Shelbourne & Mattingly: Part 3
Part 3: The Studio
Welcome back to Rockland Springs, where art and bourbon flow from the same well of memory. In a paint-splattered studio on the third floor of the purple Victorian, Seth creates beauty from darkness while Erie guards their shared history like rare bourbon aging in rickhouse shadows. Some stories are best told with oil paint and bourbon, in fiddle songs that drift through floorboards and childhood memories that refuse to fade.
Part 3 of Shelbourne & Mattingly invites you into the private spaces where truth lives—in quiet moments between old friends who've shared every reckless dare and tender secret.
Pour yourself something from Warehouse Eight (we won’t tell), and settle in as the story continues to unfold...
December 21, 1992
THE STUDIO
The purple Victorian housed a warren of artists’ studios. I climbed three creaky flights up, and there was Seth, barefoot, perched on a wooden stool. His red wool hat and white high tops lay discarded by the door. Mason jars on the windowsill collected rain, their glass stained with rings of dried paint water. The metal radiator clanked uselessly, but Seth seemed oblivious to the cold.
“Third floor’s killing you today, Shelbourne.” He smiled without turning.
“Just add these rickety stairs to my list of mortal enemies,” I said, trying to catch my breath. He’d been working in this studio since summer, moving back to Rockland Springs after art school. Though he’d settled back into his parents’ sprawling Gothic Revival home, he claimed he needed his own space to create. The attic space felt carved from the building’s bones—exposed beams crossed the pitched ceiling, peeling wallpaper clung to the slanted walls, hardwood floors wore more paint than wood. But north light streamed through tall windows, and it was his.
I tried not to think about his lungs and these stairs.
I stood behind him, close enough to smell linseed oil and something medicinal, but also that warm, comfortable scent that was purely Seth. Paint tubes lay crushed and curled beside razor blades and turpentine-soaked rags. His canvas dominated the wooden easel, with so many layers of color I felt like I was drowning in it. Beneath the cobalt and crimson, a Civil War soldier patiently waited to be revealed.
“Your collectors are going to fight over this one,” I said, finding my voice. “Almost finished?”
“Yep. We can drop it off Thursday after my scan.” He gestured at the canvas. “It’s pretty, right?”
These paintings had started with our late-night raids of the Kentucky Heritage Museum archives. My part-time job had its perks—I’d smuggled him into the archives after hours, watching him handle each photograph like it held secrets only he could see. White gloves, curator’s loupe, that same focus he brought to everything. Together we’d take pictures of his chosen images—often the ones too damaged to display—and I’d return the originals to their folders, no one the wiser.
The Louisville gallery sold his paintings as fast as he could paint them. At twenty-three, he was already making the kind of art that made people uncomfortable in exactly the right way.
He didn’t like me to watch him paint, so I sat cross-legged on the scratched and splattered wood floor, novel in hand, still in my navy-blue puffer coat with rainbow stripes across the chest. I read the same page for twenty minutes, lost in pretending Seth was a perfectly healthy man in an indigo wool sweater.
I heard a brush clatter to the floor. He flexed his hand, bent to retrieve the brush, and set it on his palette with a sigh. From his backpack, he pulled out a pint of small batch bourbon.
“Don’t tell my oncologist.” He lifted the bottle and drank, then held it out to me. “Though between their chemo cocktails and whatever our dads are hiding in Warehouse Eight, my money’s on the family cure.” He grinned. “Close your eyes.”
It was an old game. I obeyed, breathing in deeply. “Hmm. I’m picking up hints of dinosaur skin, a rusty tractor wheel and...toothpaste.”
I took a sip. The bourbon hit my tongue with that telltale Warehouse Eight magic. Our fathers might be mad scientists, but even their mistakes were beautiful.
“You’re dead wrong, as usual,” Seth said, consulting the label. “‘Vanilla, teased with butterscotch, underscored with notes of rich cocoa and caramel.’”
“Is that batch for children? Sounds like a pornographic milkshake.”
“Says the girl who dared me to steal a pint at the ripe old age of ten.”
“Ah, yes—The Snowstorm of 1980.” I hugged my knees to my chest, grinning at the memory. “We hid behind the springhouse, and I made you a bourbon snow cone. With my mittens.”
“And I puked.”
“My mixology skills were still developing.”
“Plus, Trestle Ridge and dirty snow is just...wrong."
“You should have listened when I offered to pre-taste it for quality control.”
He laughed. “That was a special day, Shelbourne. Two fourth-grade miscreants sticking it to the man.”
“Now look at us. Rebels without a curfew.”
“Speak for yourself. I’ve got a strict lights-out at eight PM.”
The scratch of the razor blade against canvas filled the quiet studio. I tried to read, but couldn’t focus on the words. Every time I looked up, I noticed something else that had changed. Seth’s chestnut hair had lost its sheen to chemotherapy. Veins branched like river maps under the translucent skin of his hands. Paint stained his black sweatpants in patches of purple and blue, matching the bruise that I tried not to notice on his bare foot. Even his cheekbones—the ones I used to tease him about in our yearbook photos, when he looked like he belonged in cologne advertisements—looked too sharp now, tight under dry winter skin and stubble. But his sea blue eyes were the same, seeing what the rest of us missed.
As he scraped away another layer of paint, I caught a glimpse of the dead soldier beneath the colors. He lay curled on his side, one arm tucked behind his head like a boy sleeping in the grass. The paint around him glowed like early morning light. Only Seth could make something so terrible look so gentle.
In the studio below us, Ollie Branch played Civil War tunes on his fiddle. He had a job performing at the museum, his period costume and long beard transporting tourists 130 years into the past. “Tenting on the Old Camp Ground” wound through the floorboards—a mournful tune about soldiers waiting in winter camps.
We’ve been fighting to-day on the old camp ground,
Many are lying near;
Some are dead and some are dying,
Many are in tears.
The melody crept under my skin, awakening every cell in my body. The book slipped from my hands as something inside me surrendered to a tenderness so fierce it felt like bliss. Seth is dying. How dare I feel this? But the truth poured through me with the fiddle’s next note: he was here, vibrantly alive, painting his truth into existence. This brilliant, impossible, barefoot goofball, refusing to stop living even now.
Silence fell. The song had ended. When I finally looked up, still caught in that suspended moment, I found Seth watching me. He’d set aside his paints to sketch me instead.
“I like that coat, Shelbourne.” He closed his sketchbook. “Take me home.”
TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 4: HIS HOME
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