"We need to get rollers for the ceiling," Miri says. She's devoted. She's up all night watching videos of the street art scene in the Bay area. She's been coming home on weekends to help me tag. Liam said he would help more too now that the summer's almost over. We need to get it as close to done as possible before then if we're ever going to show it to anyone.
Not that I don't want to do that, I do, but months of working on this place has made me so attached to it. I've sort of been living at Liam's place all summer, but it's hard to feel completely comfortable even using the kitchen there. It's not really my house, so I don't want to just stay there all day. It's hot out, and New Jersey is just so empty, so I come here.
Liam and I brought a milk crate full of extra spray-paint a few days ago and left it there. The floor is almost entirely connected now too; there's a faun drinking coffee that leads to a pile of skulls with button-eyes that leads to a brontosaurus and so on. The right-hand wall when you enter the Wishing Well is all plate glass windows covered by brown paper, but it lets in enough sunlight where its all torn up at the bottom to splay across the floor nicely.
Recently we've been all starting as far away from each other as possible. Liam will be near the counter at the far end, I'll start in the doorway, Miri will be over against the left wall, and we'll all work our way to the middle, where the half-fish/half-frog tag is. Today we're putting harpies on the walls and painting "THE WISHING WELL" across the far wall so you see it when you come in.
Miri looks at some of the shelves. They left a lot of them, but there's not much on them other than empty picture frames, some tablecloths, and lots of ceramic shards. Still, Miri comes around the corner from one of the shelves with a small glass vase. It's got a wreath of yellow flowers printed on it.
"This was on the bottom over there," she says. "It's like something from my grandparents' house."
"That's weird," I say.
"Yeah. I want to look around in the back rooms more today."
"Maybe you'll find some of those cross stitchings of farm houses that old people like," I say.
"Yeah, or maybe there's a cookbook by Mother Goose lying around," Miri says.
