文/伊卷舒
Boer was up early and anxious to attend the “Retrospective of Chinese Painter Xin Sang” at the Boston Art Museum. The artworks, ranging across forty years, were exhibited with distinctive theme and style. Though the tender sentiments remained permeating the pieces, Boer could tell that the strokes, colors and forms of the paintings had evolved from being bold and expressionistic in his younger days into a subdued maturity.
Entering the last showroom, Boer was astounded at the portrait of a girl in a red shirt with two braided pigtails. Alongside it was a gold plate carved with the title “Boer.” Thirty years ago, Boer was a middle school student, good at painting. Mr. Sang was her art teacher. Often after classes, they would go to the villages nearby to draw. Boer admired Mr. Sang, who was 9 years her senior, and good at everything Boer was interested in, like singing and playing the accordion. Mr. Sang would sometimes be amazed by how extensively Boer read, and rationally she behaved for her age.
The young girl’s warm-toned world shattered when her parents found her diary. Her parents learned that her late stays at school were for excursions to rice patches and grassy rivers, and that her smiles came from his compliments, like “talented,” “beautiful,” and “stay with me a bit longer.” With these words, Mr. Sang had overstepped the rules of a teacher. Her parents politely asked him to stay away, and had her switch to another school.
Reluctantly, Boer went to Mr. Sang one last time to pick up her portfolio. On top of her drawings, she found a portrait of her, in a red shirt and two pigtails, her eyes full of expectation.
“I finished it yesterday, a gift for you. But it will take about two weeks to dry. We don’t have the time.” He said, looking at her sadly.
Boer backed away, holding the portfolio in her arms, and staining her shirt with red paint. After that day, Boer locked her brushes and easel in a trunk and never opened it again. She chose a path that led her further away from home. Along the way, she had numerous dates and an equal number of breakups. Eventually, she married and, perhaps inevitably, divorced.
Throughout the years, Boer had come across Xin Sang’s name unanticipated several times. In her second year of college, she saw in a student newspaper that one of his paintings had received the silver medal in a national art competition. A couple of years later, a leading art journal declared him a leader of the avant-garde. The first time Boer went back to China from the US, where she pursued her doctorate in statistics, she was surprised to see him interviewed on TV.
“You were just fifteen,” Boer’s mother said reading her daughter’s mind. “What could we do? You met the right person at the wrong time.”
“Let the past stay in the past. ” Boer whispered.
Two months after the show was over, an unexpected package arrived. Inside, Boer found the portrait and a note. “Boer, keep this one instead. It’s dried completely. Time is magic…”
【500字小说练习】
（图文都是伊卷舒原创，禁止抄袭）
