The Empty Canvas: Flash Fiction
He travels the world, hoping, stupidly and quite unaware of it himself, for a glimpse of her
Harold meets his wife Mary on a trip with a group of friends to see the coast at Oresannt. Mary is among the group but Harold has not previously been introduced to her; he is quickly curious of her, and then enchanted. It is while they are swimming amongst the rocks at Dertia that he sees her rise from the water and realizes that she is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. Her long black hair, soaked, falls heavily on either side of her face, and she looks like she has emerged mystically from the depths, as if she is not fully human, but an entity of legend or prophecy. She sees him looking at her and smiles.
In his hotel room, he straddles her legs as she lies on her stomach, her thighs pressed close. She is a buxom woman but she has strange small buttocks, which when her thighs are pressed together form with them a thin square cross, at the center of which (hidden in the folds of her flesh) is her asshole, and just below that, her vagina, both of which he fucks as she cries out breathlessly beneath him.
After they marry, they move together to a house in Almholm. Surrounded by countryside their house is wide and airy, and Mary fills it with her paintings, light falling down upon her from the window as she works. They spend their days in bliss. Aside from household tasks they roam the hills, picnicking in the nude in the small secluded meadows surrounding the house.
One day Mary is standing alone outside, painting a thicket by the house. The tree she is looking at turns to crystal — she blinks hard — and then it begins to waver, blur against the sky. A hand to her forehead, she stumbles forward. When Harold returns to the house — going through it, finding it empty, then going out the back — he finds her collapsed by her easel, dead.
Harold leaves Almholm and never returns. He travels the world, hoping, stupidly and quite unaware of it himself, for a glimpse of her. He sees the beach at Sirende, where people walk barefoot through the black sand, and at the horizon the blue worlds of sea and sky merge indistinguishably… He spends most of his time in Aratua, a low-lying and rather dilapidated city, where the prostitutes in the brothels remind him of Mary. Fat and heavy-breasted, they have that sense of self-assuredness Mary had had, which he finds in most other people to an either insufficient or excessive degree.
Of these prostitutes Martha is his favorite, and he often wonders what does she think, looking into his eyes like that? Does she feel as cut off from the world as he does, as afloat? The men who pass through her arms wisps of smoke; himself another sad and lonely old man. Most people, looking at him, could guess what little there is to know about his current way of life, and would think him something of an incorrigible lecher. In truth he yearns for a daughter.
