Pietà, My Dear
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The light that pours through your windows the next morning is weak, thinned out by cloud cover—milk-colored and useless for creativity. Though your studio seems undisturbed, unchanged from the day, there are imprints of large boot impressions in several chalky layers of clay leading from the fire escape window to the mouth of your sculpture. Even still, everything else sits where it should, the clay buckets sealed, your carving tools organized in stainless trays, the floors now swept from last night's efforts.
You pad barefoot across the cold concrete in the same clingy boyshorts you wore all yesterday and night, a thin tank top sweat-clung to your spine as you move past the head—still open-mouthed, still monstrous, and yet—
You pause before it, fingers rising where the upper lip curls grotesquely over the brow. A blot. Not quite paint. Rusty in color, dry enough to flake away under your nails. It stains the edge like a fingerprint pressed in parting. Denial has brought you far in life, so you embrace it again and shrug it off as your own, the sort of smudge left behind by a manic energy brought on by frenzied creativity.
Doesn't matter that you haven't touched anything red-hued in months...
You don't dwell. Don't think about suspenders and bleeding eyes on clingy cream. Can't let that cut-muscled body, broadening as your sleepy eyes climbed up it, haunt your waking dreams. That shit is for sleep or exhaustion.Plus, it's not real, you repeat within, holding it like a mantra as you shed your clothes and duck into the shower.
The steam fogs up your mind just enough to keep you grounded. You wash like you always do—quick, thorough, surgical—and you don’t linger because you’re not the kind of woman who needs the comfort of your own touch... or anyone else's for that matter. You're too used to being cold. Too used to starting your day with a list of things you have to do just to feel like the hours aren’t wasted.
Breakfast follows—eggs, toast, herbal tea with cinnamon, and orange slices since the weather calls for it.
You spy a magazine on the counter after your first warming sip. It's been there for weeks, opened on an article about Elegance in Negative Space. There's a page ripped out and a single fingermark of dried cherry peeling up the corner. You toss it in the trash can, eating with mechanical efficiency at your kitchen counter, scrolling your phone one-handed and sipping with the other. Distractions. You need distractions. It works until something from the television tears you away from your weekly calendar.
The news. You swivel on your stool, mug and phone in hand.
A flash of red on the flatscreen, slightly distorted from this angle as it faces the couch and not your kitchen. There's a stuttered frame, then a shaky video jerks into motion—raw, captured at the wrong perspective from someone’s camera phone.
You find yourself standing behind your sofa, hands empty at your side, watching the screen. The video pans across the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—a place you know well—each step decorated not with welcome banners or tourists or school groups, but with—
"Severed heads..." you say aloud, your own voice almost unrecognizable to your ears.
There's a dozen of them. Men and women. Old and young. All lined in grave procession, like jack-o-lanterns, their mouths gaping wide—stretched wider than living flesh permits—and stuffed inside those mouths are small, blood-soaked origami figures, soggy at the edges. Sleeping bodies folded into paper, slumped inside butchered mouths, their shapes dreamlike and prenatal.
Like you, the critic whispers. Your fingers dig into the couch backrest. The camera video shakes, the image flickers, and your stomach lifts into your ribs.
The anchor on the television cuts back in as the video fades. You catch verbal segments 'police confirming nothing... insider speculation... signature technique... previously named Vincent Van Gore now commonly known as Muse, potentially Inhuman—' and the name lodges in your chest like a shard of glass.
"Muse." It tastes far sweeter on your tongue than something so blood-soaked should.
The anchor repeats his name like someone who doesn't understand the weight of it, someone who doesn’t know how he stood outside your window, doesn’t know how you thought you dreamt him. But he's... he—
Your phone rings, making you jolt and yelp. An electric surge of adrenaline discharges down your spinal cord as you stumble to your countertop and pick up the call without considering the ID.
Sylvan’s voice slides through, unctuous, asking if you got his last message. You mumble an affirmative, clearly queasy, but he pays it no mind, asks if you’d be interested in dinner or coffee or maybe something stronger, always dancing around what he actually wants. Without thinking, you mumble—sure, fine, maybe—turning your attention back to the news, to the words scrolling beneath the anchor’s expressionless face.
BREAKING: SINGLE ORIGAMI MADE FROM MAGAZINE CLIPPING PLACED ON EAST-FACING STEP... INVESTIGATORS UNSURE OF SIGNIFICANCE... INTERVIEW WITH CHIEF OF—
Sylvan's still talking as a fawn response causes your hand, clutching the phone, to sag at your side. Your eyes move to the trash bin but dart away, back to something safe. They settle on a dust bunny against the wall, between the kitchen and the television. Sylvan's distant chatter never ceases, going on about some show, some gallery, connections he can make for you, but you’re not listening anymore. You don’t even say goodbye—you just hang up.
And then the week swallows you whole.
Time fractures into long blocks of silence interrupted by moments of hysterics and panic at the passing pigeons, groaning pipes, and wind whistling with shifts of the fall air pressure. You stop leaving your studio entirely, barricading yourself within its brick walls. You jam a chair beneath the doorknob of your bedroom at night. You order curtains but realize your 16-foot ladder barely reaches the halfway point on your windows. More time spent in your bedroom, away from the glass panes, and when you sleep, it’s under your bed—not on it—because that space feels smaller, safer—pentimento almost.
Groceries, takeout, and material shipments arrive, left at the base of the building by request. You collect them in oversized hoodies and boots, avoiding eye contact from any onlookers, one foot in the building foyer for fear that you'll be grabbed and taken away if you break contact with your sanctuary—your home—a prison, maybe.
By day four, the intercom rings. Sylvan showing up unannounced, or maybe not. When your phone died on the second day, you didn't bother charging it. More come and go, all ignored, some friendly, some curious, one a wellness visit that you reluctantly answer with just enough information so that you're left alone. The buzzing stops on the fifth day, but somehow, the silence is worse.
Yet, during the day, you work. A drop cloth covers the monstrous head, so you don't compare everything else to it.
You work like you’re trying to exorcise something through your hands—soaking down your unfinished sculptures, tossing them into slip bins while fresh clay forms hulking constructs, grotesque mutations of your old style, things with too many mouths and holes, unnaturally long limbs prying open their own ribs. You don’t name them—don’t sketch beforehand—just let the heat in your belly guide you until they dry, and when they do, when the skin tightens and the weight feels final, you lift them... and if you find them lacking, you tiptoe to the window opposite the fire escape, and toss them to the backstreet below.
You watch them all fall, limbs breaking, faces caving in, bloodless bodies turning to clumps and shards on the alley floor.
At night, hiding under the bed, when you think the knocking of your knees are footsteps, you wonder if you’re supposed to join them down there. Is this what the late, great Edmondson experienced during his prophetic visions where God told him to chisel the first Tomb-Stones? That catalyst that propelled his sculptures was divine... are you hiding from your prophetic legacy? Under this bed. Beneath the grave of inspiration, nested in welcoming silks and down pillows. Hiding from Muse.
You don’t know if he will come again. But you know you want/don't want him to.
On the seventh night, sleep refuses you. You've swallowed magnesium pills, drank cherry-infused teas, even opened a year-old bottle of Klonopin prescribed to you during a gallery opening that left you with chronic nightmares from the stress... but nothing works, not tonight...
... and as the clock passes midnight, a feeling scrubs you clean—of just nothing. A numb, glacial absence takes residence until even the throb of your thoughts feels muffled, buried beneath cotton batting. Your limbs are heavy yet twitch with that electrical ache of sleeplessness, a paradox that draws you from under the bed frame into the cool sharp air of your bedroom.
You remove the chair, open the door, and step outside, nothing but a baggy hoodie between you and darkness. The studio greets you without ceremony—quiet and ink-black, lit only by the dim streetlights bleeding in through the high-set windows. It should feel safe and familiar, but you still feel nothing.
Your sculptures stare. Each of them—those malformed things you birthed—feels sentient. Their shadows lean too far forward, reaching across the floor like arms poised to catch you, draw you under. You move faster, heart thudding in nothing-panic with nothing-fear. The gnawing, cavernous absence of feeling is unbearable.
Go outside, you tell yourself, sounding melodic. You'll feel better with some fresh air, won't you?
A pull anchors deep in your stomach, guiding you to the fire escape.
"Yeah," you agree. "Just some fresh air. I'll feel better."
You unlatch the window and crawl out, breath fogging in the cold as your knees scrape against the sill, fully naked under the loose fleece. Goose-pimples run up your legs. Your hot groin chills against an upward breeze, one that licks like ice up your belly, trapping around your collarbones, leaving your nipples stiff and aching.
You should go back inside—should—but that numbness starts to unravel the longer you stand there. The cold hurts, but the pain is something. The pain makes you real again. Nothingness starts to fade as you grip the icy railing, wringing free flakes of red rust as you lean over without really thinking, without knowing why—until you see...
... him.
"Muse."
Far below, haloed by alley light and the jagged scatter of broken sculptures, he looms amidst the ruin like you chiseled him, cast him down, but refused to break. He is still. Waiting. His eyes—carmine voids hollowed out of filthy cream—are angled up, locked on yours. They shine like rubies... like fresh blood under stage lights.
He has no expression, no mouth, no skin to be seen. And yet he stares at you in a way that ignites something feral in your chest.
Like a delayed switch, you gasp—sharp, high, full of horror and that awful thrill you never know how to name. The wrought iron groans beneath your feet as you tumble back with a jerk so suddenly your shoulder clips the window's metal frame. It slams shut. Scrambling for support against the railing, you twist, throwing yourself toward the open pane, fingers grappling the sill to crawl back through. But the window is shut. It doesn’t budge. It’s either stuck or latched, and in your panic, your hands can’t find the catch, can't work the mechanics, can't even function as fingers.
“Fuck—fuckfuckfuck—” you hiss under your breath, tugging harder, lungs heaving with that electric dread, the one that starts in your toes and melts up your spine.
The metal beneath your feet vibrates.
You freeze, panic overtaking logic. Lizard brain online in the driver's seat. He’s climbing up to meet you... And he's fast. Two steps at a time.
The fire escape shifts, this time with weight—his weight—and you feel it before you hear it: the sound of boots against wet steel, the ragged grunt of effort leaking through a fabric mask, and the creak of the railing as his gloved hands pull himself up and up and up.
No, no, no, no, you gasp, yanking on the window with everything you have. The latch catches. You don't see it. Can’t. You’re too afraid.
Hands seize you—strong, coarse—gripping your upper arms, fearless of the bruises bursting under his fingers. Muse yanks you back even as your foot kicks wildly against the brickwork around the window sill, even as your fingers reach for cold glass. You feel the kiln-like heat of him through your hoodie—your back pulled tight against his chest, the press of his mask against your cheek.
“Hour after hour… creation and rejection.” His words paint your skin, breath blistering through the mask, “The rhythm of despair. A ritual—” you struggle, and he corrects his grip, snarls and squeezes harder, “—even. So romantic. Gave me ideas.”
His breath shudders out, low and strained.
“Imagine it—“ A grunt, as though you weigh nothing, as though your animal fight is pitiful compared to the dozens, if not hundreds he's forced into submission. “—your cold, perfect body snapped open on the concrete, framed by the bones of your abandoned work. A self-portrait in flesh. Maybe I’d leave a plaque: Here lies the artist who feared the rot she gestated.”
You yank away once more—one last time—and grasp the latch. Muse growls, jerking you back. The window slams open with a sudden, traitorous shriek of metal hinges… and crashes into your forehead with a sharp, hollow crack of bone.
White light. Then black. Dark, humorous breath on your jawline, the cotton brush of a nose against your ear.
“Don’t worry. You haven’t even started to bleed.”
Your body slumps, limbs like string, head lolling forward before Muse hefts you back, warm, solid, and far too gentle for the grip that initially took you.
Before the cold vanishes entirely, your last sensation is the sound of him exhaling through fabric—tender, almost reverent—and the slow sway of his chest against your spine, as though he’s rocking you to sleep while the fire escape groans under his shifting weight.
Then nothing there's nothing.
Though, as you sleep, strong arms scoop beneath your knees and shoulders, lifting you through that threshold he crossed a week before. Like a bride on her wedding day, chaste flesh draped in black… held securely, prepared to be wrung dry.