Chapter 5 What to Keep

"What to keep and what to kill, that really is the question, isn't it?", Blue thought to himself as he looked through the stack of notes, sketches and rewrites from the early days of "Leer". The more he looked at everything, the less he wanted to kill any of it. Blue found himself marvelling at the sheer amount of time that he and John had put into "Leer" to no avail, bolstering his ambition to see the project through. He decided to include it all. His studio was already littered with every kind of art supply, collage element and "another man's treasure" one could imagine but Blue had become adept at finding everything just the way he had scattered it, out of necessity. It wasn't that Blue was messy so much as he was chaotically productive. When he spread the stack out on the floor, Blue began a sort of dance, leaping from notes to sketches, over to a large ink and colored pencil rendering on an over-sized topographical map and back again.

"I'm going to confuse the hell out of everyone who tries to read this", Blue said to himself as he landed with his legs splayed wide across a large drawing and a row of a half-dozen inked pages in succession. "Anybody who can't figure out the story can go back to reading "Archie"," Blue heard John snickering into his ear. He turned so suddenly that he nearly fell on the ice that Leer broke through over twenty years earlier. John was nowhere in sight, but Blue felt him there. If he found out that John was dead, it would have made sense to him. The paranormal evangelists would identify the chilling feeling as his dear friend's presence, possibly attempting to contact him from the great beyond. It wasn't that kind of chill. It was more like exhilaration, a palpable feeling of shared purpose, as if John were actually there, helping Blue to make the right decisions, nothing buried, nothing burned.