Life in Paintings

Chapter 6 - Punishment of Marsyas

Chapter 6

Punishment of Marsyas

My hands are pressed where my heart is when I wake up. My eyes are filled with tears but those aren’t tears of sadness. They’re tears of anger.

I’m angry—very angry.

I understand that vandalizing and destroying property is illegal, but that’s why we have prisons. This whole curse thing is absolutely ridiculous and I don’t deserve it. I don’t deserve any of this.

I get up on my feet, still feeling the phantom ache of the blade piercing through my chest but I ignore it.

I’m not weak. I was never weak. Not once in my life have I been week. I’ve always been strong.

It’s time I act like it.

I take in my surrounding. I’m in a forest this time. The leaves are turning orange and brown and red so I’m assuming wherever I am, it’s fall. I don’t know how this will help me in any way, but there’s a sense of power in trying to situate myself. The more I know about what’s going on, the more I can take charge. That’s the only thing I can think of. Normally, when I dream, if I know what’s going on, and I know I’m dreaming I can take charge. Maybe This can work the same way if I really will it.

I’m grasping at any straws at this point.

I start walking ever if I’m completely exhausted and I’d rather just curl up on the ground and forget about all of this. I’ve lost one of my shoes, probably before I drowned and I was too preoccupied with the witches to notice it earlier but now I do. My clothes are torn and bloody and dirty. I’m missing a shoe. I stink. My hair is without a doubt a complete mess.

All of me is a mess.

I shake the thought and start walking. I need to figure out thing, that’s the number one plan, not fretting over my appearance.

After a few minutes of walking I hear sound—or more precisely, the kind of sound a mob of people would do. There is music softly playing and the more I walk, the louder the conversations sound—but conversation isn’t the only thing going on.

There’s a man shouting—well wailing might be a more accurate description of what’s going on.

When I get close enough to see why this man is being so loud, I automatically want to turn around.

No. This is not happening. This can’t be.

            I cover my mouth to keep form shouting, my eyes wide. I doubt the people surrounding the wailing man would hear me though, they’re too busy celebrating.

            Celebrating around a man—well man is loosely used here because he’s not a man, he’s a satyr, or whatever you called creatures with the body of a man, but the legs of a horse—that they have hanging upside down, tied by his hooves in a tree, while they are skinning him alive.

            I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. On one hand I want to help the man. On the other, I have no idea how I can help him. I doubt I can fight off all of the people assembled around him. And even if I save him, what’s the point. They’re skinning him.

That thought is enough to have me storming. What’s the worse they can do to me anyway? I’ll die. I know it. And it’s going to hurt. I know it. The least I can do is try something.

I walk forward, away from the cover of the trees. “Stop!” I shout, to try to get their attention.

The people ignore me though. There’s a young kid standing by an old man, holding on to a dog that smiles at me. Part of his face is covered in blood and he smiles at me.

I take a step back.

There’s a man with horn walking around and it’s a scary sight. He looks like some kind of devil.

And the skinning doesn’t stop.

“You’re here to celebrate the victory of the gods too?” a man playing violin asks me, way too enthusiastically.

“How is this a celebration?” I shout again.

He ignores what I said and presses, “The gods have proved their worth yet again.”

“What did he do?!” I can’t take this, this ludicrous logic. I’m exhausted and hungry and thirsty and dirty and I want to go home. I want all of this to end. And I want the torture to stop for that man that’s being hung upside down at the moment. “What did he do to deserve this, you bunch of fucking lunatics!?”

The man is surprised by my sudden outburst. I don’t understand how he can be. How can he think that any of this is right? “He challenged Apollo to a contest of music and he lost,” he explains, like it actually makes sense.

“Oh yeah that makes total fucking sense!” I point out. “He lost a stupid music contest so now he deserves to be skinned alive?”

Seriously, it’s like the curse boy wants me to hate paintings.

“There is nothing stupid about a challenge with a god, and you should start minding your tongue, commoner,” the man that’s been doing the skinning tells me, looking away form his work momentarily.

I snort in disbelief. The nerve on that painting piece of crap. “Mind my tongue? Fuck you, you vapid sack of shit! I’ve been eaten alive! I’ve been stabbed and squished and drowned and had my throat slit. Whatever you throw at me, I don’t care! I’m gonna die here, I already know it!”

I’m shouting, and I’m hysterical and I don’t care anymore, I really don’t. This is all a really bad dream.

“Have you heard this, my friends, this girl insinuates that she’s been killed and brought back form the dead.” The man that holds the violin laughs at me. “And she says she’ll die here again. Should we let her join the satyr she is trying to protect?”

“TIE HER UP!”

“LET HER JOIN HIM!”

“LET’S SKIN HER”

The quickly grab me before I have time to run and tie my ankles together, swigging the rope over a big branch of the tree, hanging me in it. The man already tied doesn’t even give me a glance. This was all a waste. That guy didn’t even want to be saved, or helped.

Also, I had wrongly assumed that getting skinned would kill me fairly quickly. I was wrong. This is taking a while. And to think that I actually once thought that getting a paper cut was a big deal.

Getting eaten was probably more frightening, but it ended quickly—the second my skull was broken. This is different. This is slow, leisurely torture, and it’s a different kind of painful. It’s a pain that resonates throughout my entire body, hitting every nerve.

I can’t understand why they don’t cover their ears with how shrilling my shrieking is.

I don’t know if I lose consciousness or die from the blood loss or removed skin, but I see the skin of my stomach hanging in front of my eyes before being engulfed in black yet again.