Damsel in the Red Dress

Comfortable Noir

Cleaning Kattar's apartment takes less time than expected. I always forget he's so much more put together than I am.

For all his childish pranks, and bad-boy fashion, you'd expect him to be the kind of person who has dirty laundry scattered every which way, hanging over chairs and in great, stinking mountains on the floor, but the empty place is immaculate.

We change the linen - clean the bathroom - which is dustier than it is dirty, working in relative silence. Mrs. Moon is certain, at this point, that something is wrong - something beyond the obvious. I watch the gears churning in her head, behind the pretty mask slowly slipping into a picturesque frown, furrowed with worry, but she doesn't say anything, for my sake.

When there's nothing else to do she insists on washing what little laundry there is, weeks old, and musty with the scent of aged sweat, but since that will take a while, she suggests I head home, and I'm grateful for the bailout. My face burns up to my ears. I shove my mittened hands deep into the pockets of my trenchcoat, bidding her goodbye, and make my way out into the snow. I feel her gaze shining down on me like a candle in the window until I turn the corner out of sight, but I don't look back.

It's only 5:30 when I get home. Kattar is still in surgery, so he won't have seen the flowers just yet.

I'm tempted to go back to the peonies.

The painted ones call to me from the canvas like the living ones did at the florist's shop. They're almost perfect, but I know good and well there is no such thing as a "perfect" piece of art. I'll probably just ruin it by trying to add something else.

As a countermeasure against the mistake, I lead my body into the kitchen and set a kettle to boil for some tea. That done, I return to the living room in search of a clean canvas.

Nothing clean, canvas or not, is to be found in that quarter. Tripping over a disassembled folding chair, I head upstairs to interrogate the closet.

The door sticks, gummy paint clinging like glue to the frame. I manage to jiggle it free, and it swings open with such violence that I have to jump forward to keep it from smacking into the trashbag behind the door.

There I find a row of canvases arranged neatly on the grated metal shelf, tie-dyed with big globs of paint in suspended animation that opted against joining their brethren in the dizzy red giants and crescent moons on the carpet.

The first two canvases are largely invisible, draped from head to foot in the folds of my blood-red dress slipping rakishly from her hanger. I shy the skirt to one side with my shoulder and take one canvas in each hand. The dress gives up any attempt at living upright and slips to the floor in a sanguine pile, so vivid, that it seems to leach its color into the walls and bleed on the carpet.

The only light in the closet comes from the dim LED bulbs oozing their way in, half-heartedly, from the bedroom as if they think they have something better to do. My eyes scrounge about in the black until they can make out the details of each piece. The first is a half-finished acrylic, lackluster, and smutty, the other, the original 'Damsel in the Red Dress," weeping in repulsive splendor.

I run one finger lightly over the dehydrated emotions, scabbed onto the canvas.

It's hard to believe anyone wanted this - that it went as far as it did. Won anything. My pretty pity party.

The Damsel doesn't stare back at me like the flowers do, like the sun splattered on the ceiling. She ignores everyone, self-absorbed, in her own little world, staring into the glass, with her head down, wine dribbling over her fingers, and soaked into the bodice of that pretty red dress, she was so proud of - staining like nobody's business.