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His Lover's Portrait
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His Lover's Portrait |
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Anvrill Senior Member
since 2002-06-21
Posts 710in the interzone now 
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For days now, Edgar hadn’t set foot outside his small studio-apartment. He had been unable to leave, knowing an unfinished project would be waiting for him, staring at him in spaces of blank canvas when he got home. Not able to take the frustration, he had devoted his time to staying awake, putting brush to canvas, streaking and daubing a surreal nightmare that wouldn’t let him go. Like any morbid artist his age, he was living alone in the cheapest bachelor’s apartment he could find, all the walls painted black, with just enough lamps to light his work by. His kitchen had been turned into a dark room over the past year. This meant that there was no food in the apartment, but he barely ever ate anyway. From time to time, when he knew he had to or he’d pass out, he would run to the nearest fast food joint. Sometimes, though less often, his latest lover would bring him a meal. Alsatia (he had never asked if that was her real name) never ate. His very first suspicion of her was that she was a heroin addict, but that idea had been dashed when she spoke to him the first time. Her voice was as clear as her eyes, and she somehow knew how to look straight into his mind. Within an hour of the first time they shared his bed, she had claimed to be a vampire. Of course, it was a claim all of his lovers before her had made. They had all assumed it would turn on a brooding, semi-suicidal artist enough for him to actually keep them around. It was a cheap trick, and usually sealed the fate of his relationships. But there had been something different in the way she held herself when she said it; just enough of a difference that he didn’t immediately tell her to screw off. She had offered to prove it, and he’d let her. Not like she was the first girl to ever taste his blood. “A blood fetish, isn’t vampirism,” he had told her. “It is if you can’t live without it.” “Can’t live without it,” Edgar murmured to himself, hunched over on his paint-stained leather stool, eyes burning as he squinted at the detail strokes he was adding. The painting had come to him in a nightmare; in fact, it had been the last night Alsatia had been over. He knew she’d be back--she had confessed his blood was richer than anyone else’s, to which he responded: “the paint fumes must do it.” His dream had been in a barren wasteland that must have once been a city, years or even centuries after nuclear fallout. Everything seemed to be deep shades of red and grayish blue, semi-recognizable shapes appearing between drifts of dust and rubble. He wondered briefly what city this had once been, but then he knew it didn’t matter. There were cars half buried under chunks of concrete, their paint worn beyond recognizable colour. Severed limbs were scattered over their hoods, wedged under their tires, crawling over the rocks, leaving streaks of blood behind. These limbs were missing patches of skin, some right down to the bone. He had stumbled past these cars, tripping on the occasional grasping hand, staring at the ash-filled horizon ahead of him. The only life he saw lay in fragments at his feet, and he began to wonder if he was even alive. He kept walking, unaware of his destination, until he almost ran into a car in front of him. It was beautiful. The car he had obsessed over for every waking moment before he dropped out of high school, and had long since accepted he could never own. A 1976 Cadillac El Dorado convertible, painted a flawless metallic red. The top was up, but he could see through the window that something was in there. A few steps brought him close enough to look inside, and he was able to make out the dismembered pieces of Alsatia--none of them bleeding, all of them moving--scattered around the driver’s seat. One of her legs had its knee hooked around the steering wheel, swaying back and forth. Before he could investigate more, a sharp pain had woken him up. He had struggled blindly before pushing Alsatia off him. “Don’t you ghouls usually ask permission first?” His hand pressed to the small gash in his neck, just below another one of her wounds that was scabbing over, he had scowled at her. “Go give someone else nightmares for a change.” And now she had been gone long enough that his canvas was almost full, and his stomach was starting to collapse into itself. He wondered if he would be found dead with his finished painting, gaining fame he never could have dreamed of in life. Carefully putting his brush down on the ledge of the easel, Edgar stared at the canvas that had held all his actions captive since Alsatia left. The picture was inside the El Dorado, black leather seats giving off a dull glow under an uncertain source of light. The windows looked onto what would become the wasteland of his dreams, but was for the time just a few scratches in gray and red. Sitting in the passenger’s seat, her head tilted back, mouth parting in rapture, was the naked form of Alsatia. Blood dripped from her lips, trailing down her chin and pooling between her breasts before trickling farther down. Her legs were only flesh until mid-thigh, where her skeleton was laid bare. Her bones had been shoved through either side of the steering wheel, trapped, the stripped calves and feet dangling, bones not attached together by anything except the magic of paint. “Feel it?” Edgar asked the picture, truly wishing for a moment that it really was Alsatia caught in front of him. If she wanted to play morbid games, he could show her what being morbid was all about. *** “I was beginning to wonder about you.” Alsatia had let herself in, having jimmied the lock. She came bearing three carry out bags from Peter’s Drive-In, which she set on the floor, and a milkshake, which she put directly into Edgar’s hands. He stared impassively at the straw. By this point, he didn’t remember what food was all about, and wasn’t sure if what was left of his stomach would accept this new offering. “You really need a phone. Your band keeps asking me where the hell you went, like I should know.” She walked over to his easel, and observed the picture of her, somewhat skinned and trapped in an El Dorado in the middle of a wasteland. “Keep telling them I’m not one of those normal whores you keep around, but they won’t listen. Leave it up to a bunch of industrial-rock idiots not to understand anything.” Lightly, she tested the painting to see if it was still wet. Nothing inside the El Dorado, just the barren destruction around it. But what can you expect from a band who call themselves Descriptor?” Fed up with getting no response, Alsatia turned back to Edgar. He had finally put the straw to his lips, and was now beginning to take quick gulps. She sighed and walked over to him, putting her hand on his chest. “If you dry yourself out, you’ll be no use to me. I don’t screw you for the art, you know.” She glanced over her shoulder at the painting. “And people think I’m twisted.” Edgar dropped the empty shake cup to the floor. His stomach was threatening to let fly everything he had just swallowed, while at the same time it screamed for more. He did his best to ignore what his body was doing. “Art is a sort of vampirism,” he said carefully. He’d been thinking this through the entire day, as he made the finishing touches on the painting. “You steal a bit of life from your subject, just as much as you need to make it real, and that life you have stolen...” He spread his hands out in front of him. “Creates eternity.” “You’re delusional,” Alsatia whispered in his ear. She then helped him off of his stool, onto the floor, where she opened the first paper bag, and fished out a burger. “If you don’t eat, I’ll go find someone else’s veins to suck on, and never come back.” He shook his head. “No, you’ll always come back. I’ll always take you back.” Taking a bit of the burger, he couldn’t taste it, but the weight of the food felt good in his mouth. “Vampire and victim have a way of becoming one.” “And that would be ever so much more dramatic if your mouth weren’t full. I’m going to go pull the shades up. You’re beginning to look the role more than I am.” “I captured you,” he muttered down to the now-empty wrapper of his first food in almost a week. “I’m sure you did.” Alsatia returned to his side. “Now go sleep, recuperate. We can work out a vampire/victim rights clause in the morning.” Edgar had already curled up on the floor, and was slipping into dreams about metallic red El Dorados and bleeding women with sharp teeth. *** It took hours of staring at the painting for Alsatia to decide not to leave. It took even longer for her to decide not to destroy the art that had brought Edgar within a few days of death. Never before had she seen a boy with such sunken eyes, his flesh seemingly bruised where it rested against the bone. She had known he’d been locked up here with his paints, and had intentionally given him time to create. If she had ever known his creation would disturb her, she never would have come back. But he had caught her off guard, and that was so rare that she had to take notice. She had to stay. A while. Just not long enough to witness his death by an unintentional suicide, which she knew by now had to be inevitable. It wasn’t her place to change a person’s nature. By now she was used to the self-destructives, of course. They were always the easiest meals. remember the sound |
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| © Copyright 2003 LL Hager - All Rights Reserved | |||
bsquirrel
since 2000-01-03
Posts 7855 |
I suppose you could consider this the requisite boyfriend responding post, and in a way, it is... But in another way, I have to say how much this story captured me. You took the cliche "artist dying for his masterpiece" and turned it on its head, with not a little sardonic humor and vampire mythology to keep things interesting. I love the way you write. This gave me a cruel smile -- which I needed, believe me. Love you. I know it's over. |
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littlewing Member Rara Avis
since 2003-03-02
Posts 9655New York |
Anvrill - your not submitting!!!! - this ohhh you just must - please is quite amazing - go see in asots - xxoo |
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Anvrill Senior Member
since 2002-06-21
Posts 710in the interzone now |
The thing is, I'm going to be aiming to publish this in a magazine (once I get up the guts to write the cover letter, which will take a bit), so I'll just let my poems flail miserably under other people's votes.  And my ego couldn't take it with one of my stories, anyway, being able to count each person, or lack thereof, who's actually read it and liked it enough to vote. Augh, no thanks.I'm such a picky girl. But my stories are so much more important to me than my poetry; can't help it!remember the sound |
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