In a daze as the blood flows with no sign of abating, she has the thousand-yard stare as the images in her head explode as if her skull’s on the receiving end of a shotgun blast. Bringing her fingers to her bottom lip, she touches the claret as it pours like a fine, red wine—one her cheap-ass would never dream of forking out for. Trickling over her nails, it wraps around the pinkie on her left hand like vines around a tree. With a mere flick of her wrist, droplets fly off and splatter the canvas in the same spot she had her eye on seconds earlier. The patterns they create make her think of Pollock. Tilting her head, she imagines tasting his cracked, alcoholic lips, and then the wet soil behind the barn where he painted some of his greatest work, including her personal favourite, Autumn Rhythm. Picturing him flying through the air and hitting the tree that caused his death less than a mile from his home, she again sees the face of the leering, lustful moon. It’s the same moon that shone over him as he breathed his last all those years ago, decades and decades before she began her transformation from an egg into the mythical woman she now resembles. Captivated by the intricate structures before her eyes, and the celestial ones behind them, she ponders how although Pollock was a violent drunk with a taste for womanising, beneath his mask, he was as much as a woman as she, for all great works of art are brought to life by women. She once said this to her tutor, Angie the American. Although she agreed with her, she relayed that such a comment wouldn’t go down well with others on the course, least of all the men. Gretchen said she didn’t give a fuck and promptly painted the sentence in giant words on the wall of her studio. Angie shook her head in the presence of others, but privately, she gave her a hug and enough money to pay off her spiralling library fines for all the books she never bothered returning.

X and I: A Novel and A Journal for Damned Lovers on Amazon UK

X and I: A Novel and A Journal for Damned Lovers on Amazon US