Excerpt from Untitled a novel in progress
Mia McKenzie

It was the artist in Ava that Helena had first loved. Everything else--the friend, the lover, the forever--would come after. That morning, when she had first seen Ava standing at the canvas, holding a paint palette, its surface vibrating with blobs of blue and white and deep orange, her thumb crooked easily through the thumbhole, her fingertips gentle and loving underneath, Helena knew. This woman she had barely noticed before, this quiet wife of her only brother's, who had stood at the empty canvas that dawn as if beholding heaven, her whole body poised for a birth, a coming forth, her shoulders undone, the heel of her right foot arched up from the wood floor in a kind of almost-motion, pushing and not-pushing her being into the canvas. That hunger for color and crumbly paint-smell, that craving that Helena knew so well, was bright in Ava's heavy-lidded eyes. She had painted two women she could see through the open window beside Helena's easel, sitting on a porch across the street. It was a haphazard little painting, but one overflowing with quiet joy, funny and tender and smart. As Ava had stood back from it, appraisingly, her head tilted to one side, Helena thought that she had never seen such a lovely woman, and noticed for the first time, later, in the kitchen, the way her hips moved as she stirred the grits.