since he had started showing his paintings to her. Continually, it popped up in criticisms of his work, if it was a criticism at all. Samuel had never really stopped to figure out why his art was so ‘ugly.’ To him, it was the only thing he knew, what he’d been raised with.
    Samuel had grown up, most of his young life, in Louisville. The worst parts of Louisville. The parts that nobody ever thinks of when they think of Kentucky because pictures of the slums and the factories didn’t make it into the travel brochures. There were no horses for miles and you’d have to walk through an ocean of concrete to get to the nearest mountain.
    His family had moved to Raven Creek at the beginning of his freshman year. Raven Creek was a small town where everyone had pretty much the same income, but Samuel seemed to bear the stigma of living in the absolute worst house in it. The feeling of being the only poor person in town was coupled and tripled with the facts that he was not