The Son

I sat as still as possible but it was impossible — still. I was in my element, the sea surrounding me.

Still, I tried to hold onto the life raft I grasped tightly in my two puerile hands, I followed the eyes of the artist and there I saw my life sprinting, on the notions of grandeur that were as twin flames in the blood mooned whites of his eyes, — there was still a blip of life on the surface of his soulless demeanor.

I turned this way and that, fidgeting on my bum, as the artist peered behind the wall I’d erected — he looked in upon himself.

Mother commissioned the portrait, why she chose that time in my life and that specific artist baffles me, was she trying to capture a semblance of the memory of her youth — I mimicked fathers stature.

The portrait artist — self centered only saw his own dignity, wearing his pride on his sleeve, he brushed over it, trying to hide it within the folds of his frowning pride.

My backdrop was the sea — only the cerulean sea had washed up on the eddies of my eyes, the sea inebriated, was wavering on a sobering thought.

His vision distorted the canvas and what bled to life was a haunted caricature of what he wished me to be, mother urged him on.

He plied my curls with highlights, nesting them like branches that had roots, anchoring me to the pebbled beach.

He moored me to the pier, the gentle waves lapping at the toes of my sun-kissed legs, tied to the shimmering horizon, I tucked my legs beneath me.

I wasn’t sitting still enough for his taste, I was preparing to run, he read my ambitions, so he painted nimbly — rushing the breath from my winded sails.

I was stranded, out of breath and yet his brush flew erratically in the air as a conductors wand would, the music as silent as the grave,

I ebbed and flowed, with the lapping waves, taking a siesta against the waning sun as it quenched its fire into washed out sleeping embers.

He was a miserable soul — a master, mastering the miseries of miseries penchant for keeping company. He left the canvas idling in the sun. My cheeks were burned, my lips he tried to balm with the colour’s on his brush, as he languidly placed it against their parched portal.

He puffed, clouded plumes of August heat on a filter-less cigar, he put it out on the waves of the cloudy sea, it swirled in the eyes of the face born upon the portraits definition of vanity.

He brutalized me, the soul on the canvas, with a torch that was coloured with the sparking flames of opinion, only now and again oiling the canvas with the drippings off the brush he’d dipped it in the sea.

“Don’t litter”, I exclaim, as his put out cigar, took with it the explications the artist had exhaled on his plagiarized impressions of dubious affront.

He slapped me with his twirling brush, the canvas felt it — just as a gunslinger, he fired in rapid succession, he muted the simmering canvas.

My eyes, flashed in anger, disrupting the easel, flipping it sideways — the canvas rips on the shards of the echoes of the laughing sea.

He smiles insidiously — masterful, and drowns my — the canvas in the sea, washing away the colours, extracting the oils that floated away, as they rose like the truth, to the surface of the azure expanse.

Mother, berates my implied behavior but not my tendencies to rock the boat.

We begin again, I correct my behavior, he checks the memory of his ego.

His dactyls soar over the canvas, deftly as I await the results of anger — are in.

The covered portrait hung beneath a shroud, beside the portraits of my prim and proper siblings, dressed according to their texture. I pull the veil, — a magnum ooops!

Colours are floating on the waves of an ego’s opinion, an ego-esque method. I am nowhere to be seen.

My mother commissioned the portrait, but all she received was disappointment, it promised more than it delivered, at the moment — the portrait reflected the ray’s of the rising Son — stilled.

I refused another sitting. Mother commissioned a new painting, from a quiescent photo. The photo promised mother would get exactly what she reared — the photo had an opinionated physicality with a view, it mimicked my fathers stature.

It will yellow but never age, the intent favoured the notion of art on paper but not the philosophical journey, the ventures indulging the pages with the nonsensical design of youthful endeavors. As she stared into the amber flecks of my eyes, veiled from her inquisitive prying, the truth fluttering on my lashes — mother made her decision, she carried the photo in her pocket — even mother had lost her faith in the artist — to capture my essence as she wished to remember me and not the Son she herself had raised me to be.

The part of herself she hid from the artist, the delicate femininity she veiled with the pride of ownership, her parting shot to me, “Never lose your allure, no man should know the complete compilation of your thoughts, man — should only know you from the neck and down. You my child are private property”.

The portrait resides in the attic, private viewing’s allowed by appointment only, with the sole discretion of the owner.

Copyright ©. R Tsambounieri Talarantas. 2019. All Rights Reserved.