With no one to sit for him, he painted himself. Over one hundred portraits in the bathroom mirror, all with the expression he wore the day she left him. He tried the hall mirror beside the window. The light changed, but his expression remained the same. He saw himself in a copper pitcher, distorted, but not so different. He kicked a pail of rainwater and his face rippled. He painted his rippled face. Soon, he found he did not need a reflective surface. His face appeared in a windswept field of grass. In the clouds. In the vast, empty sky.

Daniel Coshnear is author of Jobs & Other Preoccupations (Helicon Nine 2001) winner of the Willa Cather Fiction Award and Occupy & Other Love Stories (Kelly’s Cove Press 2012) and winner of the Novella Prize for Homesick, Redux (Flock 2015), recipient of a Missouri Review Editor’s Prize and a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship. His newest story collection, Separation Anxiety was released in 10/21 by Unsolicited Press.