Violet Mortis's Arc

Chapter 3 of 6

Violet stepped into the upper room and stopped. Rough sketches covered every wall, dozens of them, hurried and smudged. She turned slowly. Each drawing showed the same face. She pressed a hand to the cold plaster. It was the face she had painted seven times and still could not finish. The face from her palm. The face she had burned. Here it was, drawn by a stranger she could not remember, waiting for her like a question she had been refusing to answer. In the center of the room, propped on a broken chair, sat a canvas. The seventh attempt. The eyes too wide, the mouth twisted red, the whole face pulled apart like something seen through water. Violet knelt in front of it. She had abandoned this. She had told herself it was him. It was not. It had never been. The missing woman had been painting this face beside her, and Violet's rotting mind had stolen it, mistaken it, painted it seven wrong times trying to remember a man while a woman bled out of the corners. Violet pulled the address from her palm and let it smear away under her thumb. She picked up a stub of charcoal from the floor. She would finish this face first. She owed it first. She worked fast. She drew over the wrong canvas, line by line, until the eyes settled and the mouth closed. The woman stared back, finished. Violet's hands shook. She had painted the wrong person seven times. The fiancé she chased was not even the face she remembered. Footsteps creaked on the stairs behind her. The brother stood in the doorway, pale. "That's her," he whispered. Violet stood, charcoal black on her fingers, and understood. Her memory had not just decayed. It had swapped one person for another. Whoever waited at that smeared address was a stranger she had never known at all. Violet reached into her coat and pulled out the small leather book she carried everywhere. Pressed flowers slipped from its pages. Lines of his laughter, written in her own hand, stared up at her. You are the reason I laugh. She read the words and heard nothing. No voice. No face to set them in. She closed the book and set it on the chair beside the finished sketch. One face was found. One was lost in a way she could not undo. She walked to the wall, picked up the charcoal again, and began a new line. If she could not trust the face she remembered, she would have to learn every face from scratch.