The Exquisite Corpse, a deadly tale of Art

A beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not.― Leonardo da Vinci

He worked feverishly. It was always like that when he worked on a piece. The work became all consuming and the only thing that mattered was finishing it. As with all his art, once the theme had been determined by some great injustice or minor annoyance, he spent a day in meditation, creating a variety of pieces in his mind until something in his brain clicked, like a combination lock that suddenly opens with the correct turn of the wrist.

The hardest part was finding just the right subjects, whose presence within the artwork would raise it from mere decoration to a relic with hidden meaning and power. The humans that served as media in his creations needed to be perfect and it surprised him how many perfect individuals were there for the taking.

For the particular work of art he was presently creating, after the harvesting of the fingers and tattoos, he found himself with the unpleasant, yet necessary task of disposing of the bodies. It was a difficult, tiring chore and he thanked heaven for the dried out well on the property near his studio. At almost two hundred feet in depth, it was the final resting place of all of his perfect donors, requiring only several yards of cement every now and then to entomb and obscure all the unnecessary parts. He laughed to himself on many occasions at the realization that in twenty or so years, if he lived that long, the well would be completely filled with cement, and corpses, of course.

His latest project was titled Senseless. It was his comment on gun violence and society's low regard for the value of human life. He saw the irony and obvious hypocrisy of his own artistic method and it instilled within him great guilt, but it was a guilt he was willing to suffer for the greater good. It was a guilt he reveled in, like a flagellant suffering for Christ. The pain of his guilt was a baptism for each work of art he created.

He was presently engaged in the tedious process of preparing his organic specimens for inclusion in his art. Sometimes he would use casts made from the body parts and sometimes he would go through the far more intricate process of plastination, replacing the fats and fluids of a specimen with epoxy to prevent decay. This was the process he had chosen for the fingers he had harvested and it would be weeks before they were ready to be integrated into his piece. The tattooed skin was being stretched and tanned, a faster method than plastination, but still requiring patience and skill.

When these initial preparations were complete, he turned his attention to building the box that would house them. The diagram he created contained numerous small sections to enclose all the found and gathered items necessary to tell the visual tale he wished to convey. He found the building of these boxes both soothing and meditative.

When the box was completed, he gathered all the remaining artifacts he needed for the artwork. He would not assemble the piece until all the parts, including those being preserved, were ready.

This was the most difficult period for him, the two weeks before he could complete his work. It was during this time he addressed the more mundane aspects of his life. He would pay his bills, shop for groceries, do some reading, and catch up on his favorite shows. The only thing he did that related to his art was to check on the progress of his preservations and tend to his small greenhouse where he grew the Chondrodendron plant, from which he extracted the curare he used when harvesting the people necessary for his art.

On this particular Friday, he found himself pulling into a nearly empty parking lot in front of a Food Lion in the early evening to purchase groceries. Near the front entrance, a disheveled woman sat on the ground holding her daughter, a child of about four. A sign was propped up by her knees that read 'Please Help Me Feed My Girl'. The sight upset him greatly. When he finished his shopping and exited the store, he noticed two teenagers harassing the mother. He chased them off and dug into his wallet to give the woman his last forty dollars. She thanked him profusely.

He felt exhilarated on his way home. The plight of the homeless and their abuse, seemed to him the perfect theme for his next work. It was a cause worth illustrating and some of his possible subjects were already so close to his home. It was almost as though fate was shining brightly upon his vision and guiding him to his next endeavor. He would see if he still felt the same when his present piece of art was complete.