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A prompt followed by a 2-hour deadline? In please.
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Feb 27, 2021 04:12
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 14:36 |
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Ha, OMG
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Mar 6, 2021 03:02
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Hate and the artistic temperament (rust AND levitation, kind of) 1145 words She had this still life in the studio--the studio being the kitchen. Things from around the house. A bowl, some grapes, a banana. Of course a banana. Some onions, which didn’t really go with the banana. Weren’t the typical things apples? It could have been worse. At one point she had done paintings of dolls, collecting them from all over the place, and those things were creepy as gently caress. But the still life wasn’t good. Fine the first day. On the second day it looked different, droopier. The bananas spotted, the onion shedding its skin. By the end of the week the whole mess started to smell. And then there were little bugs in it and she Zanna drew them into her sketches, too. “What is the point of this? Why do you just work on the same thing over and over?” It didn’t matter which roommate asked the question. They were all wondering. “I’m doing this. Y’all just don’t understand the artistic temperament.” That was a straight-up diss. Among the three of them Doe was a poet and Cheri an actor so Zanna had a lot of nerve lecturing them on the artistic temperament. The fact that none of them were working in their chosen field right now, not yet giving up the day job--not that a poet ever gets to give up the day job--didn’t matter, and Zanna was further away from the beating heart of her art than most. Cheri at least got some chops in acting civil to customers on the phone but Zanna worked in debt collection, a thing she didn’t even admit to most people. Her roommates looked at Zanna’s most recent canvas and concluded that she wasn’t even processing what she was drawing. On the canvas you could clearly see the spots, and that the banana had turned black. No one knew, or would admit, who was the first to introduce an object not selected by Zanna. It was a bottle of hot pink nail polish, with enamel that looked like bubblegum clotted at the bottom of the cap where it had leaked while lying on its side. A couple of days later Zanna had incorporated it into a charcoal drawing. It was a testament to her skill that you could almost see the color. Other things began to appear. A fountain pen, a comb with missing teeth, six bobby pins. A locking carabiner. A flavored condom, or that’s what the package said. Doe put on rubber gloves to remove the slimiest onion. Zanna said nothing, until the tarantula appeared. You couldn’t miss it--him? Her? Somebody had tethered her (we’ll go with “her”) to the banana with a thread and safety-pinned it to the banana, and concealed some water in a jar lid behind the still life, which at this point the roommates referred to as “the installation.” A collaboration. Zanna wasn’t speaking to them. She’d get home from her shift, heave an enormous sigh for the benefit of anyone who might be listening, and get out her drawing pad, or an easel with a canvasboard and her acrylics. She had something to say about the spider though. “This is animal cruelty! She should not be tied up like that! She could choke! What’s she going to eat? She’ll starve! And she has no water! Who does this? Who did this?” Doe admitted nothing but pointed out the tarantula’s concealed water source. “It’s rusty,” Zanna shrieked. “What kind of lid was that anyway? Probably something poison. You people are animals!” Instead of pulling out her art supplies Zanna stomped into her bedroom, slammed the door, and didn’t come back out. At least not while anyone else was awake. “Should we talk to her?” Cheri whispered. “Have we gone too far?” “She’s kind of right about the spider though,” Doe said. “Where did you get it anyway?” “Me? I thought--I thought you got it.” They stared at each other. Doe laughed. “Oh no. you’re not fooling me.” But Cheri shook her head vehemently. “Do I look like the kind of girl who would even touch--I mean, somebody tied a string around it, you know? And I don’t even want to be in the same room with it. Please tell me you stole it from your classroom and you’re gonna take it back. Like, immediately.” “Well.” Doe looked at the ceiling, then back at the still life. “I think what she’s working on here is a self-portrait. A manifestation of her life, and how it is eating her soul from the inside out. No that’s not right. How it’s turning her soul into a rotting, rusty, putrefying slime pile. We’ve got to help her.” “Way to dodge the question of where the gently caress did that eight-legged monster come from,” Cheri said. She leaned in, none too close. “It looks like--is it like a fly? With lots of eyes?” She shuddered. “Creepy AF. Better than the dolls, I guess. But I think we should set it free.” “Good call,” Doe said. “But not tonight. I have a big day tomorrow and I’m not jeopardizing my future promotion by risking a spider bite. Or whatever other possible disease I could pick up from that mess.” But in the morning the spider, and in fact the whole mess, was gone. The table had been cleared. Where the still life/installation had been, a canvasboard painting sat on a small plastic easel. It depicted only the tarantula, larger and scarier than the real one had been, and with more eyes, or at least more obvious ones, and claws like knives on each of its eight legs. It was suspended over a pile of bodies--bodies whose color and general confirmation matched the physical attributes of Zanna’s roommates. The spider had no visible means of support, not even its leash, which meant it was bound to fall on one or both bodies sooner or later. Was it levitating? Was it mid-pounce? Doe studied it, took one more bite of her granola bar, and decided she wasn’t hungry any more. Cheri looked at it, then looked away, turning her attention to her bulletproof coffee, as if that would save her. And then Zanna appeared, cheerful in a way her roommates hadn’t seen in a while. “So,” she said. “What do you guys think?” “Uh,” Doe said. “Interesting. Do you want to talk about it?” “Yeah,” Cheri said. “It--it doesn’t seem to be an actual depiction of what was, uh, you know, what was there. What you were drawing.” Neither of them asked what had happened to the tarantula. Doe went on. “What about you? Are you happy with it?” “I hate it,” Zanna said. “But art is supposed to elicit emotions. Strong ones. The stronger the better. So. If hate’s where it’s at, then hate is okay.”
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Mar 6, 2021 04:35
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Aardvark! posted:i noticed several fuckups plot wise/missing things that i needed to put in immediately after i posted. i dont know why posting it made them all immediately obvious I noticed a whole different story that would have been a LOT better, immediately after I posted.
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Mar 6, 2021 05:10
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