It was cold—so cold that it made my bones ache from the inside out. I jumped back, then steeled myself and walked into the cold. I wanted to know how it felt, to be fully frozen and surrounded. My legs dragged back against the current, but I pressed on, gasping when it touched the back of my knees. I made it all the way up, past my waist, the ground silty and slippery beneath my feet, and then—I pinched my nose and dropped under.

The cold was a wallop to the chest, but it was tolerable. I dropped to the bottom and opened my eyes. Beneath the surface, the water wasn’t black but red—pure Red Oxide, the color of iron—and it was dotted, quite beautifully, with little green caterpillars of algae whose fine fibers swung gently to and fro. I popped up, into the sun, considered swimming farther, into the deep—where there was nothing to hold on to. Yet the mere act of thinking about the open water made me step back involuntarily toward the shore.

It was impossible for someone to drown themselves here. It was too cold. It was too scary. I thought about all those pictures of the beach covered with people, feather-haired, mud cracking on their skin. Maybe in a crowd, it could be fun—lighthearted.

But not alone.

Alone, it was big as the ocean.

I returned to my bungalow to change into clean clothes and slam coffee—the beginnings of a routine. Rusty water streamed from my clothes the whole walk, turning my hair into wet ropes. Outside my porch, I paused, twisted the ends together, and squeezed out most of the water—and as it drained through my fists and into the sand, I had an idea.

Oil paint likes structure. Jay DeFeo, whose oil paintings weighed hundreds of pounds, was famous for using rope—rope like the wet ropes of my hair—to support the massive piles of paint. I didn’t have time to learn how different ropes would behave, but I knew how raw wood acted. Raw wood drank oil.

In the studio I took two fresh pieces of plywood and carved holes, making organic, honeycomb-patterned lattices that roughly followed the contours of how Prudence had once looked, then secured the lattices flat atop the new backings. Prudence would be at least an inch thick above the substrate when she was complete, and this raw wood latticework interior would soak up much of the oil, hastening the drying time by months. I hoped that when covered the lattice would look and weigh much the same as actual oil paint would have. It wasn’t a textbook solution, but it was something, and buoyed by the optimism of my own fresh ingenuity, I unscrewed fresh jars of powdered color and took out a clean palette knife.