[Creative Nonfiction] Slip Through
Read the third place entry for our June 2026 contest, Creative Side Quests.
Slip Through
by Nicole Barnes
It’s a sunny June morning when Vazquez creates my portrait. I hear him whooping to himself when I step out for coffee. I turn toward him and smile, default mode, then feel a twinge of fear when he seeks to engage me. My inner voice instantly says, “He’ll ask for something I don’t want to give.” But I secure my flip flops to the sidewalk, relax my body.
“I’m Vazquez. I painted this last year.” He gestures at the wall of the abandoned corner store, covered with pastels and a messy-beautiful urban skyline. I say I love when desolation becomes art. He asks if I want to keep my book, the Fall 2025 issue of Riverteeth, and reaches out his hand.
I give it to him, open to the event. Vazquez puts on headphones and slides into a beat only he hears. He crouches on the sidewalk and twirls his blue Sharpie, swings his head to an inaudible rhythm, rises and twists, crouches again. The muse arrives and he dashes the first wild lines of blue on white, haphazard and illogical. His eyes are closed, turned away, then open and piercing into me. The shape of my face starts to lift off the page. He adds light green, sad eyes, and a flatline mouth though I am smiling at him. His raven eyes see my inner sadness, the sour I carry in my gut.
I have a video recording of him. I had asked and he was keen, so I reached for a thin representation of Vazquez performing the art of which he repeatedly said, “I don’t know how I do it,” caught the furiously fast pixels while a car drove by playing a lit beat that I imagine merged with the music in his headphones and for a moment, we three - Vazquez the street artist, Nicole the writer, and the unknown driver - were connected by music.
He says think of a number and keep it secret.
“Four.”
“I was thinking seven,” I tell him, smug inside. Derision arises unbidden.
“Okay. What’s your favorite number?”
“Thirteen.” My brother’s birthday.
“How many children do you have?” He doesn’t ask whether.
“One.”
“You lose one?”
“No,” then, “Well, we wanted to adopt a second child, but it didn’t work out.” I think but don’t tell him about the baby who could have would have been Jasper, little brother to Amos Thacher.
“So, seven plus four plus two.” He turns his handsome face toward me.
I smile, still smug. His magical numbers game is a cheap trick a drunk guy uses to get in your panties. It is far, far too easy to be seduced into believing that my professorial thoughts are truer than the thoughts of a swill-swigging graffiti artist.
“I don’t know how I do that. I don’t know how I know it.” He has folded his impossibly long legs into a graceful crouch. His silk smock that overflows with pale yellow paisley kisses his cherry red sneakers.
Vazquez bequeaths his art to me with a hug and a soul torn open. His mother is gone and the grief breaks him but her energy on the wind sutures him back together. “I feel you, but I can’t see you, Mama.” Like millions of alcoholics before him, he admits as he sips on the eighty-proof in his black sport bottle, “I’m not an alcoholic, I just drink a lot. I don’t need it, my body needs it.” I understand, I say, my father celebrates fifty-one years of sobriety next week, and being human is hard. He laughs and says, “You can’t say that to everyone,” and doesn’t need to explain that’s because most people are afraid to acknowledge their suffering for what it is: a song from our ancestors and descendants, reminding us that to be wholly human is to Be With.
He asks for my phone number and starts the path of future possibilities with two squiggles in neon pink on the back of a lottery ticket. They form N - I - and I, who have not told him my name, write the C - O - L - E and my number. I think of Allan Levi’s Theo of Golden who enlivened a whole community with the gift of his presence. Strangers became friends became family, and Theo’s boundless love filled his own heart because he gave it away. I think too of the scene in Kung Fu Panda where Master Wugui (which means Tortoise) tells Po, when he’s certain he is not the Dragon Warrior, “Quit. Don’t quit. Noodles. Don’t noodles. You are too concerned with what was and what will be. There is a saying, ‘Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called The Present’.”
I allow my time with Vazquez to be a gift, to both of us. We hug and a vibrancy hums in his thin, malnourished body that stumbles in the morning sun. He says he will call me and make me his teacher and again I feel that tug of defensive retreat. “I’m too busy. I don’t have time for this. I don’t have time for you.” But time can always hold the important things. This is what I thirst for, not a calendar overflowing with candy colored slices of obligations and predictable outcomes, but the serendipitous gifts that our broken and bruised world continuously presents, if only I dare slip my hungry body through the slit in space-time’s fabric and enter the unexpected.
We walk to where corporate hotels and gleaming businesses squat like greedy stone giants. Vazquez gestures to the granite thiefs and says, “This is not real. We are real.” He blows me a kiss and walks away.
When I return to the color-splashed wall, alone with my coffee, I see what Vazquez had written on it in bright blue marker just before I came out: When was the last time you did something for the first time?
About Nicole Barnes
Nicole Elizabeth Barnes is an Associate Professor of Chinese history at Duke University with many academic publications (you can download the open access edition of her first book here). She is writing her first novel, a historical fiction about a Chinese medicine doctor and his partner in eastern Oregon.
This piece was written in response to the theme Creative Side Quests.