Still Life of an Apple Molding

     The sound of a phony wave crashes and the man with the paintbrush pauses mid stroke to hear it. It falls like an instrument of intermittence, playing the tune he always knew he would wake to scream at. The canvas defaces him, assembled on an easel in an underground room. “Welcome to my underworld”, he says to the Muse that so often betrays him, such fraud coiled in her fidelity as he strumms a painted hand through a tousled head of Einsteinian disarray , “I hope you enjoy my demons, they’re just for you.”

            She, of course, does not answer. She is far off, flitted away in her nomadic tendencies, sparking another artist with her precious loins of inspiration. He was alone and befallen within the grief of the horrid self-pity that appears and reappears when the will to create vanishes. “The curse of the artist”, he says, moaning in morbid matrimony to the invisible Muse who has no promise in return. He sighs and paces, catching the light, the angles, the atmosphere of his still life of an apple molding. Unable to declare what was missing, he signs it, small but legible in the left corner, with his signature Egyptian scarab and initials of B.M. “Beltram Mort, the name of a deviant,” he fights the urge to break the canvas in half and, instead, throws the still wet marvel into the pile of his other witherings of failure. He unleashes an animal cry, a sob that could not belong to any being with a sound mind and stampedes in retreat, in a subsided, agonizing need to escape, up the stairs into his upside down home. The basement is his prison.

            He lay in bed, beneath the sheets, wandering with serial curiosity what his Muse must be doing right now. He enjoys the fabrication that she is lost, trapped inside the endless, spiraling hallways of the paper castle he had painted several months ago; or perhaps she was coercing the genie in the bottle he had wished out of his head twenty six days ago after becoming a Jafarian victim to the lure of Arabian Nights; or maybe, just maybe, she was with him right now, just sleeping in a poisoned slumber from a prick from the spinning wheel he had failed to turn into gold a week before. Deep down, he knew the truth, he knew she was gone and never coming back, but when abandonment does arise, when anguish begins to eat away at a life force, the only thing we can do is deny it. For the more tortured souls, it is the only way to survive. Beltram drifted off, swallowing sleep as if it were syrup, thick and heavy and slow, taking it like it was “a spoonful of sugar” in the sour tasting reality he knew he would have to wake to.

            The usual red tint that constructed his dreams flowed out in vast disposal; unlike most nights, he saw no other sights or visions except for the Red itself. It was wild, yet focused, fevered with singular intent: to take. It flooded on, a scarlet molasses that could consume a city, eating the children’s brains first and then the artists. It had no mercy, but paced and pumping was its flow, it knew the best way to kill was in caressing and pitiless progression, taking one breath at a time and then tricking the victim by giving it back, and then when one thinks they have been spared, the Red will rip it away again, sucking it from the bosom where one’s deepest secrets crawl, forcing them to a swallow of finality. It was taking him and there was no way out. Nightmares have no true escape, no sudden elevator of departure.

            Beltram Mort woke in perspiring fright, cold sweat fused with the heat of the drown. “Blood, blood, blood,” he muttered, a reiterating fool, grasping blind in the darkness for the brush that lay only in the grounds below, in the hell of his fallen heaven, “Blood, blood, blood.” He climbs from his bed, circulating in the disoriented silence known as the night, the depiction that darkens the souls of those of us who have known the torment of the demon that beckons us to create. It keeps us up. It keeps Beltram up. He walks in a sleep induced drunken stupor, like a dead man rising from the grave. But he is far from dead, he is at the spark of life, of the only life that freezes time, that locks one within the mind, that spirals the depth beneath the waves and their secrets. “Blood, blood, blood.” Ah, yes, this was Midnight Madness, the clock struck three times, but oh it was wrong, it had divided itself by four, subtracted nine, such sacred numbers diffuse into the subject of Time itself. It is the precipitant of Madness, the uttering, the muttering of those with a derived intent. “Blood, Blood, Blood.” He chants in a trance of concentrated affection, he knows what he has to do.

            He climbs down beneath the Earth, meeting with him the gateway of his own burial. Gnawing through the witherings of his successes, he finds his last painting, the still life of the apple molding and places it upon the alter of the artist. “Blood, Blood, Blood,” he mutters still, infatuated by the wisp of alleviation, that final inspiration, the one he must bet his life upon. He finds a pointed and refined cobble stone upon the floor of his basement sweep, “Blood, Blood, Blood,” he whispers, a solidarity in his voice, assured of his coming actions, no foreboding in his thicket of truth, “Blood, Blood, Blood,” the stance of completion, the raised arm of a poet coming to streams with his conscious finale, the flow of Paints proceed the Earthly bounds. His body, his body was the temple of his creation, the maple of the tree was worth more than the sap. He saw the Red in his dream, it was the perfect shade, a darkened scarlet. “Blood, Blood, Blood.” He paused breathing in air, the last inhale of his decree. He drives the sword like stone into his wrist, screaming in anguish, kissing his long gone Muse goodbye, until the rock reaches the other side, missing the bone, but penetrating the artery.

            He finds the grasp of his paintbrush, the tip so caressed and sweet, the stylus of his ripped and tortured soul, guiding it to his salvation, he dips it into his severed arm, catching the perfect hue of Red on the hair of that sweet tip, and reaches for the Canvas, no longer defacing him, but facing him with solace, a solace that runs so deep it exemplifies pride, it touches Love. He slithers across the wise and knowing surface, watching the Red fuse with the apple core, a poison apple in which his Muse may eat, watching it rot and decay into a doom of setting. He fevers with the trance of art, with the coming demise of a world withheld from our knowing.

            “Oh, the beauty of Death, it is complete,” He cries, holding the brush with a sacred devotion that more articulated humans could never understand. Beltram Mort falls to the ground, to his prison grave, still grasping his Pen of Picture. He spirals in chaos and growling and growing morbidity beneath the glow of his masterpiece, the blur of his sight recedes, but his vision endures. The apple stares back, an eye within its core, gratitude from its stem. The Canvas whispers “Goodbye to thee,” but the Brush knows no goodbye, “I am following you in Death”, it says, a smile soaked in blood slips across Beltram Mort’s face. He sees within the unthinkable distance, the distance that only those touching Death can ever know, and he sees the after life, a life beyond, but within the Disturbia of his rot and rise. The ever tortured artist sees with a tearful, truthful, glorious knowing the source behind the Canvas, no God it was, this I swear. Mr. Mort watches as the Egyptian scarab with his very initials carved upon the creature’s back crawls to his presence, retrieving him for it’s symbol of eternal, of the immortal sap. The sound of a phony wave crashes, but the Man of Paints hears it no longer.

            Beltram Mort dies, slipping off into a Death by means of Madness, Brush in hand, scarab by side, and leaving behind a destiny with no destitute. His Muse withers into dust, the price for her betrayal, but the Still Life of an Apple Molding, molds on in its everlasting decay. And as for his Paints, well they are drowned, never to be used by another. The watercolors dissolve within the Red Sea, a funeral pyre of the acrylic’s mortality, seeping forever like “Blood, Blood, Blood!” The Phony wave crashes yet again, and it is only the most tortured of us that can still hear it.