Akris’s Heart

There was a time when I was kinder.

Regarded as wholesome even. Not cruel or twisted, cold or wicked, not a perfectionist or some freak artist with a corrupted dream—I know what they say. but I wasn't always this... warped. There was a time when my heart still rested on her canvas, atop a puff of a colourless pillow.

I used to draw for her: my heart.

I used to depict all the sights she'd been too bedridden to see. It started with a few ugly scratches from a pencil on torn paper, but the papers got bigger, the pages fuller, their numbers filling books, then shelves. After a while, pencils didn't cut it. Drawings couldn't capture the beauty of a sky or the shimmers of an ocean, and she wanted to explore it all. She was an adventurer at the core; an adventurer with a cough. And it was that which kept her in bed.

If nothing else, I used to fear their sound; breath leaving her lungs so forcefully, so destructively. My paintbrush used to leave the page to wait for them to pass, but they got so torrential I used to fear the air would not return. So my brush strokes grew fervent. I rushed to paint my point. Entire sketchbooks full of sights, creatures, magical items. I rushed for the chance to show her the world she could not trek on her own two feet. I'd resolved myself to show her everything I had the power to show.

"Would it kill you to smile?"

My paintbrush stopped.

"You make such beautiful paintings, yet it never looks like you have any fun making them," she whined.

I considered her for a moment, giving the usual lack of emotion. She sat there, in her blankets, hugging her pillow and staring expectantly at me.

I moved my brush to an empty patch of blue and continued to paint. After a moment I tucked the canvas between two fingers and flipped it around to show her.

She laughed. "That's not what I meant."

I'd drawn a smiley face for her, using the bend of sand dunes splashing higher than they normally would and two pebbles thrown by a dessert sylph. It looked ridiculous.

"This is your best one yet, Akris."

She said my name like a song, ignoring the S, rolling the R in the only way it was meant to be rolled.

I didn't say anything.

On the days she didn't harass me, she stared out the window solemnly, between naps and coughs and our games of show and tell.

When she slept, I left to capture new sights for her to see. When I returned I'd remake them, down to last detail on each overlooked pebble or leaf.

I'd watch her excitement each time. I'd watch her joy, her bitterness, her tears, her yearning for more.

"Never stop." She whispered to me one night, after her healer had finished his failings; his potions of emptied promises discarded in a bin.

And I never did.

I rushed through her paintings when she coughed and rushed even more when the coughs stopped. I rushed to show her the world, without realizing I could have kept her in mine. If I had only stopped to paint her. Just once. I could have kept her by my side with a single portrait. I could have painted what she looked like looking at my paintings. I could have kept my heart in an eternal capsule of time, upon a colourless canvas.

But I didn't.

And she died.

Just as everyone knew she would.

The day she left her bed, I brought all my tools into her room. All my paints and oils and pastels and water colours. I threw crayons into the mix, charcoals and pencils and for the first time in my life, I made art.

The final touch was a single canvas, resting atop her pillow. There was no colour upon it, for black was not a colour; it was a reminder. A reminder that darkness and death lurks behind every masterpiece, waiting to sink its teeth into every colour you've ever grown to love, every hue of emotion you've worked hard to put on a face. Upon this canvas was a black silhouette of the portrait I'd never drawn; her shadow, resting upon her pillow without her. Abyssal and uncoloured, just a crude black splotch on my past reminding me exactly where my heart could have rested had I eternalized it.

Behind the canvas, her pillow was painted. Her bed was coloured in to the brim. Her bedsheets covered in crayons Her window splashed with rainbows of oils. Her door carried the greys of lead. Her floorboards, and walls, and ceiling and chair. Her rug, her dresser, the inside of the drawers, her flasks and vials of lies from healers whose bloods I used for all the shades of red. Every knob, every screw, every crevice, every wick... I painted it to eternity.

Living proof of the life that could have lived if the world hadn't failed her. If I hadn't failed her.

When I finished, I left the room. Closed the door—

"Would it kill you to smile?"

...I considered her echo. Then took the paintbrush from my ear, stole a smudge of red from my cheek and drew a smile on the knob.

And smiled back at it.