I stand on a wooden box in the Oswego Art Association, an oblong building that looks like it's made of Lincoln Logs. I am naked. Through a small square window I can see pellets of ice flying past, sharpened by their trek from Canada over Lake Ontario to Central New York. They hit the window pane with a relentless click, click, click.

I don't understand why humans decided to forge out a way of life in a place like this, where precipitation descends with force that could break the skin, where the sky is cement gray eight months out of the year. This tiny city seems so forlorn perched on the edge of a Great Lake. If I stepped outside like this I would be dead of exposure by night's end. Nature simply did not prepare humans to live here, without hides, or horns or talons. Just skin. Every instinct I have tells me to curl up like a pill bug.

Students stand behind their easels with their eyes fixed on my shape. I've been holding the same position for twenty minutes and my muscles are burning. Friends have asked me how I hold still for so long. "I pretend I'm a statue," I tell them. I listen to the lub-dub of my heart and forget every other sound. But I always feel their eyes.

An itch flares up on my leg. This always happens. I lean down ever so slightly to scratch my leg. I try to slip back into the same position, hoping that no one would notice. I should know by now that that's impossible. The people behind the easels sigh, and furrow their brows at their sketches.

On the first night of modeling I was surprised to discover that the drawing class consisted of five elderly men and two elderly women. I don't know who I had in mind for the student body —slight men in eyeliner and black berets, perhaps? My eyes darted around the room. Be naked in front of them? These people? I tried not to look panicked, or think of my grandparents. Breathe, I tell myself. This is only new to you. No one else is nervous. Only you.

My robe hit the floor and the terrycloth sounded like lead. The instructor pointed out my body parts with his pencil, sometimes gracing my skin with the lead tip, as if he were drawing new details onto me.

As he spoke to the class about shadows and angles, my eyes wandered. A piece of art entitled "Scab—A Self Portrait" hung on the wall. Photographs and little bits of mixed debris bordered the edges, and in the middle, behind a tiny cut of glass, was a scab. It was brownish red like a strip of raspberry fruit leather, as large as a kneecap. The scab was rugged around the edges, like it had been peeled off before it was ready. I fixed myself on that scab the whole night. What had it covered up? Who would paste it up for everyone to see, and exposing themselves when they were most tender?

After the class I glanced at the students' work and noticed that everyone focused on a different piece of me. Someone drew my navel as a deep dark hole that seemed to grumble and stretch, preparing to swallow the rest of me, all of the gray strokes falling into a hungry cavern. One woman drew my hip exactly like a mountain highway, with a gentle, rounded curve. A German man drew curls in the back of my hair that I had never seen. If I didn't know the drawings were of me, I never would have guessed. It seemed that at nineteen, I should know my body.

Tonight the instructor wants to sketch my face. He squishes my features together by only a tiny bit, but it makes me look like Picasso meets Mr. Potato Head.

"Oh, Bill! She's not that ugly," says Eunice, a gray-haired woman with a pink stripe of lipstick running crooked over her upper lip like an irregular china doll.

I stare at the drawing and notice the way he brought out my eyes. They look real enough to blink. It's as if he were drawing with light filtering through his pencil. They say eyes are like windows, and when I look at the eyes Bill has drawn for me, I can almost see the sun as it rises over the ocean, with a million sparkles on the water, the sun sliding down the calves of early morning sunbathers, glinting off of their sunglasses. I can almost forget the endless winter world that I'll be driving home in.

"You look upset, hon. Did you think you were prettier?" says Eunice.

I reach for my robe.

"No one looks good this way," she continues. "This is practice. Don't expect to become a pin-up."

From now on I'll stand so this woman has nothing to draw but my ass.

The first naked woman I ever saw stared up at me from the cover of a 1983 Penthouse magazine that I found her under my father's bed while searching for a stray toy. We held staring contest on the bedroom floor for a full minute. She had breasts like grape fruits and eyes that smoldered. I felt like I should snap the magazine shut right away, but I kept it open, grateful for every private moment with this woman, trying to learn about those secret places with names I did not know.

 

Kelly K. Palka was born in Albany, NY and graduated from SUNY Oswego in 2005 with a Bachelor's in English. She graduated from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2007 with an MFA and currently works as a news writer for NTP Media Group.