It was dark in the farmhouse as my hiking boots crunched through snow up to the door. I stood there without knocking.

A single pair of headlights flashed over to my left and disappeared, the only car that had passed since I’d pulled over and parked off the side of the road. The whoosh of the car faded into silence, and still I stood there, unknocking. Maybe the artist had gone out for the evening. Maybe he had fallen asleep. Maybe I should just creep back to my car and drive away, reschedule this job interview for daylight hours, or maybe I should just retreat to the car, drive home and pretend the whole thing away. 

“Home” was a one-bedroom apartment where I heated up frozen meals and avoided sitting on my neighbor’s secondhand couch, that I’d bought for $50 and regretted ever since. My downstairs neighbor had chain-smoked on it right up to the day I’d bought it, and when I came to pick it up she told me how she had given not one but two baby girls up for adoption and beaten cancer once already and was praying to do it again. Sadness and cigarette smoke leaked out of her, and although I immediately changed my mind about the couch I couldn’t think of how to escape our deal without adding to her mountain of sad. I wrote her a check and arranged the couch in the middle of my living room, where I silently nicknamed it the Carcinogenic Couch, occasionally sprayed it with Febreze, and did not sit on it a single time.

I did not want to go home and avoid my couch. I did not want to go back to my job at Bridge School, where I thought I’d be leading outdoor activities  for struggling teenagers but instead was muddling through the afternoons unsuccessfully trying to role model good coping skills and heating up pre-cooked dinner in industrial-sized pans. I definately did not want to crawl back to my family and admit defeat, my sputtering launch into adulthood when I was supposed to soar. I raised my hand up to the farm house door and banged my first against the chipping paint. 

A dim light flickered on over my head, and a bearded face poked out of the door.  “Hi,” I started off, as he blinked at me through crooked glasses. “I’m so sorry I’m late. I feel asleep. But I thought I’d knock, or I can come back -“

“Oh hey! No, no no no, come on in.” He stepped back from the door, running his fingers through a mop of brown hair. “You’re the one who wrote about the job, right? Come in!”

I stepped into a cavern of a room. A four-poster bed sagged to my left, and a faded living room set was arranged in a semi-circle on the right. Blank canvases were stacked everywhere, and next to the living room was a makeshift studio space dotted with easels and paints. The only beautiful thing about the place were the giant chickens. They stared at me unblinking from giant canvases that lined the walls, painted in swoops of red and black and gold. My host shoved a stack of papers off a couch even sadder than my own and waved for me to sit down. “Can I get you anything? Uh, I’ve got water, or some hot tea?”

“Hot tea would be great,” i told him, and he disappeared behind a long curtain that ran across the massive room. I heard clanging sounds followed by running water. 

“It’s just an old barn, see,” he crowed, reappearing from behind the curtain with a steaming mug in hand. “But I’ve got everything I need!”

“The chickens are beautiful,” I told him, folding my hands around the heat of the mug. 

He waved his hand at the walls. “Oh, yeah, yeah. Chickens are my big thing. Tourists love ‘em. This place is crawling with tourists in the summer, you know? There’s all kinds of ways you could help me out around here.”

“There are?” I said hopefully, thinking if he needed me enough, I might be able to exit Bridge School and render my entry to adulthood salvageable.

He nodded enthusiastically. “Oh yeah! A young lady like you? Yeah, you could help me with staging, with sales. It would be great to have you in here running the gallery.”

I studied the chickens along with him and imagined the shadows and clutter away, picturing myself making conversation with art-loving tourists all summer long. It sounded right, or at least, more right than anything else I was doing. But that wasn’t what was in the job advertisement I’d responded to. “Did you – were you wanting to start doing some other types of work? For the job?”

He chucked, running his fingers through his pouf of hair. “Well, not to sell. I’m known as the Chicken Guy. This would be a personal project, you know? I love to do beautiful nudes. I used to have a girl – she was a real firecracker, that one, she’d call me sometimes in the middle of the night if she felt like posing! We created some beautiful nudes together, her and me.”

I nodded, while my stomach tightened. I’d been thinking a regular schedule in a well lit studio, not haphazard dates at this barn in the middle of the night. “Can I see some of your past work with her? Or – your other beautiful nudes?”

He shook his head. “Nah, no, I couldn’t do that to her. It’s too personal, you know? I treat all my models with respect. I told her from the get go, these are just for you and me. I couldn’t show her pictures to anyone. Just like I won’t show yours to anyone.”

He smiled at me, drinking in my hesitation like I was absorbing the steam from the hot mug. “I believe in art for the sake of the art. I get paid for the chickens. But I love to draw beautiful nudes. I need someone special for that. Someone with the spirit of an artist. Someone I can create with. Someone who wants to really live their life and be part of making beautiful things.” He clasped his hands and rubbed them together. “We should go ahead and get started.”

I clutched my mug tighter, protecting me from the train of his artistic will. “I really wasn’t planning on doing anything tonight. I have to get up for work tomorrow. Maybe we could figure out something, but I need to check my schedule….” I didn’t. I needed a moment alone to get my thoughts in order, to decide whether to walk away and stick with Bridge School and the Carcinogenic Couch and my crushing gray thoughts, or risk taking off my clothes and being swept away on the free-spirit art train. 

Continued in Part 2

All photos from Pixabay. Feature photo by MBatty & edited by me.