A Ruined Ratio

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The studio smells like home, a faint thread of something acrid rising from the heater vents that haven’t been cleaned in months. Your hands tremble as you peel off your coat, nape damp with a rain-sweat sheen you didn’t realize had settled there until the draft caught it. 

That fucking gallery show.Too bright. Too many voices. 

Your jaw still aches from all the polite smiling. There’s pressure behind your left eye, thudding in time with the headache blooming across your temple. You didn’t eat enough. Didn’t drink enough either… not until the end, when you escaped the critical crowd to suck down a rum and coke near the bar, hidden in a pocket of shadows like a subway rat.

Now, home, away from it all, you step over scattered drop cloths on the concrete floors, unleveled by the building’s age: an old factory floor planned into penthouse-style apartments that never saw completion before the development company went belly up. 

You stand at your kitchen counter, overlooking the living room with its rug rolled out into the mouth of the studio space, rubbing your elbows without thinking. The pressure of your arms crossed under your chest, hands rubbing the bony bend of each arm, brings comfort, cleaning away a memory. Sylvan’s hand had lingered too long on that very spot earlier—fingers slick with desperation as he complimented your ‘chaste subject matter’ and how your sculptures ‘speak of a purity that’s tragically absent in most female-centric art.’ As if you're a female artist first and foremost, never just an artist...

You wanted to punch his teeth down his throat... Instead, you gave him a smile that felt like a paper cut, thin and stinging, and moved to the other side of the gallery. He followed anyway. Sylvan never misses an opening and never leaves you alone...

Of course, they all said the same thing with different words, like ‘brevity of womanly empowerment’ and ‘rebellious innocence,’ and they all got different faux smiles in return. You’re playing it safe these days. Conservative, even. Chaste, comes that word again, whispering near your ear, too close, the breath of it tracing your neckline. You barely managed not to tear and yank your nerves from your throat.

Thankfully, you’ve always had this place—this sanctuary where the insulation was stripped to bone and brick, purchased when you were still hungry, still raw from the academy. It was a shell then—beautiful in its emptiness. A void begging to be filled. Now, it’s cluttered with your ambitions. Sculptures half-finished. Some crouch in corners like oppressed animals, others stretch toward the exposed beams overhead, tongues of wire and clay gathering dust. But the majority of them glare at you like virginal effigies that would be happier if you’d just go fuck yourself instead of birthing them into existence. 

You hate all of them. And they hate back. 

You take a sip of the cherry juice and seltzer you poured when you got home—flat and syrupy now, still a promise of a good night’s rest—and let your eyes drift to the loft windows that take up the entire northeast corner from floor to ceiling. No curtains. Never needed them. No one to look in from the condemned warehouse across your building where the subway beneath makes the bones of it moan every day at noon sharp.

Sirens start up in the distance. It’s routine around this time as well. White noise. They’re like pigeons here—circling, crying, always feeding on something. You used to flinch at them. Used to double-check the locks. Now, you sip your tart drink and think maybe someone should come. Take the sculptures. Smash them. Take you. Soil you. Anything to undo what you’ve done to yourself. Perhaps then, once ruined, your art—your very self—would have some meaning.

The sirens grow louder—urgent now. Your gaze lifts from your drink to the window. The color of the red-blue reflections doesn’t fade; it grows. Ear-splitting sirens merge with the wobble of ambulances. You step to the window, mason jar sweating in your grip. Curiosity piqued. 

Outside, the street is bathed in chaos. Flashing lights. Pedestrians being shoved aside by pigs in uniforms, each of them shouting for different reasons. A bright yellow tape ripples in a cop's hand, wrapping around rusted parking meters and tacked to a brick wall.

Gunshots. Not distant. You hear them with the crispness of immediacy, and it startles something awake in your chest. That was close. Your eyes dart to the rooftops blackened under light-polluted skies, and it could be a trick of an over-exhausted mind, but you swear there’s a figure bobbing—running—against that dark backdrop of the city skyline… away from pursuers. 

‘Get them out of here!’

Below, cops are pulling a human shape from the scene, assisting paramedics haul it onto a gurney. You look back into the depths of your studio, finding several sheet-covered statues lying in the darkness, more alive now than that body below, similarly covered in alabaster white.

Someone shouts, and your gaze trails back through the window to the scene below. There’s something on the pavement that catches the headlights: red and glossy, half a word. Too greasy to be anything but the material of violence.

The sight should repulse. Instead, it pulls you closer as though hypnotized. That word chaste rings in your ears again as your eyes widen on the crime scene.

You press your hand to the cold pane, breath fogging the glass. The implication of a dead body—its burning of monotony, its heat—somehow centers you. The horror of it threads down your throat and settles in your lower stomach as a slow, trembling ache.

It’s not innocent. It’s hunger—hungry.

You inhale slowly, unevenly. Down on the street, the sirens begin to fade. The crowd gradually disperses. You watch until the last flashing light turns the corner, the last echo of rubber tires vanishing into the dark. Only then do you turn back to your studio.

You don’t bother changing out of your dress—just tug an oversized hoodie over your head. The hem nearly swallows up the pinstripe skirt—casting an allusion of wearing nothing but the hoodie—but you don’t care. The modest black heels get kicked into a corner as your heart skips. You slide into boots with crusted clay and dried paint on the toes.

Outside, the concrete is slick from oil leaks, damp from the rain that hadn’t had time to dry before nightfall. A smell lingers—something you think you noticed when you arrived home, but can’t be sure—burned rubber, faint metal, something… astringent like a perfumed musk.

The alley below your window is still choked off with yellow tape, but you need to see it up close. Not from behind glass. Inside it. You press your fingers into the pockets of the hoodie, hunching forward as you step beneath the police tape, its edge damp and snagging on your shoulder like a wet ribbon.

The moment you step into the decorated alley, the noise of the city relaxes. No honking. No sirens or screams. Just your own breath, catching when your eyes lock on the dining table.

It’s long—absurdly long for this space, claustrophobic against the alley walls. A sheet of linen clings to its warped length, soaked through in the center where something dead may have been, leaving behind a spattering blush of browns and blacks dried into dark textures like brushstrokes. The bloodstains are still moist in the middle, weighing down the fabric to the wood beneath it. Fingerprints—partial, frantic—dot the end of the tablecloth where someone must have clutched it, making sure it was even on either end. 

You take a step further within, feeling much like a vulture picking apart roadkill. Your gaze travels up the table to the chair at the head. It’s been pulled out at an angle, and you wonder if that was intentional or left by a cop with no eye for design. Closer now, you see there’s a smudge of red on the seat cushion. You can almost picture it—the slump of a body, its fluids settling with gravity, leaving behind something like a blotter stamp.

A sound. A clatter above. Ice down your spine, a supine rattle of panic. You whip yourself around to the noise, staring at the steel bones of a fire escape. One of the platforms sways just an inch, just enough to supply the terrible thought that someone is watching… or was, and yet—

Your hands clench in your pockets. You feel everything. Sensory input condensed like a star between your eyes, projecting a funnel of undulating gleam. Exhaustion, just tired—or drugged somehow. But you're not, and you blink and blink until you see it—a $100 bill, folded once, torn at the edge, and stuck to the brick wall. It's soaked through, crinkled from blood, dried into the grout line. 

Tacked newspaper clippings are plastered above like graffiti, some curled at the edges, others nailed down by force. Headlines run jagged as torn thoughts: 

TAX BILL PASSES — HOMELESS DISPLACED. CORPORATE PROFITS HIT RECORD HIGH. CONTRACTS FUNNELED TO DEFENSE INDUSTRY. ART FUNDING SLASHED FOR THIRD YEAR IN A ROW.

You picture crime scene cleanup crews cataloguing the remaining cash as they did the body parts left behind, snapping pictures of everything, especially the news clippings. But that bill, its unsubtle symbolism, almost more so than the headlines completes it—makes the alleyway feel like a perverted banquet hall fit for an oligarch. This, the critic says, is what artists spend their whole lives searching for: true meaning.

Another groan of steel resounds above, amplified by the narrow space. This time, you hug yourself, fingers worrying your elbow through thick fleece,e and ignore it. You're too dialed in on the art now.

Your stomach turns. Sure. But not from nausea, from something that twists hot and slow under your ribs. Your cheeks burn. You’re sweating under the hoodie. Between your legs, a pinpoint awareness throbs. It's arousal, though your body doesn't remember that feeling, so you call it thrill, excitement, inspiration, and lick your lips twice. 

You shift your thighs where they’ve started to stick together beneath the dress. The blood... the violence… the message—the art of it makes you want to—

Your phone buzzes, a dissonant hum in your pocket that breaks the hypnotic hush. You don’t want to look, but the spell is broken and reality demands you look.

Sylvan:I was passing by and saw the lights on in your studio. Late night, huh? Let's have dinner sometime, talk about your next series. I think there’s something special in your future. I want to be part of it. We can go over the numbers then. 

You read it once, then again, your thumb hovering over the screen like it might burn you. His words are soaked in the same syrup he dripped all over you at the show—“I believe in your message, I see something rare. We should spend more time together.” 

You know exactly what Sylvan wants, what that look in his eyes meant when he praised your restricted philosophy, how his voice got low when he said your work presented “so much beauty unspoilt.”

He doesn’t want your art. He wants your body. He wants to crawl inside you, fuck you, wear you like greasepaint, get off on the idea of sullying you—squirting his name all over you until its his, leaving you nothing but last season's art trend. But what else are any of them meant to think when you've spent years showing them falsehoods groped together with clay?

You shove the phone back into your pocket, ashamed of the reputation you’ve spent over a decade forming. Something odious and dishonest, nothing like…

"Nothing like this…" you whisper.

You step forward, heel dragging over the cracks in the pavement where blood still pools in stiff, black globs. You move slowly, circling the table, breathing in the rot and the faint scent of something aromatic—expensive. Cologne maybe. Maybe whoever did this wore it, or maybe the victim did. Either way, it lingers, delicate and predatory.

You stop beside the head chair.

Your chest is tight. You feel light-headed again, as if overloaded by sensory detail: the smells, the feel of the air in temperature and weight, the edges of everything hyperrealized. Your skin is on fire, but your fingers feel cold. You grip the edge of the table and look down at the blood-stained linen, the trail of red fingerprints, and feel someone watching you partake.

You swallow. There’s a pulse in your ears. Something flickers in your chest.

This… this is art. Not slipped, carved, baked clay. This is flesh and passion. This is something stripped bare to pentirsi layers, offering previously unseen details unappreciated by the uniforms that dismantled it. But you're here now, you see it... smudged within the image as a coffee stain in a sketchbook. 

You smile as the fire escape sways, metal bones screeching beneath heavy steps. The cold licks your legs beneath the dress, but someone's breath warms your nape, gushing through cotton fleece to bare skin where fine hairs rise above gooseflesh. You’re soaked in something deep as a threadbare exhale titters over your shoulder—too hot to be real. 

You’re not alone anymore. 

The artist is here, maybe, pressed into your back, fused to your spine, reaching under the hoodie one-handed to hold the flutters to your abdominal wall where they want to dig out and fly away. You cramp, or the hand squeezes and something in you—some endlessly regurgitating thing—finally matches the phantasmal breath heaving down your collar...

“Eyes open, finally... Tragic how long you chose to stay blind.”