His obsession, his muse.

2. Cillian

“Psycho plus socio with a path equals psycho sociopath” I mumbled under my breath trying to get the exact one I am. I'll just settle for the two. I knew I was different because my mummy had said so when I was six. I plucked off the feathers of a bird and used it to depict the real feathers on my bird drawing. The bird writhing in pain, skin already bloodied. A knock came on the door and I knew it was her.

"Come in." My own voice felt strange saying it.

The door opened and she walked in. Up close her cheeks were fuller than I expected and her eyes were exactly light blue, almost like the ocean, dark and blue and disturbing in a way I hadn't anticipated from a distance. I wanted to paint them immediately. I wanted to study them until I could reproduce that exact shade from memory alone.

I smiled my warmest smile. "Sit, sit please."

She pushed at the chair before settling into it. It was obvious she remembered me from that night and was working very hard to pretend otherwise. Her eyes went everywhere except my face.

“ Alright, may I know you and what you're here for?” I asked with all smiles.

"Hello sir, I'm Stapleton Zara." Her hands flew as she spoke, gesturing at the air between us. "I wish to take the course you'd be lecturing on, Depiction of the Human Body on Canvas 107. I was asked to come to your office to make enquiries."

"Why do you want to study this course, Zara?"

"Well." She licked her lips. "I have been delving into portrait painting for a while now and it seems like something I would like to specialize in as I enjoy it. Also my son is usually one of my subjects, particularly when he hears any noise he appears from wherever he is with this expression and I just have to paint it."

I knew she added her son into it to create sympathy, very manipulative.

She kept on, mouth running, trying to impress me. It fascinated me how quickly she could switch from the woman on that stage to this. Composed, articulate, professionally eager. I was almost certain she recognised me and was performing obliviousness because she wasn't sure whether I had recognised her.

Too late for that now.

After that night at the club I had done my research thoroughly, and my research had never been normal. I loved knowing everything about my muse, everything about their lives because I need it to properly depict them on canvas. I stalk my muse because they are my muse whether or not they like it. It was day thirteen of watching her and every day followed the same architecture. A fight with the man she lived with, probably her husband, his voice louder than hers. Her getting groceries after he fell dead drunk on the porch. Her son, who was a complete blabbermouth and I couldn't stand because he stressed my muse. I had considered slitting his throat one night while I snuck into the bedroom she shared with him. I wanted so bad to see the look of horror on her face but decided against it as it would dim her spark. That blabbermouth was her whole world. As the devil will have it the next day, he hurt himself with a little knife and yes the look of horror on her face was satisfying and soon she pet him and put him to bed. Then her, alone at the kitchen table with a canvas and a brush moving like she was confessing something.

She painted the way people prayed when nobody was watching. I needed to be close to that and I did, just behind the curtains, watching her hands move, she painted me but with no eyes. I needed to understand it and then take it apart.

"I hope you would consider me for this course sir." I had barely heard the entirety of what she said.

"I'm strict in the selection of students because I want the class light and focused on people genuinely hoping to major in this direction."

"I understand sir."

"That's alright. You care to show me what you've got?"

She appeared stunned, not expecting that question. The truth was I hadn't asked anyone else that. I hadn't interviewed anyone else at all. It was because of her I was here lecturing in the first place. I remembered the look on Matthew's face when I told him I wanted to lecture at the public art institution for free after years of ignoring their letters and their increasingly generous offers. He had stared at me across the breakfast table like I had said something in a language he didn't recognise.

Anything for my muse.

"Alright sir, I don't have my brushes or canvas with me." She looked around herself briefly, flustered, her face going pink. "Oh god, what am I doing?"

"That's fine, just follow me."

I led her into my inner office on the third floor, the space I reserved for the works I chose to show people. She went quiet walking in, her eyes moving slowly across the walls. There was a quality to her attention that I noticed immediately, she wasn't scanning, she was reading.

"Your works are lovely sir. It is genuinely an honor to even be considered for your lectures." She stopped in front of the fire painting.

"That one I painted in one hour," I said, moving to stand beside her. "I have never worked that hard inside a single hour before or since. I refused to sell it at the Tuscany elite exhibition. Did you attend?"

I knew she had. I knew she had stood in front of this exact painting for a significant stretch of time, unresolved, leaving with the expression of someone who hadn't finished a conversation. I remember scanning her application for the exhibition, seeing her name brought deep satisfaction and she's thirty one, with a banging body. Never knew I was one for older women but I was different, always different.

"Yes I did." Her eyes stayed on the canvas. "The works there were really captivating and confusing in the best way. I loved it." She tilted her head slightly. "Now the famous question. What's the muse?"

I expected that. Every admiring artist eventually asked for it.

"Fierce determination," I said. "And the deep longing that lives in the soul of man."

She nodded slowly, turning it over. That was what I told everyone. What nobody knew was that the day Tony, my beloved fiancé, had nearly died in that accident, the only things I could see were his blood and his desperate longing to stay. He was brought to my home to recuperate and there, while he slept, I had extracted blood from his veins with a careful hand.

The red and orange strokes across this canvas were painted in Tony's blood. His life, his longing, his fire. Every critic who had written about it across three continents had called it visceral without knowing how accurate that word actually was.

She was still looking at it. "It doesn't look like a painting about an idea," she said quietly, almost to herself. "It looks like a painting about a specific moment."

I looked at her.

"The red is too specific," she continued. "That's not imagined red."

The room was very quiet for a moment.

"Thursday," I said. "Eight in the morning. Bring your portfolio."

She turned to look at me, recalibrating. "So I'm being considered?"

"You're being observed. Thursday will determine what that means." I moved back toward the door. "That's all for now Zara."

She gathered herself, picked up her bag, and walked toward the exit. At the door she paused and turned back once, something unfinished in her expression, like she wanted to ask something and decided against it.

She left.

I stood in front of the fire painting for a long time after the sound of her footsteps faded down the corridor, looking at Tony's blood dry and permanent on the canvas, thinking about a woman who had just told me, without knowing it, more about this painting than anyone ever had.

I needed her. Not just in the way I needed things I wanted to consume and discard. In the deeper, more inconvenient way. The way a painter needed a subject that refused to sit still. The way you needed the one thing that kept escaping your full understanding.

Everything else could arrange itself around that.