The Misrepresentation of a Wild Thing

The man painted himself in all the wrong colours. He drowned his thoughts in whiskey and found his mirky likeness in the bottom of a glass. He got in quarrels and woke in foggy mornings, with a mirror of black and blue remember me bye’s, hiding his true features behind their inky stains. He rarely bathed, sitting in a bath seemed like a rotten thing to him, his black hair course and matted against his skin like some unwanted dog, though this man had house and home. Apathy soaked the room, drenching into the curtains and the walls, staining their colours grey. That same shade dripped its colours into the foundations of the house in tiny little percussions, like rain that causes the wood to rot and mellow, so that as he walked across the floorboards it fawned beneath his weight and he heard those same doubts creaking back at him, as if they were a real thing, a noise of the world and not a product of his own imagining. You see our man had fallen into the worst of sicknesses, the belief that he was a worthless thing.

Empty of having accomplished anything in his life, and therefore unworthy of the love of the man dying in the room next door. His father had filled the world with a great empire. All he'd done was fill his room with paintings that were sapphires in the evenings but soil in the afternoons.

The final moment of proof came when he entered his father’s bedroom, the lawyers like vultures around his bed discussing his inheritance, he could barely speak, but as our man entered and his father noticed he took the trouble to whisper three little words, “not my son.”

Bright hues of amber flickered in his eyes for just a moment when he caught a firefly zooming past him in the dead of night, whispering of the wild inside. The same look he’d had in his eye when he saw the way light traced beneath doorways in his yesterdays, as he wandered through the house as a child. The enchantment in his eyes as he fell in love anew each night as he started to paint. But he didn’t notice these things, nor paint them in his self portrait.

Our man left the bedside for the solitary bar. Lost in drink, swirling around the idea of how to prove his quality. When he found himself stumbled upon by an old man, a sailor with countless wrinkles bearing testament to the voyages he’d faced, lightning struck outside the window as stumbling on his last legs he intruded upon our man’s solace. For some reason he reminded him of his father. But once he’d found his stable purchase he whispered a tale of such delights our man simply could not resist.

He told a tale of how he’d been wrecked at sea, lucky to come back alive at all, but before his ship had wrecked he’d spotted the island they’d searched for, a paradise with no man’s footsteps, where it is said the goddess of luck herself makes her den, and any that find her might chance upon her fortune. Lost at sea he’d been picked up by a passing ship, but none believed his tale and found his map a fancy, though not our man, out of desperation alone he was enraptured by the passionate telling and paid what little left he had for the map. That very night he set to sea, in a small boat just big enough for one, out alone out upon the treacherous black ocean sway.

After weeks he came across an island that was a visage. A great rolling shore, long beaches of light-yellow sand so fine you could pour it out your clenched hand like a waterfall of dust. And beyond that a triumph of nature, a jungle of trees so tall they were fit for giants, so dense you could scarcely see a few steps in before it became engulfed in shade. And beyond that a symphony of a thousand different birdsongs, together in a harmony so loud they drowned out the sound of the sea, making our man gape wide like a fool as his breathe was stolen from him, with the seduction of its overwhelming beauty. An orchestra fit for the gods, assuring him his journey had not been in vain.

He cut his way through dense jungle, so little light peering through the canopy he could easily have gotten lost in there forever. But at last, a great temple that stood tall above the trees, carved into the mountainside. Its guardians two giant monoliths of jaguars yawning wide, and between them a shadowed doorway that entered into the mountain. That orchestra had followed in his wake, low beats and thrums from gentle birds’ hums darting through the trees, heard but never seen, singing blues and blacks, sensing sorrow and waxing lullabies between footsteps, he’d found their company strangely soothing, had now burst into a cacophony of violence. Whether from excitement at him finding where he needed to go, or a warning to leave, he could not tell. Hot rain poured from the heavens, drenching him and the world around him. He looked at the rain, the dark green leaves, the steam rising off the ground. The fangs of the jaguars that seemed to warn of violence within and threaten to move despite being built of stone. He had come too far to turn back now.

The light of the doorway had disappeared behind him long ago. Suddenly great torches blazed on the walls and he was welcomed by a symphony of a different kind. Men and women, young and old, came up to him begging him for a little food or water, they looked the worst sort, without house or home left leaning against the foundations of the mountain like those that who lean against the steel foundations of our street’s canopies. These were the halls of the damned, all those who had fallen on lady lucks misfortune.

He gave what food and drink he had left out of his parcel, not saving any for the journey home. When that was gone he gave his shoes, his shirt, he tried to insist on keeping his jacket for the warmth. But he saw a stray dog chained up alone, abandoned, its fur a mess, in places patchy and removed, and wrapped the jacket around it, it trembled at his touch, in its dealings compassion was the stranger sort. Those unfortunate souls surrounded him, begging for more than he could give, until for fear of being drowned and stamped beneath their clumsy crowd he pushed through them and fled gasping for air into the next room.

Escaping the chamber he entered a great hall. Great pillars carved out of sand rose to a ceiling so high you could not see their end, and all around him the world was filled with mountains of gold and jewels. Shipwrecks of pirate kings lay bereft and spilled precious gems across the floor. At the far end of the hall, a throne stood upon a mountain of gold, made of broken, misshapen, bloody crowns belonging to kings fallen by the wayside.

The gold smelled like your jacket on a winter night whilst you're stuck waiting in the middle of two places on a lonely road, drenched in a stagnant puddle of rain. Like the frays of a broken sailors rope, like a half drawn painting left to mould in a forgotten attic. It smelt familiar. It smelt of grey.

It was stained in the rot that it was stolen, fallen from grace, a long way from fates intended end, and having not realised its meaning nor found its peace, it was still very much alive, brimming with an urgent need to move and fulfil its purpose. He became suddenly aware that every piece of gold thrummed with urgent life around him, and our man felt very far from alone.

She purred her laughing way down the pillar side, causing such vexations in the grains of sand, as she trickled along their skin in curls of sultry smoke, that they were desperate to learn to stand and move. To chase after her as she flowed across the riverbed of gold and leant against our man taking him in back-to-back, changing to flesh and fur, a thing half woman and half cat. She leant her head seductively back on his shoulder, then curled around him, keeping close in perfumed smoke that smelt like rain steaming off a campfire. Now they were face to face, blue fur gorgeous as her deep black eyes, as she twirled her fingers curiously through his hair, running her fingers down his forearm leaving scratches he scarcely noticed in her wake. She leant forward and whispering hot air in his ear, coaxing the answers out of him, “What brings such a handsome young man to my shore? It’s been so long since the ocean sway has let a man come my way.”

Our man explained his purpose sitting on a chair across a table that had appeared from somewhere between the two as she leant forward staring intensely, enamoured with his amber eyes as much as he was with the mischief in her black, in a world of gold that didn’t much attract the two. She leant forward staring intensely, she longed to see the world through his wild eyes. She already knew her price.

An accommodation of fiction; sycophants and vultures circling his bedside for weeks, growing more confident each day his health waned and protectorate son was gone. A commotion outside the room at the front of the house, the maid racing concerned tones, the racket of things knocked by something stumbling about.

A small dog came running into the room, a scraggly little thing with a demeanour like something loved, the sycophants were about to kick it out when leaning on the maid’s arm, he came walking through the door. His eyes were covered in a thick, dirty green rag and his clothes and hair were soaking wet and stunk of the sea. He dragged the ocean into the room in sea shoe footprints.

“Leave us,” his broken voice rasped, the vultures who had fallen silent quickly scurried passed his imposing frame in the doorway out the room. The dog had started playing, chewing on the bottom of a chair in the corner of the room, not quite yet a tamed thing.

He found his way with his hands. He found the corner post of his father’s bed, ran his fingers along it softly. He found his father’s leg and softly felt how thin it had become beneath the bed sheets. He took a few steps further to the head of his father’s bed and fell to his knees before him, “I know you're disappointed that I’m not like you. I brought you something to prove you wrong.”

He raised the little black book in front of himself with two hands and presented it to his father, who had regained some of his awareness, though not enough to take in the peculiar state of his son. He turned the page and opened the book and looked at what was inside. Our man sat back on his heels and waited for his verdict, the ocean still dripping from his hair onto the carpet.

“Oh, my boy, that’s all you ever needed to be. And I left you twenty thousand, enough to start,” he turned and looked at his son. “My boy? What has become of you?”

“What....what does it say?”

His father’s undiscerning face grew more concerned, and he turned the book to face his son. In it was a painting of our man. So accurate and pure it could have been a photograph taken in false glass. And in it he was painting, wild eyes flickering amber, lost in the love of what he was doing.