Dreaming

[Pincushion]

“Paint me, darling.”

That’s what she declared, laid across the upholstered chaise longue that sunk in the middle of the gilded space; a room of waning wealth picked clean of all personality. Her frame had withered with age, yet she still possessed the pinprick echo of beauty. The angularity of her shoulders as she posed, the malnourished chin deigning to point upwards in a show of posturing - that's all that was left of her. Face as pale as the stolen teeth that glimmered between those red, overdrawn worms that flanked the top and bottom of her rows.

The artisan was scarcely a third of her age, and two thirds her height. She was placed in the middle of her dustless sanctum, a room fit for art and the discussion of little else. Gold paint was lathered like thick slime against the wall with no discretion of taste or subtlety.

“Ignore the cracks in the finery, dearest - pretend as if they weren’t there,” she said, the outer exuberance of wealth she emitted giving way to tragic vulnerability. He had only just begun unpacking his macabre tools of resurrection; his easel and brushes aligned just so along the chipped glass table he had been given to work on.

"You'll paint me fairly, won't you? I don't abide slander, written or not." the spinster stated again, this time with the venomous tone of cordial levity. Filling the air where he did not himself. She had expected instant flattery, he surmised.

‘A hand is only as fair as the coins placed in its palm’, is what the painter wished to say, allowing the glint of his own teeth to form itself into a cruel smile. Transfixed with his own works; the room, and the subject all disappearing from his attentions. He knew enough new money to know when to keep his mouth shut, so he did just that.

“You did the darling Raenia girl, didn’t you?” she spoke out, that crackled Cormyrean affection wearing the skin of upper-class living and none of the soul, the ruinations of the ravenous middle class leeching the inside of her throat.

“I did, madame,” he responded, the power of a question slicing through his silence earlier than intended. “Are you a friend of the family?”

“Heavens no, I simply can’t stand their meekness - though that girl of theirs has a beauty to her, don’t you think?”

He kept his green eyes on the easel as he spoke, pretending to modify the charcoal sketch he had etched of her a day before. She hadn’t been so talkative then, and thankfully so. A foul mood had overtaken her, with barely a few words exchanged to organise proper payment and scheduling. He was not privy to the reason, nor did he care to be.

“She is beautiful indeed, madame. A pleasure to paint her,” he responded, again. The widow had found which method of interrogation would garner her results.

“And is it a pleasure to paint me?” she reflexively replied, too quick to the mark. A sliver of irritation, poised chin dipping down to offer her wrinkled slits the full view.

The painter let his eyes drift back to her proper, no longer able to withdraw an excuse from his work. It was as if some miasma of foul sensations hit him at once, ferried on thoughts of revulsion - through his gaze, all the candles in the room had been snuffed out, colour dripping from the walls to reveal the bare, cold foundations. The brick of that woman’s face plagued him, delicate fingers snapping in a fit of infantile anger, concealed. She was hideous to him. A corpse made living.

'What is the point of beauty if it fades, and turns to dust? What is art but another juggling act, the preservation of the fleeting in a state of decay?'

“It’s always a pleasure, madame.” he smiled. Fixating on his easel yet again, and away from the rot. Brush in hand offering its first pigmented strokes. His eyes did not rise to meet hers during the three hours of toil. His sketch was enough.