A Slight Miscalculation

Fandom: Inuyasha
Rating: G
Disclaimer: Inuyasha belongs to Rumiko Takahashi. As always, I’m just borrowing for a little fun.
What Lies Beneath: Kargura and Naraku; freedom and regret. 

 

A Slight Miscalculation
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Before I met him, I cast no shadow. I danced through the world, every move a sigh, a song, a symphony of whispers, and left no footprints. He was a shadow and a collector of shadows, for he was but an empty shell, a holding cell for all dark things. For what is emptiness, if not an insatiable hunger to render what is hollow whole?

I wish I’d never stopped to sing to him.

He was hollow, and a hunter of hollow things, who made me captive in a pleasing form, though he cared little for such pleasures, much less for love. So I would know my master, he tore out my heart, hid it away for safekeeping, and left his emptiness inside me.
Those who do not love think the heart is only a talisman, a trinket, a tool for bargaining. Those from whom it has been stolen feel it gone, and with the pain of that memory, conjure something else in the space left behind. One small, true thing coaxed out of nothing--is that not what desolation desires, after all?

I should have known…

He was hollow, a hunter, a shadow--a sculptor skilled at rendering form from formlessness, something from nothing, though his greatest trick was valuing the intangible within the tangible more. He gave me back my heart but shattered me, scattered me to the wind.

I wish I’d had a firmer grip on nothing.

How to Paint a Picture (XIII)

Fandom: Stephen King
Rating: G
Disclaimer: Duma Key belongs to Stephen King. I thought there was one, last bit missing...
What Lies Beneath: A meditation on obsession and madness.

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How to Paint a Picture (XIII)

Sit in the chum…

Start with all the lies you tell yourself to keep the sea weedy darkness at bay. Mix them with a little time—not enough to muddy them—just enough to blur them a bit at the edges. Lay them on fast and thick in broad strokes. Don't think too much about little details, either, a good falsehood's more David Hockney than Andrew Wyeth. Make sure to gloss them with enough repetition to make them stick, for while the truth changes every time we touch it, a well-made lie can last for centuries.

I should know.

After finishing that last piece at Duma, I burned my canvases, my brushes–everything. I knew the locals would say that freak barrage from the Gulf was "just another Alice," but I called, and still call her, by another name.

Painting: You will want to, but you mustn't. Why? Because art is not a diversion, not for dabblers, and not for the faint of heart, because what art really is, is creation, the act of creation itself. Not reinterpreting a likeness or an image, but actually rendering something from nothing, willing form from formlessness, order from chaos. Turning water into wine. Playing God.

Even now, the gift is hungry, though I wish I could will time's brush to soak up every stroke of the past. To render nothing and through the act of erasure, create absolution.

But hunger gets what hunger wants. Water always turns to blood before it turns to wine.

I always knew she would find a way back.

Pick one…

Late afternoon. August. I remember the light changing from burnished orange to muted crimson on Lake Phalen's near-placid surface, because water always turns to blood before it turns to wine, and the shush-shush of the waves as they lapped the shore. The fingers of my right hand—my ghost hand—turned hot and started prickling, like I'd just grabbed a fistful of nettles. Then—

Orange says no, but apple says, vamonos!

I want to fight it, but I can't.

When I finally resurfaced, my watch flared three o'clock in Indiglo. When I turned on the porch light and saw what I had created on a canvas I had not purchased with paints and brushes I no longer owned—

I knew I could never refuse my baby, my favorite, my If-So-Girl...

She'd grown more solid since I last saw her on the beach and though she was made of a million little pieces, she was still substantial. Her smile was coolly feral and her reach exaggerated, as though I'd painted a 3-D movie still of her instead of a picture. Reaching, almost comically intruding into the foreground, except for that brittle bright glitter in the hollows of her eyes, she held something polished, dark, and heavy in her hand…

It was RED.