Painting With Pain
An old piece of mine that I quickly reworked just to annoy someone.
Painting With Pain
High walls of dark and jealous shrubbery encircled his coldly shivering form. Grass towered above his bare and prostrate shape in the rain. Multitudes of wounds bled a bloody halo of red pain into the muddy sludge around him. A rock bites jaggedly into the vulnerable flesh of his buttocks, yet with no strength to oppose this indisputable intrusion.
The moon hovered like a one-eyed jailor, stark against the starless backdrop of night. He could not face the accusing stare for it shoved him into a pit of reality that stank of his sterile urine, filth and fresh earth. Drops of water bled into his eyes, blurring the streaks of cloud that periodically, mercifully, made the yellow orb in the sky blink. A cough wracked his body fountaining bloody water into the air. And he was left to reflect on how he had come to be here; it had started quite innocently.
His body sank slightly into the cold, ever softening earth beneath his soaked fur. The news-papers would later recount this night very briefly, and in later years his death would be remembered in shades of importance concerning another's gruesome legacy. He faded.
A drip from his muzzle dragged him back; a drop at a time, bleeding into his eye. The drip painted the sky red and the moon would become a bloody staring eye. Drifting white streams of cloud would become torrents of blood rushing over the cliff that was the horizon and again he would recount the bloody events of the evening. Each startling drop would once again drag him back from the abyss.
Sniffing the blood through his muzzle decongested his sinuses, he blinked fluid from his eyes and was faced with the moon once again. The pain suddenly roared back causing him to claw the earth weakly.
The mud worming through his fingers was reminiscent of grasping runny shit; catching it in mid-air as it spilled out of the diaper. But he had only caught some of it and the rest had stained the carpet. His wife had chuckled at his clumsy attempts to stabilize the diaper in one paw while unsuccessfully cupping the spillage in the other. He had cursed, but laughed when he eventually realized the absurdity. His wife had joined in but their daughter had started crying at their raucous laughter.
At one point there was a blue light flashing through the grass and voices calling unintelligibly. Calling to them was impossibility; words were formed but he could not hear his own voice. Anger and frustration drowned the pain but they were replaced by despair when the voices faded and the flashing blue light disappeared.
Gradually the torture subsided and memories intensified. The realization struck that these were the signs of impending death; the final breathes that he would ever take. He fought through it, for the pleasure of physical pain was a life assuring prize that he wanted.
He recounted the evening, recounting to the point where he could no longer accept the truth, and then he would feel the stone eating hungrily into him, notice the red tint on the grass around him, the pain in his joints, the earth beneath, the broken bones of his right foot and then... the drip came again and intensified into a constant stream of red paint on the sky. He sniffed hard but choked on the blood filling his lungs. He was drowining.
The moon sank ever lower; his eyes following its descent through a mist of blood, rain and tears. The lower it sank, the dimmer it became; the grass disappeared in a haze and the stone was now a numb part of his abused body. As he followed the moon the mud around him became slicker and slicker. Even his mind became less of a burden as he was only forced to witness the occasional flash of dimming memory.
When he and the moon had almost disappeared, the sky was beginning to take on a blue sheen. He watched as blue morning gradually overpowered black night, and the bluer it became the less he was aware of himself. He knew he still existed but he did not know how, why or in what form. But the moon; the jailor and its prisoner, were one in their expiration.
He reached out to it beseechingly and it blinked once last time as they both died.
"This is astonishing!' A chubby young bear (did not)exclaimed over the clamour of a crowded gallery 'Dr. Humble, come see this one."
An overweight, middle-aged boar approached his student across the bleached marble floor, "Hmm? What is it Kevin?"
"Look."
"Huh, it's quite disturbing isn't it?" said the boar peering critically over his student's shoulder.
It was a painting of a young red-fox lying in a muddy clearing in the middle of an overgrown meadow. The fox was bleeding to death or was already dead. What looked like retreating flashlights, shone through the grass in the distance to the right. A red, evil looking moon hung above the tableau. What made the painting truly gruesome was a leafless, scraggly old tree standing guiltily off to the opposite side away from the flashlights. Under the tree there was an easel with a multicoloured tabby sitting in front of it with brush in paw; a bright lamp shone behind her. It was vividly apparent that the painter was enjoying the creation of the painting that she was painting a painting within the painting. (:3) Her brush was flung back behind her head in a frenzy of creative energy. It was a half finished mirror of the actual piece that hung in the gallery.
"Do you like it?" asked a new voice, sensually purring with shrewd overtones. Boar and bear turned towards it; they were confronted with the very same tabby-cat painter that appeared in the artwork.
"It's quite interesting. But like the professor said,' Kevin replies, hiking his thumb at Dr. Humble, 'it's slightly disturbing if you consider the vast amounts of detail; it seems almost real..."
The large boar ambled forward with his paw extended in greeting "I take it that you're the talented creator of this piece?"
The tabby smiles conspiratorially, shaking Dr. Humble's paw with a gracious little bow "Oh, of course yes.' She winks sidelong at Kevin who feels a cold chill burrowing into the nape of his neck 'I am indeed the one who did it."