Vomited Art

"How could you?!" Kyle screamed, whipping a stack of neatly paperclipped pages clear across the room. They rained through the dining room like disappointed confetti, decorating it all in a deep sense of distaste.

Nevaeh stood, peering through the gap in her neatly arranged curls, holding her own hands.

"It's disgusting!" Kyle yelled again.

Somehow the words came out too loud and not harsh enough. Kyle had never raised his voice at her. Not once in their three years of together. Now he'd done it twice in the last minute.

"You don't...you don't like it?" A small gathering of tears gathered along her lashes.

"It's trash!"

Her plump lips, colored today by a beautiful blue lipstick, dropped open.

"Really? You think so?" Her voice trembled with every word, sounding meeker and more unsure than Kyle had ever heard her. It only pissed him off. "I mean...I'll trust your opinion. You're the writer really, but the AI said it was publishable."

"God, I'm gonna fucking throw up," Kyle said, rubbing his eyes with his finger and thumb hard enough to see stars. He squeezed the bridge of his nose with a disbelieving huff.

When he finally opened his eyes, they skipped straight over Nevaeh to the large floor-length window. He'd bought the house for it. For the warm, golden light that streamed through it when the sun started setting. For the way he could watch the squirrels on his hands and knees, really look them in the eyes. For the way it framed Nevaeh when she sat at his table. Today, there wasn't any sunlight. No warmth. No glow.

It was cloudy.

Too early for snow, too late for fall colours. Just...grey.

Kyle's eyes dropped to the table.

It wasn't very grey at all.

Rose petals, pink and gold and red, decorated the blank spaces of the black tablecloth interwoven with brilliant gold strands of thread. He could smell the garlic. Taste the wine. It was all so vivid. It gathered in the back of his throat and made him sick. All of this just to find out his lover, his best friend, his built-in audience had pissed all over his livelihood.

"You said you're publishing it?" he asked, his voice deathly quiet.

Nevaeh only nodded, clearly uncomfortable.

Kyle nodded back, looking more at the floor than at her. He walked slowly over to the table and sat down.

"Did you like dinner?" he asked, gently picking up a petal and rubbing it between his fingers.

It was such a mundane question to ask and not at all appropriate given the aching betrayal carving holes in his chest, but he needed to ask it. It was customary. And he didn't like breaking rules. Not when it came down to it.

"Nevaeh?"

"It was good," she replied, swaying slightly but not moving any closer to him.

He could just see her out of the corner of his eyes. Kyle knew he should just look up at her, but he couldn't bear the sight. Nevaeh would either look like she knew she hurt him or she wouldn't and he didn't know which was worse, the knowing or the ignorance.

"The cranberries were a really nice touch in the sauce."

"Came up with it myself," he said, but there was a note of disappointment in his voice that exposed the pain inside.

Kyle poked at a spot of gold on the tablecloth, following its path idly with his finger while he worked out how to speak to Nevaeh. He didn't want to scare her. The room was already as covered in paper as the table was in rose petals. He didn't want to make it worse. But it was already the worst it could be, wasn't it?

Finally, he sighed and turned slightly to face her.

"Do you know what the problem is?"

Nevaeh stared at him a moment before shaking her head.

"If it's the, uh, homoerotic undertones, I can try to-"

"No, Nevaeh. I don't give a fuck about that." His brow furrowed as an afterthought, the blow landing late that she thought he was homophobic. "Why would I give a rat's... Never mind."

His eyes dropped to a page under his socked foot. Kyle bent over in the chair and picked it up, feeling a lingering sense of regret for having thrown them. His eyes scanned through the little blocks of black text, growing heavy and sad. At last, he opened his mouth and read the entire page aloud.

When he was done, he let the page gently float back to the floor and asked, "Do you hear what's wrong?"

Nevaeh sighed, clearly exasperated and held out her hands.

"I don't know what you want from me. Maybe it's amateurish? You're the damn writer. Just tell me. Clearly it upsets you. So, tell me and I'll go take it to the AI and see how I can fix-"

"God fucking dammit, Nevaeh!" Kyle screamed, pressing the heels of his hands against his forehead as his eyes took on a wild, feral look. "Do you hear yourself? Can you hear your problem? I am a writer, yes. I have spent my entire life learning how to do this right, how to put commas where they matter, how to emphasize emotions and immediately undercut them. And you're out here, stealing my shit and using a goddamn algorithm to do it for you!"

Nevaeh's face dropped. All the worry bled out of her features. Cool, empty disdain replaced it.

"Oh. You're one of those AI haters?"

Kyle's mouth dropped open.

"It's my career, Nevaeh."

"Well, look. This is how it's changing. All career landscapes change. You're just going to have...eh...adapt. And it's not like I didn't do anything. I crafted my story as much as you did. I came up with the idea. I even edited the writing the AI gave me. You know, you have to know how to prompt the machine to get what you want and that's a tough skill. It's as much as you do, really."

Kyle sat, completely dumbfounded.

"As much as I do?" He shook his head softly. "No. No, not at all. I spent two years on my last project. Two. Years. Six hours every day fiddling with the words. I dreamt about it and when I wasn't asleep, I couldn't stop thinking about it. It consumed me. I wrote nineteen fucking drafts, Nevaeh. My short stories? Those little one-thousand-word things that take your AI five minutes to spit out? That takes me weeks."

"It's inefficient," Nevaeh said, crossing her arms.

"No, it's not!" Kyle bellowed, standing so fast that his chair tipped over backwards. "And it's not even about efficiency, you fucking idiot. That effort means something. It means that I care so much about my idea that I'm willing to pour every ounce of my mind into it. It means I bleed for it. It means it takes time to carve out a piece of my soul and press it into ink. No AI could do that and that you think it can is insulting."

Nevaeh's face only grew colder. She squatted down and picked up a handful of her pages, doing so with none of the nurturing, parental care of a writer.

"This is insulting to you? My ideas?"

"Your attitude."

He stormed over and yanked the pages from her, smoothing them down before setting them on the table.

"Art is the process. It is learning about humanity's depths. It is challenging that with our own broken souls. It is never about the product. It is about the connection you foster by baring yourself to the world and seeing how they receive it, seeing what kind of souls are moved by it. And here you are, stripping it down to algorithmic numbers that 'do the best' on the market. You are whoring out creativity! And that's saying nothing about what you're doing to the environment."

Kyle's nostrils flared as he inhaled sharply.

"If you go through with this, we're done," he finished.

"Over AI?"

Kyle shook his head and looked back to the window. It was drizzling now. The rain tapping against the grass outside looked bitterly cold and unwelcoming. Kyle swallowed. There was a short story there, he was sure. Suddenly his world shifted, tilted its axis completely, and broke.

"No, this just is a symptom. You're...not who I thought you were, Nevaeh," he said softly. "You don't see the world like I do. You don't see the value in experience or why someone might want to turn over a log. All you want is the numbers. The engagement. The goddamn dopamine rush. You don't want art. You just want to feel good.

"And the news flash, Nevaeh, is that art hurts. It sucks. You go deep into yourself to pull something out so that someone, somewhere can feel just like you. AI can't do that. It can't. Art is life, and life is art. You have no respect for any of it. No decorum. It's tacky. It's cruel. It's wrong. So, fuck you and get out."

He pointed weakly toward the door.

"I'll put your things on the step tomorrow at nine."

"Just...just like that? Us...just over? Kyle, what happened? It's just AI..."

Kyle looked bitterly at a pile of sopping leaves gone brown with decay.

"Go ask your LLM what went wrong."

He didn't turn around again. Instead, he waited patiently for silence to settle across the room. Waited for the clack of her shoes to fade. Waited for the door to shut. And then waited a few minutes longer, all the while staring at the same pitiful pile of leaves. When the silence finally came, he sat cross-legged in front of the window and wept.

And when that was over, though before the shake had left his hands, he pulled an old pen from his pocket. In the light, its lacquer was obviously tarnished with long scratches marring what had once been a pristine surface. He regarded it for a moment, remembering all the journeys he'd taken it on. Then with a sniff, he reached over to a nearby bookshelf, grabbed a journal, and did the only thing that made sense with this kind of hurt.

He wrote.