One by one she lays them all over the bed. The blue purple rose, The lake of flowers surrounded by mountains, the view of the town from a mountain's top, the torn painting of a cup of coffee, and then there are the ones that scared her, the ones that freaked her out about the smudgy parts of her brain.
Her hand lingers on the half torn page, the painting of a red shoe, the grass surrounding that shoe, the way it felt like she could touch the grass, the sun reflecting on that shoe, and then on the very right, on the edge, a small finger she notices for the first time, the nail on the finger is small like a child's, she closes her eyes and thinks, if she had a shoe like this, if she saw a little finger like this. Is the finger hers or anybody else's? She tries, tries, tries and nothing comes up. No shoes, no grass, no finger. There is no memory of her painting this, no image in connection to painting, nothing.
She puts it on the bed and rolls out another. This one is totally smudgy, there is nothing on this painting, just the ghost of something being there now swirled in the ink of dark blue and black.
The same with the other last two.
She looks at the scattered paintings on her bed and tries to conjure up any image or any memory related to them.
Blank.
She huffs and turns towards her white flush bedroom door, considers for a long time, and decides the only person that is honestly going to answer her is her grandmother.
She wears her gloves back, picks up the rainbow foiled box of candies from under her bed, and moves to check her face in the mirror but her eyes moves to the black Mack Weldon cashmere hat on top of her study table and his voice enters her brain like a wind, as if he is standing on a podium and directly saying to her, How can you forget to bring a cap in this weather?
She removes her gloves and throws them on the bed, her hand reaches for the cap tentatively, it's hard for her to pick it up when she had been eyeing it like a snake viper for two days, like any moment it would attack her. The moment her hand meets with the cashmere she feels jolting electricity in her palms, she grabs it before she goes crazy by looking at the hat.
She looks around the room and then very carefully bends her nose down to the cashmere, her eyes are still doing a circle evaluation of the room when she takes a sniff of the hat like a drug addict, and there is that smell again, of lemons and lake and coffee.
Her eyes close, she is helpless when she inhales a deep breath of that smell, she remembers breathing it on that day, the smell settles inside her and she wonders how can all these smells intertwine and form into this.
She decides, she can't wear the hat anymore, she has to keep this, this smell, has to find this smell.
She turns to her almond cupboard, finds the navy blue box with the kitsch locket in the corner and dumps out all the content in the plastic container lying near her bed. She wipes the box with a paper towel and then covers it with a polyester sheet, very carefully she places the hat in the box, and closes it before checking to see if some other smell doesn't come from the box.
Satisfied she hides the box under her clothes, and then picks the paintings and rolls them up with a bow.
In one hand the paintings, in another, the rainbow foiled box of candies, she heads out the room and out her house.
*****
When she reaches her grandmother's cabin, she knows two things.
One, she is going to find her grandmother under an old fleece throw blanket covered with dinosaurs, compass and cards near the stone hearth fireplace.
Two she would be on her grey recliner chair, listening to old Bollywood songs on the vinyl record, shuffling cards fiercely on her lap.
Misha puts the key in the lock. Her grandmother is one of those types, who prefers to be on her own and generally hates human interactions, the reason why she prefers to stay two cabins away from Misha's parents. She says, 'Too much of human company scrapes my ability to think.' So she has a cat named Mitzi, who Misha is sure have begotten Satan's red eyes, because the cat literally have red eyes and it scans every human before they enter the cabin zone and basically screeches its nails as a caveat on the wooden door.
That is what happens when Misha turns the lock and opens the door.
The cat hisses and jumps away from the door, Mitzi's red eyes look up at Misha's with so much contempt that one would doubt if she owed some debt to the cat's ancestors, mainly Satan.
Misha glares back at the cat and jingles the single key at the cat. "If she didn't want to meet me, she wouldn't give me the key."
The cat narrows her eyes in warning then, fiddles away to wherever hellish portal den she preferred to stay near.
Misha locks the door beside her, and hears low music of 'Ek ladki ko dekha to aisa laga,' hangs her coat at the bamboo coat hanger which her grandmother made from her own hands. It was painted dark brown and black. It's been years since her grandmother started making things from wood, a little rack, a small carved box, a wooden earring which she gifted to Misha on her sixteenth birthday, a locket in a silver chain that Misha always wore, things here and there which became quite famous when Misha posted them on Amazon and eBay.
Since then, her grandmother has been enjoying the fruits of her hard work, have employed two people underneath her, started her own company called Virgin Mary Woods because she was inspired by the drink Virgin Mary when she made her first wooden ring which she always wore as a locket on her neck, in the memory of her husband, Misha's grandfather. And became quite famous on Instagram with her DP, in which she is captured by Misha's phone lens, having a cocktail called Sex on the beach.
Misha removes her wet hiking boots, and wears the cosy fur slippers which her grandmother kept for Misha in extra. The furs settle perfectly on her warm skin, and she makes her way inside the cabin's living room.