Pallet

The sun pressed its face against the cobblestones and I held the crinkly kraft paper bag into which, minutes earlier, the shop keeper had fed a slim historical biography about this very town. I was walking to my final lesson, where Kate would tell us to get our own paints and I would root around inside various sandwich bags for colours I could remember the names of, and put them on pallet paper like I hadn't only heard of pallet paper three weeks ago. "You've cracked that, finally," Kate would say about my landscape, which is a compliment of the highest order, whether or not she means it. Everything about the afternoon was building to this moment, and I could feel it.