Bruce Memblatt

   Bruce Memblatt lives in New York City. He studied Business Administration at Pace University. His interests are varied. He runs a website devoted to theatre composer Stephen Sondheim which he’s lovingly maintained since 1996. He believes that his love for words and theatre drew him toward writing.
   His short stories have appeared in such places as Aphellion, Jeani Rector’s The Horror Zine, SNM Horror Magazine, Intimate Windows, Demonic Tome, Freedom Fiction and The Piker Press. In 2010 look for his works in Pagan Imagination and The Feathertale Review(6) due in bookstores September 2010. 

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New Titles by Bruce Memblatt

Jennifer Greenly is a young artist in search of beauty. When she sketches her grandmother moments after her death her future and fortune change as everything she paints begins to die. 

                                                                                                     Excerpt

Word Count: 4800                            Pages to Print: 23
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Excerpts:

The Painter

     Jennifer Greenly was born in Boston in the winter of nineteen hundred seventy-four in the midst of a blizzard. She was the only baby born in a car on Washington Street that year. It was a tale she enjoyed recounting while she attended Harvard in the waning years of the twentieth century. That is where Jennifer fell in love with beauty.
    More precisely, that’s where she began to understand what it meant to paint with beauty. Jennifer grew into a petite woman with dark brown hair that fell straight, though it would occasionally frizz around the edges in summer. Her eyes were intense and black and contained a sense of clarity that caused uneasiness in some and admiration in others, but she often thought her best features were her hands when they held a brush against a blank canvas. That was the moment she cherished most. The instant before the creation began, when anything was possible.
    One morning while studying the pale bricks that lined the walls of the buildings of Harvard she caught the sun hitting the reddish tones of their surfaces at a curious angle. The shift in light caused her to study the delicate change between the edges of colors as they merged, more intently than she ever had before.
    Jennifer would later refer to that morning as “the morning of her true birth.” The moment she realized beauty wasn’t creating a picture-perfect copy like a photo, but rather capturing change. That realization was the instant her search began to construct beauty.

    All her work up to that point, while pretty and accurate, was empty.

    Later that semester one afternoon in the library while reaching for a book her hand slipped. The book fell onto an unsuspecting man’s head. It was the luckiest slip of her life because it was how she met Paul. Paul was a law student and she knew the love of her life when he began to laugh as the paperback hit his head. They had dinner that night at a small café across the campus. Paul saw something in Jenifer he’d never seen in any other woman. The best way he could describe his discovery; a mixture of sophistication and wonder. Jennifer was as smart as any girl he’d met and she was hardly naïve, yet there was a sense of wonder and innocence about her that made him feel alive. She became his rose colored glasses. He saw the world new when he was with her. Even the moments when she became lost in her work, sometimes very intense and dark, were moments he found himself caught in her spell. That first night at dinner they knew things were heading fast but they also knew they would spend their lives together. After Paul left her dorm room the next morning she gazed at the ceiling for hours dreaming about her future; Paul and art. How lucky she felt that spring day.
    Paul would be graduating that June. He’d been recruited by a law firm in midtown Manhattan and would be moving to New York in the summer. Jennifer still had one more year to go. They’d have to manage catching weekends here and there til they were both settled, but they could swing it knowing their future was secured. Later that same summer Jennifer received word her grandmother was ill. She left Boston in July of nineteen ninety-seven on a train bound for New York.

    An old rattan chair sat to the left of Audra Greenly’s bed, which Audra picked up in small shop down in Soho one winter morning, when her feet were sturdier and her hands were steady. Jennifer would refer to it as “the chair my grandmother seized from the ashes,” because of the tiny char marks that smudged the legs of the chair.
    “Jennifer, I think you love that chair even more than I,” Audra said removing a tissue from the box next to her bed. Audra was a small woman of slight build whose eyes held a charm that in another time would have been best described as “royal”.
    “You know it’s not just a chair, Grandmother. It tells a story,” Jennifer said as she turned her hands toward the window, “not just one story but many. Remember, Grandmother, when I was little? We used to take turns making up tales about how the burns got on the chair?”
    “Of course I remember, Jen; it drove your mother crazy. How we laughed through the night while she would try to fall asleep, Audra sighed, wishing she could go back.” She thought I was corrupting your mind. Of course you would become an artist and prove her right!” She felt a tickle in her throat.
    “Do you remember the one where the chair was rescued from a troll who set it ablaze to ward off a caravan of gypsies?”
    “They weren’t ordinary Gypsies. They were carrying the secret of life in their satchels!” Audra cried fighting a laugh that would cause pain if released, “ah, the secret of life. I could use that now.”
    “Oh, Grandmother, don’t be maudlin.”
    “Jennifer, are you working on a new piece?” Audra asked holding a tall glass of water to her lips.
    “As a matter of fact, yes; but I’m not certain of the composition at this point. I find that the hardest part; finding the idea that ignites the rest of the piece. Once I know where the piece is headed it’s just a matter of strokes. Although, I’m still awfully frustrated by my work, ” she puffed, gazing at the ceiling as if an answer would fall from above, “It's getting there, but it’s not beautiful yet. My work still lacks that extra something; depth," she sighed. “The thing that moves you to the ethereal—like when you gaze at a Rembrandt you don’t just see the figures, you see into their souls. That’s what I long to create; work that inspires something sad and beautiful” She paused. “Grandmother?” Jennifer’s eyes looked toward Audra, She appeared to be sleeping, but there was no sound. No sign of breath. “Oh, Grandmother.”
    Jennifer gazed at Audra while she lay silently on the bed. She’d never witnessed death up close before. The loss she felt at that moment, indefinable as her eyes moved slowly across the stillness on Audra’s face. She reached for words, but only two came to mind. She kissed Audra softly on her forehead and whispered, “Goodbye, Grandmother.”
    All the years she found comfort in her grandmother’s eyes . . . This woman was the one who understood her best, more than anyone; more than her own mother or father, or even Paul.
    It must have been hours she sat there, but she was in no hurry. This day was the last day she would spend with her grandmother. As naturally as anything she’d done before, down to the slightest gesture of her hand, she reached for her sketchpad beneath their chair and began to draw.     Back to The Painter