Hope you'll look at this new story of mine. Here's an excerpt:

She brought him into her studio, the second bedroom in her large apartment. The windows looked down on Fort Washington Avenue and, as she showed him around, traffic noise came in from outside, chaotic rumblings to accompany the rambling mess of the studio. Declan had interviewed a number of artists for The Times, and none had had a working space as cluttered as Andrea’s. The studio was the very opposite of the rest of her apartment. Squashed tubes of paint, oils and temperas alike, about a hundred brushes piled up on the stand next to the empty easel. Newspapers, folded up towels, half-finished abstract canvases lined up against the walls two and three deep, color and abrupt decision everywhere in every one of them, and two smocks, each indistinguishable from the other, each looking like it had survived a terrible, bloody automobile crash or maybe a hard fought civil war.

She took up a large cleaned brush and held it between the index and middle fingers of her right hand, supported by her thumb. A grimace came to her lips. “I’m right-handed…” She held it up before her. The brush handle, spotted with every color of paint, seemed to Declan a kind of journal in which notes about Andrea’s art - maybe about her entire past, he mused – were kept. “So there’s pain whenever I hold the brush. In the fingers.” She daubed the palm of her left hand with the end of the brush. “They were broken once.”

“How?”

Andrea took the brush into her left hand, and surveyed its paint-mottled shaft. “I’d rather not tell you.”