6.3

 Reaching forward, she drew her finger through the light patina of dust on the glass, tracing out the lines of her skull, vertebrae, clavicle, scapula; the curve of the socket where the humorous nestled inside it. There was not enough; the mirror was too small and she was too excited to let go of the threads of this idea. This could be the inspiration she had been waiting for ever since she left the safety of her university course.

She hurried into her room, what she thought of as her temporary studio and flicked through the canvasses and primed boards she had collected since she arrived. None were large enough for the scale of work her ambition demanded. She turned a full circle, debating if she could stretch the curtains separating her bed area over the bedframe as a makeshift canvas, but concluded they would rip before becoming a taut surface. Her gaze slid past the door, stopped and returned. She could use the door. She'd done it before when she'd run out of painting surfaces during a short winter holiday when the college had been closed for almost ten days. True, her flatmates then had been less than pleased to discover the state of their shared residence when they returned for the spring term, but she'd replaced the doors soon after, as soon as her grant had gone through. How would Paul react if she removed her door, especially when they'd already had a conversation about privacy and noises at night.

Her mouth creased into a disappointed line. He would probably take it badly, worse, even, than Simon and Neil had in those college years. At least she had proper materials this time. In the old days, she had scoured the local area for colours, often resorting to dirt and bodily fluids to bring a drawing into the light. Had she the reserves available to replace the doors here? Probably not.

Moving on, her vision alighted on the darker patch on the wall where Paul's former flatmate -- she had already forgotten his name -- had drawn his Duchess fucking a Pig masterpiece. The wall, yes. Paul could hardly object to that since it had already become an established practice here. She couldn't use the same spot; she needed a life-sized canvas that could become the inspiration for a whole series of works about the Skeleton as Receptacle of the Spirit.

Emptying her supplies onto the bed, she rummaged through the collection of mark-making materials she'd accumulated and chose charcoal. She had some pigment crayons available, but the charcoal was less likely to permanently affect the wall's surface and was a softer, more forgiving medium.

The floorboards creaked beneath her weight as she stood in front of the wall opposite the two front windows; the open door to her left and her screened-off bed to her right. There was no need for her scavenged easel today, not that it was large enough to contain the work she had in mind. An easel would be more of a hindrance than a benefit today. The flat was silent; her co‑tenant out for the foreseeable future and the downstairs flat unusually quiet leaving her alone with her reflection and her thoughts. The silence pressed in, amplifying the image in her mind. Skeleton as survival. Skeleton as anonymity. Skeleton as liberation. Skeleton as mortality. Each meaning layered upon the other, none cancelling the rest.

To see herself in Paul’s bas-relief as a skeleton was to see herself in fragments and contradictions; the dichotomy of form between strength and fragility, permanence and erasure, freedom and inevitability. Wasn’t that the whole fragile sum of existence?  To see herself as a skeleton was not to choose one meaning, but to hold them all at once, each a palimpsest to be written over by the next in an acceptance that she was unfinished, ambiguous, layered. She was not the sum of her individual parts, but a creation of the whole; unique in all the world. There was only one of her in the whole of history and the eternity of the future. Recognition of that creation could come even in the starkest of forms.

She raised a long, unbroken stick of charcoal and began to draw, not a portrait of herself as she appeared in the mirror, but the outline of a skull, the curve of ribs, the long bones of arms and legs. The lines were tentative at first, but soon they grew bolder, darker. She shaded the hollows, the sockets, the spaces where flesh would have been.

As she drew, she felt a strange calm. The skeleton looking back at her was not grotesque. It was honest. It, too, was a mirror image, just stripped of her worldly disguise, stripped of the expectation of society. It was the truth beneath the surface, the form that endured. She added wings behind the figure, akin to the trailing coat she’d seen on Paul’s statue, not because she believed herself angelic, but because she wanted to imagine what it would mean for her to be free of her mortality.