Sketches by Joseph
from Chapter 6: After the Tearing
My first sketch after months of silence was a simple thing: the pulpit chair under the hanging lightbulb, empty. It looked peaceful, and I didn't know why that scared me. The chair had a high back and wide arms, the kind of chair that looked like a throne when someone sat in it and like an empty
promise when no one did. The light bulb above it cast a clean cone of white into the surrounding gray I'd shaded in. I had not drawn God in the chair, or my father, or his voice I could still hear if I concentrated. I had drawn the absence of all of them. The absence looked almost tender.
from Chapter 5: Recognition
One evening, I drew a man's profile — a classmate's — and froze staring at it. Something moved inside me, something wordless and warm. It wasn't lust; it was recognition. The classmate's name was Andy. He sat two rows over in English class and had a way of holding his pen when he was thinking
that I had noticed without deciding to. In the drawing his profile faced left, and there was something in the line of it that I had caught without understanding what I was catching. I looked at the drawing and felt, with a clarity that preceded thought, that I was looking at something true.
from Chapter 6: Idolatry
Secrets never stay hidden. One evening, my mother found a drawing — a portrait of a boy's face half in light, half in shadow. The face was no one in particular and everyone at once. I had been proud of it. The pride itself should have told me something. My mother tore the page cleanly down the
center. "Idolatry," she said. "The Lord said no graven images." The sound of the paper tearing went through me like a physical thing. A clean, surgical sound. I watched the two halves of the face lie there on the table, the light on one half and the shadow on the other, separated now by a white edge of
torn paper, and I felt something harden in me that has never entirely softened.
from Chapter 7: Light Itself
One morning, before school, sunlight slipped through my window. Dust moved like smoke in the beam, swirling above my desk. I sat down and started sketching — not scripture, not guilt, just light itself. The drawing was nothing but lines of gold ink sweeping upward. When I finished, I wrote a single word at the bottom: Free. Then I left it in plain sight on my desk. My mother never touched it.
Perhaps she didn't recognize freedom when she saw it.
from Chapter 23: Ms. Ellis's Room
I think about Ms. Ellis. About the art room that was the only room in the building where I felt like I was allowed to have an inner life. About the sketches she called striking and precise and the one she hung on the wall next to the supply closet — the charcoal drawing of hands, my hands, which I had
drawn from memory, which I had drawn because I didn't know how else to say I exist, I am here, these hands belong to someone.
from Chapter 26: The Slow Opening
I open the sketchbook I always carry and begin a small drawing of the centerpiece — a vase with three sunflowers, one of them listing to the left as if tired. I'm not thinking about him. I am drawing the tired flower, tracing the droop of its head, the way petals curl inward when they've been standing too long. "That's really good," he says. He is watching the sketch, not me. Which is the right order of things. "The drooping one," he says. "You got it exactly right. It looks like it's given up but it hasn't, quite."