Forgotten Dreams of Eternity: Lost Odyssey: Thousand Years of Dreams

(Short Story -XIII.) *Portraitist of the Dead*

Forgotten Dreams of Eternity: Lost Odyssey: Thousand Years of Dreams

Copyright © 2011 Sky_Knight

(Short Story -XIII.)

*Portraitist of the Dead*

She always has mourning clothes with her. That way, she can begin a portrait as soon as a request comes in.

And so it is today.

Having slipped into her mourning dress in the shed on the pier, she boards the downstream ferry. Her hands are full: one holds the case with her painting tools and the other the garment bag for her mourning dress.

She has heard that a rich man lies dying in a town twenty kilometers downstream.

Her name is Rosa.

"It's a race against time," she says with a grim smile. "I have to start as soon as possible, before the face changes."

"Changes how?" Kaim asks.

"It's hard to say."

There is a deepening strain to Rosa's smile.

"But I know it when I see it -when the person has gone from 'this side' to the 'other side'."

"Once they've gone over, I can't paint them -at least not in the way that will please the family. It just can't be done."

Rosa is a professional portraitist of the dead.

The custom of preserving death masks is now widely practiced in this area. Families too poor to hire an artist daub the face of the newly deceased with dye and preserve the loved one's deathbed expression on a cloth pressed against the dyed face. Some families make a death mask with plaster. Only the wealthiest families can afford to hire a professional like Rosa, so that lurking in the background of an individual's death there can be a variety of disputes.

"I have heard families quarreling over the inheritance behind my back even as I sit there sketching the dead person. One widow presented my portrait of her husband to the court to prove that he had been poisoned. Another time, some loan sharks waited until the moment the man died and charged right into the house. One husband tried to spit in his wife's face as soon as she gave up the ghost. Apparently, she had been unfaithful to him for years."

Rosa tells her stories with utter detachment. She reveals no emotion at all.

This, she says, is indispensible to be becoming an outstanding portraitist of the dead.

"You have to open your sketchbook and get your brushes going with the bereaved family members right there, overcome with grief. There's no way you can produce a good portrait if you become emotional or allow yourself to be swept up in emotions of the other people in the house."

Kaim responds with a silent nod.

His only connection with the woman is to have boarded the same boat and sat at the same table. Only a few minutes have passed since she started volunteering her stories, but that is all it has taken for Kaim to perceive the hint of nihilism lurking in her beautiful features.

"The more respectable artists despise painters like me."

"Why is that?"

"Well, half of them accuse us of making our living from people's deaths. The other half look down on us for not being moved by what we do. I see their point. I mean, the emotions are what give rise to all the arts, whether it's painting, sculpture, music, or literature. We don't have emotions like that: we're nothing but craftsmen."