2024 sides - mimicking

The sun slowly sank into the horizon, dying the sea blood orange like his daily dose of vitamin C. It must have been a long time since he last saw the sun, the pale skin he wore helped brought out his eyes, the darkest citrine one could find. His acquaintance Veronica C finally arrived, fashionably eight minutes late in her somewhat unfashionable garments, chewing a bag of carrots for breakfast. Veronica had a slight obsession with food. Last month she fed herself nothing but red colour food and at the moment she fantasized being a rabbit. Only her faux-fur coat was rather dusty and got cigarette burn on the right sleeve. It must have been rained on quite a few times as it looked like she was coated in moldy whipped cream. Jake, a quiet young man who liked to observe patterns knew that lecturing her on punctuality would be futile, set the clock to run slower knowing that she didn’t wear a watch. It was relative after all.
The room smelt of wood, oil paint that oddly came with a hint of peppermint and old dried out spirit bottles that scented like prunes. What they did for a living was copying master paintings. The landscapes worldwide has changed drastically from the last century, the only common feature was a sense of emptiness after the high rises were being replaced by invisible magic cubes in urban renewal projects. The earth could no longer take more of the reflective surfaces that brewed a soup of rising heat.
The studio owner, a lady in her seventies with eyes still shone brightly once mentioned that copying a painting was a good way to experience part of the masters’ life or mentality. Jake found joy and tranquillity when painting landscapes with sea and birds. Sometimes he would be so immersed in it that he heard birds singing from afar or sound of flipping wings if it was a close up. The sea, frozen under the brush would echo of transiting waves and stirred the sugar in his tea salty to taste. Meanwhile, Veronica was working on a giant abstract print that bordered between nothingness and an acidic fairytale, corroding the characters and structures on the canvas into some merely recognizable shapes. No wonder she was acting strange these days.