pris the witch and the cemetery portrait sitting

[Guest]

it was late afternoon. it was overcast. there was a chill everytime the wind blew. leaves falling off the trees and scraping on the paved walkways and across the flat cold marble. the sun had dipped low enough in the sky that it was casting both an eerie glow and strange shadows off the trees and stones. the kind of glow and shadows that made you think that you saw something move out of the corner of your eye when it reality nothing did.

it was the perfect day to haunt a cemetery. but right now, there was only one girl here today doing the haunting. though it was two weeks before halloween, the small female was unmistakably dressed in witch's garb. deep purple, the dress had a 'v' cut and a black belt that had a silver spider clasp which belted just under her chest to make a high waistline. the sleeves were long and tight until the wrists, where the tattered fabric hung in long strips. in the front the skirt only reached to the mid-thigh, the edges frayed in a messy triangular pattern. in the back, the dress spilled all the way to the ground and even had a short ratty train when the girl stood. over the whole of the dress was a layer of thin black mesh, also frayed and tattered to give the frock an eerie quality. the pointed hat matched, purple with the same mesh black gathered in places to help give the hat some bulk. black witch's boots with thin heels and black very pointed tips were on her feet laced with oranges laces, and her stockings were cobwebs. under the pointed hat her hair - black with green and orange streaks - was teased so that it looked as wild as a bird's nest. her make-up was thick and dark, casting a mysterious mood over her young features.

the young witch was pris, of course. she was currently kneeling in front of a very old tombstone, the marble frail enough that there was a large corner of it missing. on her ground next to her was her big black shoulderbag, because she never left home without it. pressed against her lap was her sketchbook, the spiral-bound top part of it wedged into the chill grass so that the pad didn't move while she did her artmaking. pris was using both of her hands to sketch her drawing today. she had just begun her artmaking at this stone, so in each hand was a black charcoal, no pastels yet. both charcoals moved across her page in rapid fire scratches and scrapes, her fingertips pressing flat to the page to blend and shadow when needed.

though her hands were very busy, her eyes didn't even glance downward at her work in progress, not even for a second. instead her emerald gaze was transfixed on the old gravestone. the writing etched into the stone was so aged that the 's's looked like 'f's and words like 'good' had an 'e' on the end of them - not to mention that some of the letters had been worn away entirely, so the words were hard to read. that didn't matter to pris, though. truth be told, when she chose this stone it was because of the rounded shape of it and the missing chunk off the top, not because of any of the words. she wasn't here to read gravestones.

she was here to do their portraits. and if anyone looked over pris' shoulder, they would learn rather quickly that doing a portrait of a tombstone was not at all about the stone itself, even though it was the stone she stared at. it was about the person that stone was for. so on her page, while the fragile chipped marker was featured on the bottom center, what grew out of it like smoke from a fire was a very rich scene with a young man at its center. from the telltale collar around the man's throat and the dark of his clothing, it was obvious the man buried beneath her was a priest in life. but that life as a man of the cloth wasn't easy for him, because out of the shadowy wisps that pris was streaking on her page grew the half formed bodies of an angry congregation, full of mouths that were open in rage and fists that would shake if they could move out of their drawn positions. at the center of the irate collection of people, the young priest looked like he was suffocating, terrified that the crowd was finally about to close in.

all of that, from staring at a stone. though her expression was entirely neutral, borderline dreamy, inside pris' stomach butterflies churned with fast-fluttering twists and turns. because she knew this was something new. something she couldn't do before. and now that she could, her compulsive demanding mind was asking her over and over...

"why." spoken in the same pushy tone her mind used with her. "why. why. why." and as if it would help any, the eccentric girl lifted her right hand from the page so that she could point the smudged fingertip at the stone, following her repeated question with an emphatic, "abracadabra!" while she didn't know what it might do, pris figured saying such a word couldn't hurt. she was, after all, dressed up as a witch. a wicked witch. because she was already practicing being what she wasn't to prepare for halloween.