Alchemystic Read Online Free PDF

among the gargoyles. Not wanting to come off crazy to my friends, I told myself it was all an illusion caused by the stress of the day.
    Despite rationalizing it to myself, I stopped looking up or around and fell in behind my father, trading my creepy-crawly sensation for hating the idea of what was coming instead. He wanted me to meet his suits, his businesspeople. I had thought burying my brother would be the worst of it today, but between being dragged before my father’s colleagues and my guilt over the last words Devon and I had exchanged, I didn’t think there was much of a chance of any part of my day improving. At least my father hadn’t brought his spiritual adviser down here with him. That was a small comfort in an otherwise uncomfortable day.

Four

Alexandra
    “R ules, Miss Belarus,” the Tribeca Y’s artist-in-residence said from behind his oversized and over-cluttered desk at the front of the large, open art space. “You must learn to use rules if you are ever going to pretend to create art here. Others would have gladly paid for the privilege of attending this series of events. Do you realize this?”
    My ears burned at his words. Even though it had been four months since I had done a damn thing artistic—since Devon’s death, really—I wasn’t new to art, either, even if the shitty sketch on my easel suggested otherwise. It was a mystery how this supposedly legendary sixties artiste had already reached the same level of persistent annoyance of me that had taken the dearly departed Devon Belarus decades to cultivate, but there it was all the same.
    I stared at my charcoal sketch on the easel before me. Lines, squiggles, nothing coherent yet, but after four months of not a lick of artwork produced by me, it was something, wasn’t it? Before Devon died, I was working as a part-time barista at this creepy-cool coffee shop in the East Village called the Lovecraft Café, planning to save enough self-earned money to move to my own apartment. Now that he was gone, mymother was so fragile, I felt I couldn’t leave…and my father was insistent that I learn the real estate business. My creativity had dried up, and Rory had sweetly signed me up for this art night class to try to get it flowing again.
    The fact I was being called out on “not doing art right” only filled me with a growing frustration. I tossed my half of a charcoal stick down into the easel’s tray with some force. “But,” I countered. “I’m experimenting, going free-form, letting my heart go with it. Isn’t art about expression of emotions, playing off the heart? Doesn’t the concept of rules fight directly against the very soul of that?”
    “No.” He sighed, not even looking up from his art portfolio, which he was packing up. “It does not. Rules are the manacle by which art stretches on its chain to greatness.”
    I wasn’t sure I bought that line of bull. I looked around the art space, where the mix of artsy devotees and bored Real Housewives looking for a hobby were all focusing on our discussion. “But—”
    “The argument is pointless, Miss Belarus,” he said with some bite to it, closing his portfolio and picking it up. “Art is not folly. Art is commitment, and that means establishing boundaries, meaning
rules
. I trust that is why you paid good money for this series of seminars. To learn something, yes?”
    “I
didn’t
pay for them,” I said. “They were a gift.”
    “Then perhaps you should at least do the gifter the courtesy of showing up on time for them instead of fifteen minutes late,” he said, and walked out of the studio, leaving the handful of students finishing up their own work with only me to stare at. I turned back to my easel. The disdain in his words cut deep and to the quick, but the artist in me—the one who wanted to commit the time—couldn’t argue with him. I
had
been late, though I had worked very hard during the rest of the class. I hated the fact that yet another meeting to check