6.4

She stood  back and looked at the drawing. The charcoal had left a dense layer of overlapping marks against the white-painted wallpaper, leaving a layer of dust and particles several centimetres thick piled up on the threadbare carpet and skirting board. She'd meant to get the vacuum cleaner out at some point, and this would prompt her sooner than later, and probably encourage Paul to be glad she'd moved in.

The portrait staring back was both her and not her. It was recognition and estrangement, survival and mortality. There was a tension between them, as if the drawing had already taken part of her spirit away from her, and in a way it had, from the hours and sweat she'd poured into it. All art worth its salt takes on a life that becomes separate from its creator in it that tension, she felt something shift. To see herself as a skeleton was to see herself as unfinished, as possibility. It was to admit that she was more than surface, more than silence, more than the gaze of others.

She stepped forward again and pressed her hands to the wall, almost convinced it would have its own pulse; as if it would take her life for its own. The quiet of the flat deepened, and she listened to her heartbeat, steady and alive. Around it, she imagined her bones, silent and enduring, carrying her forward. Facing her, the figure was stark: ribs arched like a cage, skull hollowed into sockets, limbs reduced to bare lines. To her, the image was raw honesty. Flesh was temporary, but bone endured. Seeing herself this way was a confrontation with mortality and with anonymity, stripping her of everything that made her unique.

She touched the wall lightly, smudging the charcoal and softening the frame of the ribcage. This, she thought, is what remains when everything else dissolves. This is the endurance of humanity. In every civilisation, the skeleton has been used as a sign of mortality. All men must die. Religion evolves because the human brain cannot conceive of an end to its own existence, but to exist is to have enriched the world, even if only by the return of the flesh to the earth.

"I can't believe you've drawn on the fucking wall." The door creaked as Paul entered came into her room. "What was it about my expressly asking you not to mark the walls that failed to register? If the landlord sees this he'll have a cardiac."

"Great. I need a cadaver to work with. It will help with the exact placement of muscles."

"The neighbours would complain about the smell." He shook his head, and she couldn't tell if he was angry or amused, but his sudden grin revealed the truth. Was this the first time she'd seen him smile? Certainly in daylight. It made him look younger; without the worries that seemed to plague every one of his waking hours. "Mind you, I do know how to work with encaustic wax. That would keep the decomposition limited for a week or two, until it bloated enough to burst out."

He moved away from the door to study her day's labours, his brow furrowing, then softening. "You certainly developed some serious drawing skills. This kind of reminds me of a Durer engraving. "He's alive, isn't he? Not a dead body, but a living being. I particularly like the wings, although I can't see how you've attached them to the frame. Although..." He paused, chewing his bottom lip between his incisors. "Wouldn't the wings be skeletal as well? Rather than feathered, I mean. Is he Death?"

Roisin shook her head with a small smile. She'd already predicted people would see the figure as the Biblical archetype. Something to work on, to draw their attention back to the Human Condition.

He lightly touched her shoulder, and she obligingly moved to one side. He stepped in a small arc around the drawing, studying it from a slightly different angle. "It's not a grotesquery. The wings are unfurling from the shoulder blades, and it has become a creature of light, of life, gathering the light into the hollows and looking at the observer not from the void of death, but in reverence of life. If this is Death, then it's a celebration of it, not a prompt to face the reality of dying."

Roisin shook her head, her voice low but certain. “No. It’s bone. It’s what I am beneath everything. It’s survival, stripped of softness. It’s the truth no one ever wants to see.”

Paul stepped closer, his gaze steady. “And yet I do see it. Not as decay, but as soul. The skeleton isn’t only what remains — it’s what rises. The sculptor of your body carved more than endurance. He carved flight. You see mortality. I see transcendence.”

The silence between them thickened. Roisin traced the outline of the skull again, her fingers trembling. "That's an optimistic viewpoint. I hadn't thought of it like that. Maybe that’s the difference. I see myself reduced, unfinished, fragile. You see me exalted, complete, radiant. But how can both be true?”

His voice softened, almost reverent. “Because bone is both. It’s the structure that holds you here, and the form that suggests what lies beyond. Your skeleton is not anonymity. It’s recognition of the soul that shines through even everything else is stripped away.”

 She leaned back, staring at the sketch. She thought of nights spent painting in fragments, abandoning canvases half‑finished. Each line felt like hesitation, each shadow like doubt. Perhaps the skeleton was the same: unfinished, hesitant, a record of fragility. Her mind wandered to Paul's angel carved in stone, wings folded, trumpet pressed to lips. She had felt the ridges beneath her fingers, the silence poised before sound. That angel had seemed distant, divine. Yet this drawing had revealed the angel within her, hidden in her bones.

 Paul stood back, watching her. "This is shimmering with light. The wings are an extension of the skeleton, not just added as an afterthought. It's listening to something. The music of the spheres, maybe, although I know that's a cliche."

"Are you religious, Paul?" Roisin turned her back on the drawing to look at him. He wasn't wearing anything that identified as one religion or another. He wore no pieces of cloth to mark him as Sikh or Hindu; no yarmulka to honour Judaism; no crucifix showing at his open collar to mark him as one of the myriads of aspects of Christianity. "Apart from the angel in your room, I've seen nothing to indicate a faith."

He shrugged, his smile returning for a fleeting moment. "I was raised Catholic, so no. I'm not religious, although if you held a gun to my head I'd probably pray to something. I spent my childhood staring at angels carved into stone in churches and cathedrals. I still do, actually, but now I do it because I'm in awe of the skill of the masons father than any reverence for the subject. God created the angels before man, the Bible says, but he adored man far more than any of his earlier works. Angels have always seemed unreachable, too perfect to belong to the world, despite all the stories of the manifesting to prophets. Yours is the opposite, though. Yours is the evolution of humanity into Elohim. Yours is an angel born of imperfection and the need for survival. It has no God-given divinity, but humanity, which was the divine purpose from the start. It makes me think that Heaven if not something to look forward to after death, but a state of hope for the evolution of humanity." You think you’re unfinished. But maybe that's the point. Angels aren’t complete either; they’re always in motion, always between worlds. Your skeleton isn’t an end. It’s a threshold."