Giovanni walked toward the door, chuckling. “That didn’t seem to be her opinion, or at least, she wasn’t complaining.”

Caspar listened to his steps recede down the hallway and turned to Doyle. He looked into the cat’s thoughtful copper-colored eyes. “It doesn’t count if they can’t remember, Doyle.”

Doyle looked at Caspar critically, curled into a ball, and began purring on Giovanni’s pillow.

“Last week?” Caspar muttered as he left the room, turning out the lights behind him. “More like thirty years.”

Giovanni walked down the stairs, pausing to grab his car keys from a drawer in the kitchen before he walked into the dim light of the evening. Unwilling to waste the dark, he sped over surface streets, hoping to reach his destination before closing.

When he pulled the Mustang into the parking spot near the University of St. Thomas, he looked at the clock on the dashboard of his car. He only had fifteen minutes left before the chapel closed, so he strode across the green lawn and headed toward the octagonal brick building which housed Mark Rothko’s black canvases.

As he entered the deserted chapel he had not been able to visit in months, he nodded at the docent, bypassed the various books of worship near the door, and took a seat on one of the plain wooden benches. He quieted his mind and allowed his senses to reach outward as he stared at the seemingly static paintings that lined the white walls.

His skin prickled in awareness of the lone human by the door. He allowed himself to concentrate on the solid beat of the man’s heart as his ears filtered the myriad noises flowing in and around the small building.

Giovanni’s eyes rested on the black canvas in front of him. The longer he stared, the more the texture and subtle swirls of paint leapt out from its depths. No longer merely black, the paintings whirled and grew, taking on dimension never noticed by the casual observer.