This is My Rifle, This is My Gun by Shannon Greenstein

“Sir?”

The Artist jumped, whirling away from the attic window out of which he had been staring.

“Stay there,” he barked, and the figure he had been sketching immediately froze, Lot’s wife on the heels of her one bad decision.

The falling snow was beginning to accumulate against the dirty panes. Soon, the weary winter brightness would dissipate to nothing, and The Artist would have only the detritus spilling from his trash bin to show for the whole day, crumpled attempts at snatching genius out of the ether.   

It had been the desert again. Everything came back to the desert.

He shook off the cobwebs of his dissociation, looking disinterestedly at the beautiful young woman across the studio. There was no genius to be found in this attic. Despite the critics’ glowing reviews, The Artist was not entirely convinced it had ever graced this space at all.

“Go,” he brusquely dismissed the young model, and she fled down the stairs like a prey animal.

He trudged to the studio’s only sofa, throwing himself onto the cushions and cursing women; women, who don’t know how to pose, and women, who can’t stand still, and women, who always look exactly like women when he painted them and never like anything else. Give him a bland landscape without a soul, he griped silently, give him a thousand of them, but please…no more women.

The Artist closed his eyes, but did not allow himself to sleep. With sleep came dreams, and with dreams came the desert again. His armor was strong, now, after all these years, but he had no defense in sleep.

He rose after a time, compelled as always to pick up the paintbrush. He painted without thinking, without a draft or a process or a concrete end goal. What emerged on the canvas was chaotic and foreboding and vengeful, splashes of crimson and black and the dark purple of an angry bruise. He signed his name in the lower right-hand corner of the painting, adding tens of thousands of dollars to its value, and tried to pretend he wasn’t afraid for night to fall.

###

It was a war, of course; a war that didn’t need to be fought, a war that considered the cost-benefit analysis of freedom and determined human lives were an expendable currency. He hadn’t been an artist then, hadn’t been much of anything but an innocent and a kid.

That would change.

At night, the backs of his eyelids transformed into a sea of sand, his breath the arid wind that gusted when the sun was highest in the sky. The world would grow dark outside The Artist’s window, but it was always bright in the desert, like there was no nighttime, like no one deserved the luxury of repose. Always, under the sun, and everywhere, the sand, and it was only a matter of time before he started to see them; the boys, kids themselves, lined up one in front of the other. Then the phantom blood on his hands would start to burn and he would awake with a start, dashing to the sink and scrubbing his palms, scouring his nails, Lady Macbeth in a frenzied effort to self-soothe.

The Artist rarely slept for long these days, relying instead on a constant diet of nicotine and bourbon and Government-sanctioned anxiety medication for his PTSD. It had been years since he’d actually rested. It had been even longer since the boys in the desert, but still they lived – in perfect clarity – deep within his skull.

And always, relentlessly, under it all, the art. The art, evolving, improving, layers upon layers of progress, bursting out of him in a torrent over which he had no control. The art felt like mania, like amphetamines, like the growing electricity in the air before a lightning storm. The art was his soul and his fuel, a manifestation of the principle which states quod me nutrit me destruit – from Latin, that which nourishes me also destroys me.

He had never held a paintbrush before he returned from the war.

###

The day dawned crisp and cold. The model shivered as she removed her coat; the studio was icy in the mornings, though The Artist never appeared to notice. She did not know how close he was to the edge; how much he longed to leave the desert. She knew only that he looked particularly tumultuous this morning, and she prayed it would not be a repeat of the day when she accidentally sneezed and he put his fist through the wall.

Soon, she was draped against a stool, motionless once again, as The Artist tried in vain to make the portrait look like anything other than what it was – a woman draped against a stool. Women on stools, he knew, did not set the art world ablaze; women on stools ultimately meant nothing at all. But the portrait was a commission, and a weighty one; so he endured, stoically capturing the ruffles of her shift as the sound of machine-gun fire rang through his cerebrum and yet another boy, another innocent like himself, fell to the sand in the movie reel of his mind.

It was bad, lately.

Lately, he was thinking about the rifle, even as he stubbornly refused to consider such an escape, a cruel dialectic that filled his days with stress and his nights with static. Lately, his paintings were filled with monsters, creatures brought to life from a Bosch triptych; lately, all his daydreams somehow ended with the gun.

He was so tired.

###

The hours passed, the light shifted, and The Artist continued to work. The model started to ache, lactic acid building in muscles she could neither shift nor relax. Immobility, however, was her only purpose, and thus she tried to block out the pain. She knew she was merely an item in this studio, a tool or a means to an end; she held no more value for The Artist than the paint itself.    

Finally, cursing her body, cursing her weakness, the model spoke.

“Sir, may I take a moment to…”

“No.”

The Artist answered absentmindedly, capturing the light on her hair with the finest threads of yellow. He was certain her request was unimportant, certain the painting alone had needs; needs only he could understand, needs he felt driven to meet.

Her calf seized in a cramp, and the model winced.

“Hold still,” The Artist ordered harshly, exhausted to be making the request again, exhausted with the portrait, exhausted with ennui.

The model held her carefully-arranged stance, the cramp in her calf infecting the other muscles in her leg like a virus, traveling up and through the limb until she couldn’t bear the pain; until she simply had to drop the pose.

For the span of a heartbeat, the air pulsed with silent fury; then came a sonic boom of anger and a sonorous bellow. The Artist threw his paintbrush and upended the easel, the amorphous tattoos of color birthed by his wrath beginning to stain the floor. The model shrank into herself as The Artist stormed across the room, a vague sense memory flitting around his head, the steps of a younger man who once sprinted through the desert in a rage, the sand blistering under his feet.  

“I’m sorry!” she begged, fruitlessly stuck between fight and flight and freeze and fold and fawn. The Artist drew closer, and she held out her hands plaintively, an invisible offering, a gesture of peace.

“Do you know…,” he roared, his mind on the rifle, his mind on the bullets, “what I have to put up with? Do you know what it’s like?”

It was the desert of which he spoke, the endless sand littered with bodies, and it was the desert she saw when he finally stood before her; she saw it in his eyes and on his face and staining the tips of each of his fingers, balled into fists.

She recognized it.

###

He was still yelling, he continued to yell, but the model was no longer afraid. She had glimpsed the desert, and she had felt its weight, and now she understood. She understood the noise and the fear and the sweet release of the rifle; she understood all the pain.

The model had a desert of her own.

She had her own tormentor, her own adversary to face. Her desert came at night, as it had for years; it stole her sleep as she lay waiting in the darkness. Her desert was a verdict and a sentence, the bars on her cell and the alleles in her genes, shaping the course of the rest of her life.  

She had also been an innocent, before the desert came.

The Artist paused to take a breath, and the model reached out to clutch his hand between both of her own.

“Paint it,” she said. “Paint it out.”

He stiffened, his diatribe against useless women sputtering to a halt.

Silence rushed in like a wave, the resonance of Truth spoken aloud, of Truth borne into the world. She knew, and he knew she knew, and she knew he knew she knew, and the weight of all that Truth lay heavy over the room like a veil.

The Artist looked at the model and saw her. He saw her, saw her endless nights and her hopeless mornings, saw her stuck in a hellscape that resembled his own. All that was broken in him regarded all that was broken in her, and their remnants came together in an instant. Shards of innocence and trust and value and shame collided like a storm front, and it was empathy which rained down to soak them both in a grim communion.   

“You can get it out,” she said again, releasing his hand, stooping to the floor, grasping a rogue paintbrush, offering him the handle. The Artist gripped it gingerly, a bachelor suddenly handed a swaddled newborn, and it felt familiar; it felt like a time when he used to be strong.

The model seized the moment of inertia to slip away, grabbing her coat and disappearing down the stairs.

The Artist stared at the door through which the model had sprinted, as if waiting for an encore at the theatre. Her simple words echoed through his head, drowning out the omnipresent soundtrack of gunshots and the screams of the dying. For the first time since he came home, there was no combat flooding his memory, no battles stuck on a loop playing out in his brain, and The Artist felt suddenly unmoored amongst all the quiet; he felt lost within the calm.

“Paint it,” she had said, and the words became more than words, more than the letters and their arrangement and the model’s lyrical accent.

He clutched the brush to his chest for lack of anything else to do, the reverb of her voice breaking through the murk of his thoughts like the first rays of sunlight breaching the horizon.

“Paint it,” she had said, and the wooden handle began to grow warm in his hand.  

Then came the calling, a calling to the easel like a Priest’s call to the church. Images were forming in his head, fighting to be born, pushing and shoving to be the first to be created, to be made real. They compelled him forward, a magnetic draw to the blank canvas.

“Paint it,” she had said, and he stared at the brush and thought of the rifle; he thought of the desert.

It was no effort to gather the shades and mix the paints; his hands moved independently from the rest of his being, a computer ruled by algorithm and void of the ability to dissent. The Artist drowned the brush in shades of brown and gold and remembered the grit of the sand. He remembered the power of artillery, the feel of a weapon in his hands, and then the brush began to move.

Shannon Frost Greenstein

Image: Pixabay.com – Tubes of oil paints and artists brushes all well used.