Muse
This short story was published in Illumination: The Undergraduate Journal of Humanities in their Spring 2019 edition.
Peering at Margo from the canvas were Violet’s unblinking green eyes. The real eyes were probably inspecting apples for dents at the grocery store. But these irises, blended with shades of milky watercolors or pieced together with jagged emerald magazine cut-outs, were only for Margo. Sometimes she talked to Violet’s penciled, slightly parted lips. A couple times she thought she heard whispered responses.
Margo smudged the final touch, a shallow dimple on the right cheek, with a stub of charcoal. She let her breathing come back to a normal pace, left her trance and came out of the music’s flow. Her work had always come from feelings, her thoughts took shape from her brush in some way, through colors or images. For a year all she could bring to life on canvas was heartbreak in the shape of a small, dimple-faced woman.
The doorbell buzzed in the living room. Margo streaked her worn jeans with charcoal before pressing the speaker.
“It’s me,” Elle’s voice crackled over the intercom.
“Come in,” Margo wiped hair out of her eyes, adding a gash to stripes already covering her face.
Margo pushed the button to let her in and rushed to grab the tiny canvas before she heard the elevator ding. She put it on her bedroom floor to dry and shut the door — she didn’t need Elle to see Violet.
Margo was at the sink scrubbing black dust off her arms when Elle walked in. Her friend’s small-boned frame still crowded the tiny one-bedroom apartment.
“Is that charcoal?” she asked excitedly, rubbing a finger on Margo’s forehead. “You’re making things!”
Margo pushed her hand away with a damp paper towel and erased the mark. “Oh, no, just throwing away some old supplies.”
“I hope you don’t mean all your supplies.” Elle’s eyebrows curved in opposite directions and furrowed. “It’s been a year. You have to get out of this artist’s block. Today will help, I promise.” Margo nodded subtly but Elle was already shutting the bathroom door.
It was three years earlier when Margo kissed a woman for the first time. That woman’s subtle touches pulled Margo toward her, her lips were magnetic, luring Margo into a cab. More would have happened in her floral bed if their long hair and boobs brushing together hadn’t made Margo roll away from the woman, cover herself with blankets and say, panicked, “I’m not gay.”
Margo told Elle about it the next day while they stood on ladders next to each other. They’d been asked to paint a mural on a theater’s outside wall. The director envisioned famous play characters sitting in rows of velvet seats mirroring the auditorium inside.
“I don’t know, what was happening felt right but then I became so aware that she was, well, a she,” Margo said. She filled in Dorothy’s lips with cherry red paint while Elle added fur to Toto’s ears. She thought about the woman’s matte lipstick, how the orange shade had locked Margo’s eyes onto her heart-shaped lips. “It happened so fast.”
“But it happened, and it felt right for a little bit, right?”
Margo nodded.“Then it’s something worth trying more, just ease into it. You should meet Violet. I’ve told you about her before, the one who does cartoons for the paper.”
“You think setting me up is easing into it?”
“No, think of her as your queer counselor. But I’d be lying if I said I don’t hope you two hit it off,” Elle said.
Two weeks later, Elle’s buzzer rattled. She tiptoed around a heap of papers and paints. A dark bottle of wine came through the door’s crack before Violet’s curly hair.
“Margo, in the flesh,” she walked over to me and looked at my half-made collage. At its center were two naked goddesses covering their crotches with orchids. She laughed softly. “Elle’s told me a lot about you.”
After setting three glasses of burgundy wine down Violet sat cross-legged on the floor with the other two. She pulled out a leatherbound notebook and drew twisted lines that curled into faces. The three hardly talked, just let Leonard Cohen, scissor clicks, and pen scratches surround them.
Margo stole glances at Violet every few minutes. Her round glasses fell to the tip of her nose, balanced on a gold hoop in her nostril. They made eye contact once, Margo looked down quickly and hoped she hadn’t seen. After a couple glasses were finished, its freeing warmth made conversation flow as smoothly as the wine out of its bottle. She suggested paths for Violet’s pen to take but distracted her with off-road tangents. Elle asked if Violet was still seeing her girlfriend. When she said no Margo’s stomach tightened like a rubber band ball.
Days after that a text from an unknown number blinked on Margo’s phone: “hey, it’s violet! wanna grab coffee this week? :)” They met, both bringing their notebooks to work on sketches, but neither ever opened. They talked for hours, refilling their tea mugs until the barista started stacking chairs on tables.
“I’m this way,” Margo pointed in the direction of her apartment building when they pushed through the doors.
“I can take the long way home,” Violet said. She started walking with Margo as her mind started running.
They reached Margo’s door and continued talking, shrinking their broad conversations into mundane chatter about out the weather. Margo dug in her bag for her keys and Violet stepped an inch closer.
“Can I kiss you?” Violet asked. Margo nodded and their two lips moved together, broken up by smiles and small chuckles.
“Come inside?”
Two years later after that kiss, most of Margo’s days were spent with Violet. She wore a rainbow-striped pin on her purse and proudly bragged about her girlfriend. She painted every day, covering blank canvases with dandelion yellow and sunset peach in thick strokes. Months of rain slowed her and Elle’s mural progress, so Margo filled the time mixing shades of blue and purple to mimic outer space’s indigo hue. On the last day she painted in front of someone, Margo erased and redid the outline of Violet’s small nose a dozen times, reworking her nostrils until they flared just right.
“How many times are you going to re-do that?” Elle reclined on the couch facing Margo, lazily moving her hand across a sketchbook.
Margo’s phone rang, interrupting the music’s loud drum crashes. She wiped paint off her hands and stepped onto Elle’s balcony.
“Hey, you.”
“Hi,” Violet replied. “Can I come over?”
“I’m at Elle’s, give me an hour?”
“Yeah, sure,” she sounded tired, used the same gentle lull that was all she could muster when she first woke up in the mornings. “See you then.”
Margo filled in the painting’s galaxies, added a layer of silver to Violet’s spaceship.
The last flourish was a note on the back: To Violet, Happy 23rd Birthday. You’re my moon. Love always, Margo.
The canvas was twice her size, but she hauled it the few blocks between Elle’s apartment and her own. Violet was sitting on the front steps when she got there.
“Don’t look at this, not yet!” Margo pressed the painted side against her torso, balancing it on her chest as she unlocked the door.
They squeezed in the tight elevator. Margo leaned in to kiss Violet, but she looked down at the permanent ink scrawled in the canvas’ corner. Worry wrinkles carved deep ridges in her forehead.
“What’s wrong? I know you didn’t want me to do anything for your birthday, but I felt inspired.”
“Let’s talk inside, Margie.” The bell dinged. They shuffled a few feet to Margo’s door in silence.
We should see other people. Margo muttered it over and over. It was all she could hear even after Violet’s indent in the couch disappeared. Two years ended in an hour. Margo strained to catch her breath through sobs. She pushed the painting off the table, flipping it too see Violet’s hardened face. She jabbed her heel through the curved nose. She stomped until only patches of stars remained, like meteor holes punched through the sky, until she collapsed on the couch.
The next morning, Margo perched the dilapidated canvas on her kitchen counter. She sat at the table across from it with a thick, empty sheet of paper and her paints. The shallow dips around the clean pallet stared at her like blank, unamused eyes waiting for anything to brighten them. She twirled blue, purple, green, white together until it made globs matching the canvas’ space background and recreated the scene, curvy-nosed astronaut and all. Hours later, she finished and hung it in her room across from her bed. She grabbed a bottle of wine and the broken canvas, and walked to Elle’s apartment, throwing the wounded painting in the dumpster.
As far as Elle knew Margo hadn’t touched a brush since the day she completed the big canvas nearly a year before. The perpetual rain stopped, but Margo picked up waitressing shifts or faked plans with nonexistent friends. She’d try sketching Christine from Phantom of the Opera only to realize her cupid-bow lips belonged to Violet. Even Hamlet’s small pointed chin was identical to one Margo used to kiss before falling asleep.
Margo followed Elle downstairs to her dented Buick. Margo moved Elle’s massive bag of brushes into the backseat, they clinked on tin paint cans.
“And she’s back at it,” Elle said, smirking as she twisted to look out the back window and pull out of the parking lot. “Just took a threat to fire us to force you back into the world.”
“They still might after today,” Margo said.
“Come on, it’s only been one year in your 21 as an artist. It’ll come back to you.”
The night before, Margo practiced sketching Annie, but the red curls mirrored Violet’s dark corkscrews instead of the beloved little orphan’s. She’d torn up dozens of papers and thrown scraps into the trash. She pulled out her laptop and watched video tutorials showing her how to sketch a human face — the figure on her paper matched the screen’s, there wasn’t any shadow of Violet. Margo planned to mimic Elle’s motions, focus on mixing the same murky green of the Wicked Witch’s skin instead of the paleness of Violet’s eyes.
“It’s just been a while since I made something people would see.”
“If the Margo I know is still in there, you’ll forget about anyone else the second you have that paintbrush in your hand.”
A few miles later, Elle pulled into a lot in front of a wall covered in a billowing tarp. They undid tethers holding two ladders down on the car’s roof, snagged the paint supplies. The ladders stood a few feet apart, like pillars supporting the wall. Elle unrolled a large paper they’d sketched plans for the mural on back when they started. Margo turned up the volume on her radio speakers.
Elle scaled the ladder with a thick brush dripping black, while Margo stayed on the ground. She studied Maria from The Sound of Music’s curled eyelashes she’d painted when she still could, focused on different faces in front of her. She fixated on all their flat eyes, dark from lacking memories and souls. She tried to turn off the green pupils glaring behind her own shut eyes and climbed her ladder.
Margo watched Elle’s arm closely as she outlined the Phantom of the Opera’s mask. When Elle stroked over the jaw once more, Margo made a similar curve for the Grease heartthrob’s face. When Elle glanced over, Margo focused on mixing paints on her pallet. Margo tuned into the music. The bass drum resonated in her chest. She stared at the blank face she’d carved out. She remembered the hole kicked through Violet’s painted astronaut face, the headless body. She breathed and transfixed on mixing whites and yellows and greens to paint thin skin over the nose in front of her. Her arm moved like someone guided it that wasn’t Elle.
The speaker went silent when the album ended. Elle’s ladder screeched as she stepped down.
“Jesus, Margo,” Elle said. Margo snapped back to reality, her arm and mind stopped. “Why would you do that?”
Margo met the green eyes looking at her. She dropped her paintbrush to the ground.
“I didn’t try,” she whispered.
“Come down,” Elle yelled. Margo crawled down the ladder and collapsed into Elle’s arms.
Sobs rippled through her. Elle held her close while she guided her to the passenger seat. Margo watched through tears while Elle moved their things back into the car, much sooner than planned.
Elle got in the car but did not start it. She flipped the mural sketch over to its blank side and placed a pen in Margo’s hand. She wrapped her own hand around Margo’s so they both gripped it.
“You don’t need her anymore. Come on,” Elle said as she pushed their hands to draw a jagged line.
Margo thought back to when the idea of having something to confess about her identity made her want to collage a million different pictures together to make a new self. The time in her life well before Violet made her proud to tell people who she loved. Tears streamed faster down her face as she squeezed her eyes shut, but Elle kept moving her hand.
“Open them, Margo,” Elle said in a comforting tone, like a mother bandaging a child’s scraped knee. “This is who you need right now. This is who got you to figure out who you are, alright? Behind all your art it’s just her.”
Margo opened her eyes to see blue irises mirroring hers.
