Talentless.

“Are you familiar with the artist’s work?”

The art gallery is a sprawling collection of colours and textures, stark white walls accented by gold frames and a thousand different interpretations of the world and its wiles. Alexander Everett stands fixated on the peaks and valleys that belong not to any landscape, but to his own signed lettering in the bottom right corner of a portrait he’d painted years prior. The subject is faced away, her body contorted in a way he’s been told leaves viewers with nightmares: more animal than human with her limbs all twisted and her palms sewn over her ears.

She’d been beautiful, in reality. Golden hair down to her waist and skin made of porcelain.

“I hear he’s considering retirement,” Everett says of himself.

Unrecognising, the gallery curator offers a slow nod, putting pieces together in the confines of his own mind, “His pieces have been hot purchases lately... That makes sense, I suppose. But at any rate, artists never really do retire. Whether they’re putting it onto a canvas or not, the substance of the art lives on in their heads.”

“I’d like to buy this one.”

“The asking price is—”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll take it.”

The curator is cautious and attentive as he packages the portrait, pressing creases into the brown paper and gingerly pushing the canvas into a perfectly measured box.

“Would you like it loaded into the back seat?”

“No, the trunk is fine,” Alexander doesn’t want the atrocity staring at him through the rear-view mirror while he tries to drive.

Her gaze is felt from the trunk despite his preventative efforts. She’s uncomfortable in her own skin, angry with him for using the wrong techniques and creating a piece absent most humanity. She’s upset, weeping and weeping but the tears do not ever leave her face.

Why couldn’t his brush strokes have been more precise? Why wasn’t his hand steadier near the end?

There’s a shack outside of city limits that used to be a space for inspiration. It was a cabin, once, before he started associating it only with shortcomings. It’s nestled between blankets of pine trees and maple saplings, and owns a clearing that looks out over the nearest body of water, blue and sparkling.

For weeks – months now, maybe – he’s been stockpiling purchases that once decorated the walls of galleries across the country. Paintings that once captivated audiences absent such critical gazes.

The interior of the shack is catastrophic cacophony: with the final portrait dangling between his fingers, Alexander enters and immediately wishes he’d brought earplugs. Without unboxing his acquisition, he tosses it, careless. The canvas clatters against his collection of other artworks, protests in judgement for every second before it settles.

The subject knows her fate, now. She’s content with it.

The rest are in the dark, their unclear days becoming less and less meaningful each time their artist leaves.

And they’re angry, too.

The three-headed man in the white suit curses and curses. And he’s mean; somehow Alexander painted this one with a silver tongue that knows how to strike sharply. He hadn’t meant for this subject to have a tongue at all. Should’ve sewn his mouth shut for good measure.

On the table next to a neglected half-bottle of merlot (with fire ants swarming the gooey spill around it and a pesky wasp that keeps trying to find the opening) is another canvas. Another particularly loud subject: this one is a child screaming in agony. Their mouth is open impossibly wide and their body is shaking and they swear they’ve never known their mother or their father or anyone who ever cared for them.

The three-headed man in the white suit says, “You useless imbecile! You call yourself an artist? Every shade in my painting is wrong!”

The screaming child cries, “You’re the worst! The worst I’ve ever known! Leave me alone!”

The twisted tangle of a woman in the box stays silent. She knows her fate, now. She’s content with it.

Scattered all around the cabin are canvases. His life’s work in one place, all of them away from the prying eyes of critics and the inauthentically awestruck. Not one of these paintings is perfect, not one of them without some fatal flaw.

Maybe this is why most artists don’t find fame until they’re in their graves.

Maybe it’s better that way.

Heels drag uncharacteristically on the trek back to the open trunk. There’s a canister of gasoline awaiting his dispersal, and Everett is less eager than he thought he might be, but he begins dosing every nook and cranny of the shack with the flammable substance anyway. Each portrait silences in turn, every one of their denigrations drowning by his own hand.

“If not an artist, what would you have been?” the last subject asks him. She’s a kind and gentle woman, the flowers sprouting from her eyes and nose and mouth doing everything to hide her antique status.

At first, Alexander ignores her. He’s never talked back to his work.

The subject’s voice shifts toward a gargle, the gasoline soaking her collarbones and esophagus, “Are you talentless in everything? If not art, what path would you have taken, Alex?” This subject knows him intimately.

“Happiness,” comes his bitter answer. And he empties the canister over the garden of her head.

He stands at a distance from the shack when he tosses the match, but the warmth of the fire is on his face right away. It crackles and snaps angrily, and for the first time in forever, every subject he’s ever painted is silent.

When Alexander glances down to the dying grass, there’s a trail of gas that leads straight to his shoes. This wasn’t what he’d meant to happen, but finally, there is no art left to torture the artist. There is no measure of his talent.

He does not step back.