Self-Portrait of Someone Else by Dilys Wyndham Thomas
When Jill’s eyes adjust to the light, she comes face-to-face with a life-sized painting of a naked, spread-eagled woman. It takes her a full minute to recognise herself. Connor had promised to paint only her face.
The brushstrokes are clinical, almost brutal, every physical flaw thick and textured. Her appendicitis scar is a chasm of reds. Pimples geyser from between her breasts, stretchmarks scratch heavy into hips. Her vulva, framed by talon-like feet that claw and rip at the bedsheets, has become monstrous, a Freudian Gorgon of swollen flesh.
She has only seen herself from this angle once before. Aged fifteen, she had pocketed her mother’s compact and taken it into the bathroom. Jill had been unprepared for all the complex folds, their mussel-like textures.
“What do you think?” Connor asks.
Jill notices the scrawled signature branded along the top of a mottled thigh. She remembers how beautiful and wanted and wanton it made her feel to pose for him, to be stretched out on the futon—that futon over there, in the corner of the cramped studio. The air had been thick with the smell of sex and linseed. Connor had wanted to capture her profile, so she had squinted against the afternoon sun for hours. As he worked, she had imagined a future together, the years that lay ahead. Dust glinted around them like tinsel.
Jill steps closer to the painting and touches the woman’s outstretched hand. The paint is still tacky to the touch. Connor’s hands have been all over this canvas woman, all over her own body. His hands have splayed them both apart. Jill brushes her fingers along a painted thigh, hard enough for the signature to smudge into skin.
Connor looks on, pulls a cigarette from his breast pocket and strikes a match. Smoke and sulphur settle between them. When he speaks, Jill can hear a snarl curling at the edge of his lips.
”It should sell fast.”
Jill flinches. She had assumed he was giving her the painting. The thought of this portrait sprawled across some anonymous gallery wall, of bored strangers staring up at her, critiquing her, taking her home to mount above their mantelpiece, makes her nauseous.
“You’re going to sell her,” she says. The words catch in her throat.
Connor shrugs and flicks cigarette ash into a mason jar of paintbrushes soaking in mineral spirits. He looks at her with what she now recognises as hunger, raw appetite.
Jill’s disgust congeals into a glob of bright white rage. She pictures herself throwing the jar of brushes against the painting, letting the portrait woman dissolve into herself. Plucking the cigarette from Connor’s stained fingers and setting the studio ablaze, fire licking at the woman’s feet, canvas curling under the flames, paint screaming.
The moment passes. The Jill in the painting continues to reach out a single, desperate hand. Connor takes another drag of his cigarette.
“How much?” Jill finally asks, knowing she will pay.
Dilys Wyndham Thomas lives in The Netherlands. Her poems and stories have appeared in journals and anthologies, including Ink Sweat & Tears, Shooter Literary Magazine, Rust & Moth, and Wild Roof Review. Dilys hosts writers’ feedback groups for Strange Birds Migratory Writing Collective and was an assistant poetry editor for Passengers Journal. She is working on a novel set in the world of competitive freediving. Find Dilys online at dilyswt.com.