Khalilah Draws a Blank

     Khalilah Shams stood in her studio, surrounded by various half-started paintings, maquettes, and scattered supplies. It was situated on the second floor of her home, the same home her family had occupied for several hundred years. On her desk was a message from the queen, requesting her presence at the inaugural Qasala Biennial, which was being held to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of both the end of the curse and the royal marriage between Jazan and Nabile.

     The royal seal in her mail had initially sent Khalilah hurtling backwards to the floor, given her family’s track record with the royal family. It took her a few hours to accept that the letter was benign.

     Khalilah, a Blue Kyrii, was one of Qasala's most prolific and versatile artists, and, in the eighteen years since the end of the curse on Qasala, had participated in biennials and shown work all around Neopia. It was only natural, then, that she should be invited to participate in Qasala’s first-ever Biennial Contemporary Art exhibition.

     Khalilah was not the first artist in her family; her great-grandmother had created the mosaic that surrounded the front door of their home (Khalilah and her mother had painstakingly repaired it following the breaking of the curse), and her father, a Brown Gnorbu named Nasser, had been a calligrapher and painter. Her maternal aunt was a celebrated poet; her cousin a dancer.

     “I knew he would be trouble,” she remembered her father saying of Razul when he promoted himself to Emperor. “He’s been targeting his own family ever since he came into power, you know.” Still, he refused to flee.

     “All the artists and intellectuals leaving is exactly what tyrants like him want,” he said to her. “What will become of Qasala then?”

     Nasser was not a blabbermouth. He knew when to keep his mouth shut. But Razul, they soon learned, had ears everywhere. Nasser was arrested, and–Khalilah stopped her train of thought. It was no use dwelling on the things she could not change.

     "Do not let bitterness taint your heart," her mother, a Moehog named Ayda, had warned her.

     “I know, ama,” Khalilah said aloud to her studio. “I’m trying.”

     Besides, the issue was considered resolved. A piece she made about the events, garments covered in the smear campaign against her father written by hand in his calligraphic style, had prompted, of all things, an official public apology from the Crown. King Jazan read off a speech that Khalilah suspected had been written by his wife, and despite her best efforts, she had wept at the ceremony. Queen Nabile took her hand and dried her tears with a handkerchief that she insisted Khalilah keep.

     If she weren't such a nice girl, she thought, It would make it much easier to resent her. Of course, being a key figure in Qasala’s freedom also made it difficult to resent Nabile. But being part of the Royal family did not exactly endear her to Khalilah, either.

     As far as Ayda was concerned, however, that was the end of it. And though Khalilah was a rebellious artist, she was not a rebellious daughter. Her parents had not given her reason to be.

     “Do not forget,” Ayda told her. “Jazan was a victim of Razul, too.”

     Khalilah knew that; she shuddered to think of how the king must have lived as a young prince under his father's thumb. The thought alone made her grateful for her own gentle parents.

     “Would it be too mean to submit Smear Campaign to the biennial?” Khalilah asked her Mauket, Teshub. He yawned in response. “Yes, it would, I know. I would rather turn in something new, anyhow. But when was the last time I made anything good?” She swept her hands outward at the mess occupying her studio. Teshub stretched and curled up to sleep.

     “Whatever,” she said. She wrapped a scarf loosely around her head and shoulders and headed out. As she stepped out the front door, Khalilah paused to admire the mosaic that bordered it. On either side of the door was a palm tree, and above it was a pattern of pomegranates, Queela and Qando fruits and their respective flowers. She was proud of her and her mother’s restoration work on it.

     In front of the house had once been a garden where her father grew jasmine, roses, narcissus, lilies, oleander… Khalilah tried not to think of his arrest. She tried not to think of the garden that was destroyed by Razul’s troops in the process. She and her mother never re-planted it.

     Khalilah walked into Mystical Surroundings, the shop of her friend and fellow artist, Garrett. A bell above the door jingled as she entered, and a call of “Just a second!” came from the back room.

     "Oh, hello, Auntie!" Garrett said as he entered. He pulled a pair of paint-stained gloves off his hands. He always called her “auntie” though they were peers and, as far as Khalilah was concerned, not that different in age.

     (“I think you’re about two centuries older than I am,” he had said with a smile.

     “Yes, but only technically,” she replied.)

     “Garrett,” she said and clapped her hands together. “Let us get coffee.” Garrett laughed.

     “Alright, let me wash up real quick,” he said and ran back into his back room, where he had a large sink. Khalilah waited patiently for him, glancing around the shop at his various paintings. In the front gallery space, he had an easel set up with a work in progress. Garrett never minded people watching while he painted. When he returned, he was wearing a pair of sunglasses. A wise choice, but Khalilah opted, like most Qasalans, for Kohl instead. He turned the sign in the door to “Closed,” and then locked it, although in Qasala, that was not usually necessary.

     In the art world, Khalilah had a reputation, perhaps somewhat deserved, for being a grouch. Her friends would point out the permanent divot in her brow and call it evidence of her constant frowning.

     “That’s another thing you and King Jazan have in common,” they would say, and then she really would frown.

     Garrett was perhaps one of the only Neopets who did not view her as a joyless crank. At the very least, he didn’t treat her like one, which was good enough for Khalilah.

     He ordered a black coffee for her and an iced coffee with a splash of cream for himself.

     “So,” she started as they waited for their drinks. “Do you know what you are submitting to the biennial?”

     “Yeah!” Garrett was already doodling in a little sketchbook he carried with him everywhere. “I was planning on submitting two of my old pieces–probably Lost Desert Silhouette and Temple of 1000 Tombs Interior–plus one new one.” Khalilah hummed thoughtfully.

     “That is good,” she said. Someone else might have read her flat tone as sarcastic, but she trusted Garrett knew her well enough to know it was sincere.

     “What were you thinking of doing?” he asked carefully.

     “Not a clue,” she admitted, tossing up her hands. Garrett stood up to fetch their coffees from the counter and hurried back.

     “Well, what sort of work do you want to make right now?” he asked, stirring his coffee with the straw. He set aside his pen and sketchbook.

     “I don’t know,” Khalilah said, picking up her cup but not taking a sip. “I haven’t been making anything lately. Nothing that I like or want to finish, anyway.”

     Khalilah had trained, originally, under her father, and been a rather conventional painter working primarily for wealthy patrons up until the curse. After the curse was broken, she was exposed to a wildly different art world, and decided to take her work in a different direction. In the last eighteen years, she became a far more conceptual artist, often referred to in art publications as a leader in the contemporary avant-garde scene.

     “I love your work, Garrett. I wish I could do the type of work you do,” she said. “No one wants paintings from me anymore.”

     “All the more reason to do them, if you ask me,” Garrett said with a smile.

     “I’ve tried,” Khalilah sighed. “I can’t do it. Nothing works.”

     “You sound like you might be burned out, Auntie,” he said, looking more serious now. “Maybe you should forget about art for right now. Do something else entirely.”

     “How can I forget about art when I have lived and breathed it all my life?” Khalilah asked. Garrett shrugged, knowing she wasn’t really expecting an answer. “All I know is that I don’t want to make work about pain and suffering anymore. I feel like that’s all I do. My entire body of work is made up of a series of personal and national tragedies.”

     “I don’t think that’s true,” Garrett said. “What about your Qasalan Night Market series?”

     The series was one of long exposure photographs made, as the title suggested, at Qasala’s night market, and were some of Khalilah’s most popular pieces. They were hailed for their vibrant colours, and the captured sense of bustle in the market. Really, it wouldn’t make a bad submission for the biennial. But who in Qasala, if not all of Neopia, hadn’t seen at least one Qasalan Night Market photo?

     “Perhaps,” she said. “Perhaps I should ‘skip town,’ as they say.” Garrett laughed.

     “In all seriousness,” he said. “It might be good for you to just take a break from making art and get away for a while. That’s what I do when I’m feeling uninspired. Pack up and leave!”

     Perhaps she would. The Crown and the Biennial Committee could wait.

     When the curse on Qasala broke eighteen years prior, Khalilah had been thirty-one (and she had been thirty-one for more than two hundred years). Now she found herself middle-aged. Her dark blue mane was a distinguished grey at her temples. The friendly lines that surrounded her father’s eyes were now hers, although most Neopets were unlikely to accuse her of looking friendly. She had visited corners of Neopia she could never have imagined in her youth, though she rarely had time to enjoy where she was. Usually, she was too busy with setting up exhibits, talking to people she knew or didn’t know or half-remembered at gallery openings, and hardly left a five-kilometre radius before going home.

     As she wandered through cities she had visited but never really seen, Khalilah found herself paying the most attention to two things: the food, and the flora. She toured the farms of Meridell and thanked them graciously for their humble potatoes, stale bread and gruel. She hiked the forests surrounding Brightvale and sampled jams of the curious local berries. She dozed beneath flowering trees in Faerieland, and though she loved Faerie City’s architecture, Khalilah always found Faerie food to be far too sweet. She was loath to admit this, though; to insult food, especially as a guest, was simply not done.

     On Mystery Island, she watched a group of teenagers as one shimmed up a palm tree and tossed down coconuts to their friends below. On the shore there and on Krawk Island, she gathered seaweed and laid them out by type. Local children helped out, and they created a considerable taxonomy.

     Everywhere she travelled, Khalilah observed the way Neopets interacted with the plant life around them. She thought about her father’s garden, the night market, the thousand-year-old olive tree in her neighbour’s yard.

     What a beautiful world she lived in. What kind strangers she found everywhere.

     Khalilah knew what she wanted to do.

     Back in her studio, Khalilah furiously scribbled out a rough sketch of her plans. She wrote up a list, crossed out points, wrote them back in, threw the list out and started all over. She wrote up her proposal, and sketched out her idea more formally.

     “What do you think?” Khalilah asked as Queen Nabile pored over her proposal. The queen looked up with a smile.

     “I love it,” she said.

     Khalilah spent the next two years splitting her time between her studio and a vacant lot behind the Qasalan National Gallery. Running the length of the lot was a long, narrow in-ground fountain that had been half-completed, and never used. This would be the centrepiece.

     She cleaned up litter that had accumulated over the years, tilling the soil and pulling up weeds. Khalilah knew well that the Lost Desert was not the barren wasteland many Neopians took it for. However, since the end of the curse, Qasala’s plant life had struggled a bit compared to before. She wanted to plant her garden from seeds, but it would be more difficult. Would her garden have the same meaning if all the plants were transplanted from a garden centre? How had the flowers in her father's garden been planted? It was impossible to say. So she grew little seeds in egg cartons on her kitchen windowsill and browsed greenhouses and garden centres around Neopia for plants that would be likely to thrive in Qasala’s sandy soil. Assistants she hired to aid in the construction of her garden did the same.

     In her studio, Khalilah gathered materials and drew up patterns for the garden's tile walkways. This would be a while; she wished she had more time to prepare before handing her plans off to the tile cutters. Getting the fountain running might be troublesome, too. Someone was always coming up to her with some new problem, from paperwork issues from the city waterworks to receiving the wrong colour tile. It was infuriating and invigorating.

     She was so consumed with the thrill of finally having work she wanted to make that she completely forgot about her fiftieth birthday until Garrett showed up at her house with some friends and a honey cake.

     Her fifty-first came a week before the Biennial's opening. Lining the garden were date palms, pomegranate and olive trees, providing critical shade to the garden. The fountain would begin running on the day of the Biennial’s opening, and the tile walkway featured floral and geometric designs reminiscent of the mosaic on her family home. Surrounding Khalilah were roses, jasmine, hibiscus, hyacinth and oleander, and the national fruits of Qasala, Qando and Queela. Ideally, the fruits would be free for visitors to pick and take home with them.

     Some of her plants, though, were looking a little worse for wear and she hoped they didn’t wither in the sun before the opening. After all the work she and her numerous assistants put in, it would be terribly embarrassing if her garden simply died before the event it was put together for started.

     “If you die, I can never show my face in public again,” she said aloud to the flowers. “I hope you know that. I’m counting on you.”

     Khalilah lay down on a bench in a small pavilion opposite the National Gallery and closed her eyes. She was looking forward to a well-earned holiday after this. Next time, she would simply submit an old piece and call it a day. Still, it was nice to create something.

     She felt a tiny splash on her nose. Khalilah opened her eyes. The skies above her were grey, and all around her came a plip, plip, plip. Rain! Khalilah laughed and ran out into it, standing among the flowers with her arms outstretched.

     “Ama! Abba!” she cried to the sky as the rain started to fall in heavy sheets. “I love you!”