I am an artist.
My fingers dip into acid azure. The frenzy inside me is citrus sweet, eating at my teeth. Nails spread color onto wastes of white. The scratchings manage to hold the weight of heavy rain, caught in vivid acrylic. It's completed with the speed of birth -- hours and hours of laboring. Snatched breaths, panting, the tearing of old to produce new.
I sign with a set of constellations. Curved comets to light up the dark. Invisible in sunlight, in shadow, they’d glow like fireflies. Some artists only add a signature to say finished. Finite. I add it the same way I add color. The portrait would be empty without it. Infinite.
I travel to night. Spiral galaxies and stellar graffiti. Neon gas giants and fluorescent nebula. I hesitate to add a moon. To stamp her onto the blank space would implode me. Wreck the theme of loneliness I’m trying to weave.
I reflect on my mistake as my hand, possessed, presses the silver crescent of Luna onto my painting. She weeps her own light, and I have to change all the shading I’ve sketched.
The artist I am doesn’t mind. My hands shake with fury, and I attack the next piece. I mourn the hours I have wasted on something as simple as a moon.
Splashes of white, thunderheads bursting with rage. I cut up clouds, make them pregnant with lightning. Haphazard, lazy work. Too much rain, too much noise.
Next, we glue each element to the painting and hope they stick. I shove all the completed work into the abyss. They will find their way down to the world, I am sure. Paintings exist without their artist. They are infinite.
My next task is to make a plain summer sky. I fold up the corners of a blank page, fit it to the proportions of a bedroom window. Birds made of beads and origami insects I add next. Spread around them cobalt and sapphire, ignore their refusal to blend.
They almost feud, but I like the tension. It makes the sky threaten to split, and the space behind spill out.
I’m near done when I notice a mistake.
Eraser-grey runs from one side of the paper to the next, slicing out of the scene. I didn’t remember adding that. It’s a loose stitch in my careful surgery.
It spreads to the other works that sit idle beside me. Cancer flowing through veins, the silver eraser-grey haunts. It festers and pollutes, and no matter what my rubbing and tearing and painting overdo, it grows again.
Mistakes unfurl and curl on my paintings, my skies. They do not belong to me.
The worst blooms of these error-weeds are the ones that glow with heat. Solar oranges, uranium yellows. They are colors that stain the cerulean charcoal. I am a freak. My work is bombing itself to pieces.
To retaliate, I try to piece together tempests out of tiles. Frescoes of hurricanes and crashing waves. Sketches of snowstorms, crayon artwork trying to copy collapsed atmospheres. I try to fix my style, but the eraser-slivers keep cutting me.
It only gets better at worming beneath my nails. My scratchings thin.
I unveil my last painting.
A void of howling nothingness. No stars, no silence. Secretly, the black is actually packed spectra of light, strangled to appear empty. A rabid rainbow, an anorexic iridescence.
A sky with no decoration. No clouds, no colors.
The eraser does not strike this time.
I am done.
Complete.
Finite.
I am an artist,
without an art.
This story is part of official church scripture describing how this world lost its sky.
In my head, there is this cold, almost polar desert world, where there is no atmosphere to protect the inhabitants. People either live underground or wear specialized masks to allow them to breathe on the surface.
In terms of flora and fauna, they'd be very alien. Bioluminescence, bulbs, membranes, and gills would feature heavily. Humans are colonists to this world (perhaps the descendants of a long lost magitek empire?) who struggle to survive in the wastes.
Magic wise, I see it as low magic, with an emphasis on internal/external abilities. Maybe even elemental, but with non-traditional elements replacing the usual 4. Sandbenders for the win!
Anyway, this is just my ramblings.
Submitted August 06, 2018 at 01:18PM by _cocytiae_ https://ift.tt/2MkwXUF
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