It's not quite right

Flic rested the painting up against the front of the covered chair. Each of the two sides rested against one of the ornate arms, hidden beneath the old, splattered sheet, so the picture was angled at about twenty degrees. She prowled the room, eyes fixed on the canvas, looking for a new illumination, for the light to hit it in such a way as to show her where it was wrong. It was deeply frustrating to be so sure something was lacking and yet have no idea what it was. She had spent yesterday going over it with a magnifying glass but for all the tiny alterations she had made, she couldn't see any difference in the overall impression. She was becoming desperate.

She lit another slender French cigarette and squeezed the smoke out the sides of her mouth, fuming like an angry boiler. She lit another with the stub and continued pacing. The windows were grubby and flecked with bird shit, so the sunshine cast small oval shadows sporadically across the floor and walls. As the smoke filled the room, the light refracted off the swirls and threw out ethereal dancing patterns. The painting came alive. Flic knelt before it and tried to capture this beautiful quality of light.

The fixed shadows were easy enough, she simply darkened the areas which were there, filling in each oval as it was projected onto the canvas. The swirling shades of smoke proved more difficult. Eventually, she tied five brushes together and held them in one clawed hand, dancing them like a puppeteer as she traced them softly over the  picture, hoping to capture that essence of motion within motion.

She came to look at it again a week later and hated it. She picked up a bucket of black emulsion, meant for the back wall, and poured it over the picture.


Somehow, it got included in her next show and a collector bought it for fifteen thousand pounds. He told her that the thin shroud of black hid only the details but the relief of the brush stokes told the true story of obsession and irritation; nothing would ever be just right. She told him to fuck off. He smiled and nodded his head.