Masterpiece

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She was a blank canvas, soaking up impressions like an early nineteenth century painting of hazy pastel pinks and yielding yellows. Gazing from a distance, it was hard to tell that she was never whole.

Smiling. She was always smiling, the corners of her mouth twisted up grotesquely, two thumbtacks placed just there to keep the grin from slipping. They whispered too quietly for her to hear – do you think her face hurts? did it freeze that way? – but she knew anyway. They called it demonic, that smile, and crossed themselves when she passed them.

He was a palette, ready to change the world with vibrant violets and shocking chartreuse. They’d once tried to break him, scraping at him with a brittle eraser until he was a ruined mixture of smudged edges and too much shading. He turned watercolors into wine and drank himself straight into the drab dreariness of a Watteau.

Frowning. He was always frowning, one brush stroke away from another tableau of disaster, reds running into greens and blues into oranges, until his life was the color of her eyes, her hair, her skin. He saw her in every corner, a flash of ruby against burnt umber as she blew him a farewell kiss. She haunted his dreams and commandeered his conscious and he thought of her every precious moment of every meaningless day.

Months upon months and thousands upon thousands of canvasses slithered through long fingers smudged with cadmium blue forgetfulness. They washed him phthalo green until he was sick of it, prodding at the rainbow until it shattered into a glorious prism of half-remembered techniques and surrealistic shapes.

He still had never met her.

She propped her pretense up with putty and plaster until she turned cobalt green with envy and naphthol red with anger. It was all so normal – the pristine white edges and carefully framed events, hung on the refrigerator door like a child’s first foray into expressionism – and she didn’t quite understand why their watercolors weren’t dripping into oblivion like her own.

In the morning, the light caught the curve of her cheek and hewed stark contrast into the sharp angle of her jaw. He held her still with soft bristles and crumbling charcoal while she tried to place how she knew him, the sense of déjà vu as striking as the Renoir at his back. Graphite grazed across the canvas while gesso flaked lightly to the floor, a million times familiar, but for the first time, finally, it felt right.

They were a matched set, artist and art complementary and complete. She found shape and form and molded him into a myriad of colors; he took technique and creativity and made her their Muse.

Dreaming. They were always dreaming, fancy carrying them from the mediocrity they might have fallen into. But she was his masterpiece and he her Michelangelo, a thousand creations of man away from failure. He painted thanks along her spine and she held him wrapped in acrylic-based ties.

“Behold the masterpiece you made me,” she would whisper.

And when it was over, he wished the splash of color would immortalize them forever, but she slashed his paintings and left his paints to dry.

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For what it's worth.

Much love,

-K