The Painters Death Wish

My Lillies

A tuneful hum muffled into existence. With a paintbrush in hand and palette nearby, Tony began to paint. Unruffled by the turbulence in the air, his fluency increased with passion. He found himself irked by his model in front of him. He tilted his head to observe her strife. She abstained from eye contact and shivered at his glance. He smiled and continued with his craft, humming over her pained meows. As she whimpered, she grew pale like clay and bit at the bondage till her mouth bled. He noticed it, how her skin had a new shade of pink, turning red.

"Are you alright love?"

 He smiled when he got no response. "You're as pale as a lover dying of despair." He thought back to his remark, forgetting about his model. "I like that." He dashed a new coat of red on the canvas. "As a lover dying of despair."He started to laugh, a deep laugh that came from his chest.

"Don't you just love-love?" Tony spoke without looking at her. "I can tell you something about love." He darted a large blob of paint on the canvas and worked from there. "It kills." There was a bucket next to him that looked as innocent as a bin should and; he grabbed something from it. That something-turned his models panic into trepidation. She watched as he used it to stipple across the page, her eyes widened with every dot. Then he took the object of her affliction and pointed it right at her. Her heart stopped.

"You!" His stony expression laid her bare. He was pointing a severed hand at her. The paint marking its fingers dripped onto the floor; he was using it to finger paint without the hassle of getting his own hands dirty. It was fresh, so fresh that its skin wasn't dry. It was a male hand, no blotches- just brawny hands-that have no beginning. "Look." He turned his easel to face her. He spoke like a child eager to impress."Do you see yourself?" She froze in fear; she'd never experienced this type of anxiety before so much so that she keeled over.

He vexed with her reply, twisting his eyebrows in adverse fate. "What?" He smiled. "You don't like flowers?" The artwork depicts her body grotesquely, giving her freakish flexibility and deforming her limbs. In it, she is amputated and posed in an outlandish fashion. Her head was severed, located in the middle of her body, probably to represent a flower ovary-her arms and legs were the petals.

He stood and dusted himself down, striding towards the television on the wall. He was in his man cave, behind the door with many secrets. The area lit by red-LED lights that shine onto the artworks on the wall had a hidden area etched into the wall. He designed a cage to be placed into the wall and extended it outwards into the cellar. He could view her from the comfort of his cave that held both his entertainment of a lounging area. Modern Pollock themed furniture aligned with dark walls and wooden antiques. There too was another small bar in the corner, cushioned in-between another sculpture and security system. A news story appeared on the screen, a recent crime report.

"You're friends become famous."The women removed her hands from the bars and crept into the darkness of the cellar. "She wanted to become famous right?" He walked to his bar and poured himself a drink. "Acting is a tough thing to get into." He swivelled the glass in his hand. "This is easier". He walked to the cage and clicked his glass onto the metal. He took his time striding from the one end to the next, calmly as if in a daze. "Look my flower." He held his glass up to the screen. "Can you see it?"

The screen added," It happened around six-thirty this morning in the Jardins des Tuileries of The Musée de l'Orangerie..."

He watched her expression sour and wondered as to whether she could hear or not. While the news report continued-she crawled closer into the light, grabbing the cage bars.

"The Sûreté reported the findings of an amputated body hidden amongst the Lillies in the infamous museum of renowned artist Claude Monet..."

No picture of the victim surfaced of course, for both the family and viewer (mostly for the victim). They did not describe the victim, nor give out any serious details of the crime scene. The women knew of whom they spoke of, and she wailed at the story. She pleaded with him and offered him what's left of her dignity, and he merely swallowed in her cries with an amused grin. He watched as her pupils trembled, perspiration marked her forehead. The foreshadowing of his words hit her harder than she started to hit the cage with her head. Banging her head with such discontent for her life, he had to act. He injected her quickly with a drug to end her sorrows, for only a while because he wasn't done with her yet. While stroking her hair with the caress of a lover; he held her head in place. 

" I think you belong amongst the Lillies," he whispered.  He kissed her forehead; holding a type of fascination in his thoughts that made him cringe.