She doesn't always remember painting them.

The premise

The Residue: What Sleep Leaves Behind follows Emily Sombrook whose canvases begin filling in on their own, each one surfacing a piece of a small town's history that no one has spoken of in decades. The paintings are accurate. That's the problem.

The story moves just like a painting, patient in places, sudden in others, more interested in what a scene reveals than in explaining it outright.

About the author

Willa Ellie Maestro paints in her sleep.

Not metaphorically. She has woken up more than once to find a canvas finished that she has no memory of touching, the paint still wet, the image already whole. This unsettled her long before it interested her. She trained as a painter in her twenties at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, a standalone public arts conservatory where she was able to live and breathe her craft, studying under teachers who cared about discipline more than talent. She spent most of two decades doing the unglamorous, steady work of a working painter. Portraits. Landscapes. Commissions for people who wanted a likeness or a memory captured honestly. It was a good life, and a quiet one, and she never expected it to become anything else.

Then she lost family during the pandemic, suddenly and without the kind of ending grief is supposed to have. No cause to point to. No moment where it made sense. Just the aftermath, sitting there, refusing to resolve. Something in her practice changed after that. The paintings got stranger. Faces she hadn't intended. Places she didn't recognize but somehow knew. She started writing because the paintings weren't saying enough on their own, and because putting words around an image was the only way she knew to ask it what it wanted.

She never trained as a writer, and it shows in a way she considers a strength. Her prose moves the way her painting does, patient in places, sudden in others, more interested in what a scene reveals than in explaining it outright. Her fiction starts where most people stop looking. A small town buries a disaster so completely that three generations grow up never hearing the word for it. A sleep drug meant to quiet the mind instead cracks it open, and the town's oldest secret starts leaking into people who never agreed to carry it. A painter keeps finding her own handwriting on canvases she swears she never touched.

Willa's characters are never the ones sent to investigate. They're the ones standing too close when the truth decides to surface anyway, an insomniac, an outsider, someone whose hands know something before their mind catches up. That's who she has always written, because it's closest to how she experiences her own work.

She still paints. She still doesn't always remember doing it. She says the canvases usually finish the sentence before she does.