Getting Away With It

“Fuck the brush,” she muttered, squeezing a daub of paint onto her finger and smearing it against her thumb.

For the next few hours, she reworked the red mass on the canvas, pressing harder and harder against the cloth, smearing paint with the same heavy vertical strokes, only now with her body, not just the brush. She transitioned from using just her fingers to attacking the painting with her palm, her wrist, elbow, knee…

The light from the window faded. She flipped on the overhead lights with her toe and kept at it.

She caught a glimpse of herself in the small mirror hung on the wall. A sight to behold, she thought. Paint all over her body, smeared on her arms, her torso, across her thighs, hand-prints all over her skin where she’d wiped off her hands for the next shade of red.

She fished a camera out of her bag resting against her bed and set up her small tripod. “These are not for sale,” she reassured herself. “These are not art. I’m just documenting the process.”

She’d never taken photography of herself naked before. Other people, sure, as part of her art degree. The slip of paper certifying her as having four years of education in art was buried somewhere in her parent’s house. But she’d never taken a picture of herself nude. And definitely not covered in paint.

A couple of test shots looked sickly and weak. She pulled out an extra flash and tried again.

This time, the red popped right off her skin, glowing in the otherwise dim room. She was gloriously detached from herself as she clicked the remote over and over again, posing herself as if she were just another model. Her fingers flicked over her body, scratching here and there to bring out a stronger contrast between her pale skin and the paint.

“The art comes in here,” Steph said, pointing at the base station on the second animation on the screen. “We want to make the status of the wifi network into an art installation when the wifi is running.”

“Aleatoric, algorithmic artistic endeavors.” Phillipe said.

“Again, you’re going to have to explain that one to me.”

“Simply put: we want to base the display on who and what people on the wifi are doing. Packet-sniffing, lifting of browsed images into a display feed, probably some more esoteric generative practices as well.” Phillipe tapped the mouse, and the screen changed to a still of a wall of a cafe with a collage of images projected onto it. “Just one idea.”

“We want to evert the browsing experience into the real world.”

“Evert?” Zoe was beginning to feel like a broken toy, just parroting words she didn’t understand back at the two of them.

“To evert is the opposite of invert. It means to make something invisible, visible, sort of. To project from a small space to a larger one.” Steph made some futile motions with her hands, cupping them on the table, then splaying them out into the air in front of her. “It’s a popular idea when talking about the internet, but it’s kind of hard to explain.”

“I think I get it.”

Phillipe closed the laptop. “That’s the basic pitch right now.”

Zoe looked down at the remains of her salad and took a deep breath. “I’m not sold.”

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“OK, I get it. You think it needs contrast.”

“What’s up with it, anyway? Seems sort of violent. Not like you.”

Zoe turned to him. “So you are getting more out of it!”

Mark shrugged. “Just with how long and fast the bust-strokes look.”

She raised an eyebrow at him. “The what-strokes?”

“Brush-strokes. Isn’t that what I said?”

She giggled then, which she always complained made her sound like some bleached-blond art-bunny. Mark thought they were beautiful: they started in her belly and shot up through her body like bullets, rattling her whole frame. The distracting effect of this was greatly compounded by her nudity, and Mark found himself staring at a point about a foot to the left of her head until the giggles subsided.

“Anyway, yes, I was trying to be a little more adventuresome with my technique, my brush-strokes.”

“You know, you’d sell more paintings if you told people that you painted in the nude. Think of the shock-value: Zoe Haller, Nude Painter!”

“Fine, I’ll put on a shirt.”

MagCloud is having a 25% off sale through tomorrow (the 31st). This means you can pick up my self-published magazine of fiction, poetry, photography, and miscellany, BLACK RABBIT, for just $5.40.

It’s a steal!

“Your actions last night were not unwarranted. But they were… inadvisable.” She paced beneath the halogen light, shadow flicking about the room.

Susan found it hard to concentrate on the woman as she talked, instead watching a fly flit around the light, landing on the surface for the briefest of moments before taking off again.

“Do you know where you are?”

Susan had enough snark left in her to rise to that bait, at least. “Hell.”

The woman snorted. Susan considered it a strangely ungraceful verbalization for someone so composed. She clasped her hands behind her narrow hips. “This is what happens to little girls who mess up very, very badly.” The shadow of a smile played over her fine features. “We will fix you.”

“Nothin’ here that needs fixing.”

“Oh, I very much disagree, Susan. We know an awful lot about you. Did you know,” the woman said, pulling a file out of nowhere and flipping it open, “that you hold the record for most depraved fantasies of all the girls who have come through our doors? A filthy mind on you.” She flipped a page. “Look at all these shades living in your head. Johnny, Robert, Barth, Maggie…” The woman’s features scrunched up in disgust. “Rufus?”

“Shut your mouth.”

“Hmm. There is plenty to do here, but our little session is almost up.” Susan could hear a fire alarm ringing somewhere in the vast complex, getting louder and louder, nearly drowning out the woman’s final words—

“Wake up!”

Susan popped awake in her bed, alarm blazing in her ear. “What the motherfucking christ.”