fiction by Majesté Sinclair · selected passages from a work in progress
He was a painter. Admittedly he wasn’t very passionate about it. He could paint the most beautiful of landscapes, the most realistic of faces, other times he could render every feature of your face so distinctly that, taken apart, you’d mistake it for particularly eccentric collage. But he couldn’t bother to have the slightest bit of care for it. When he painted me I was in my first year of college—majoring in English, in New York. I was only nineteen and moved here from Oklahoma. I hadn’t known anyone at all, I was very timid and aloof and wouldn’t speak unless spoken to. I took the shortest routes from my lectures to my dorms and made a wholly effort not to intersect with anyone. Truthfully I was very afraid of people, In fact completely terrified of them.
* * *
He sat and looked at me. His eyes moved over me painfully slowly, feature by feature. My nose, my mouth, my cheeks, the space between my brows.
* * *
And for half an hour I stared at myself. How he stared at me. I thought perhaps if I stared long enough my face would naturally and physically start to morph on its own, showing its true beauty—or grotesqueness. Naturally nothing happened. I instinctively tilted my head and adopted a more seldom expression, straightening my back as well. I pretending I was looking at the back of a canvas—some later night I would later literally place one there. And eventually my face started to shift.
I could see myself all the ways he could’ve possibly seen me, painted me. And each one was more believable than the last.
* * *
Eventually I realised it was no longer enough for me to imagine. The mirror had become too little for my greedy self, it offered women and took them back before I mould into them. I knew what I ached for. The certainty—the face that existed beneath his eyes, fixed permanently and purely in oil paint. Incapable of shifting its features, adopting some hellish or divine form simply to taunt me.
These are excerpts; some passages have been omitted.
* Excerpts from a longer work; passages have been omitted.