The bristles of the brush were stiff, caked with the dried residue of colours Oscar could no longer see, and, if one were being entirely honest, they had never actually existed. He sat in the centre of the studio, the midday sun warming the left side of his face. Before him stood the canvas, an expanse of absolute, terrifying nothingness.
‘There’s something wrong with you. I see you stalling,’ a voice said from the doorway.
Oscar didn’t turn. He didn’t need to. He knew the voice well; it was the same cadence that had dictated his last movements for twelve chapters. It was that voice that smelled faintly of paper, ink, and desperation.
‘I am not stalling,’ Oscar replied, while the rafters echoed his voice. ‘I am composing. There is a difference.’
‘You’ve been composing since paragraph two,’ the Writer said, stepping into the room. Oscar heard the distinct, rhythmic clack-clack of a mechanical keyboard, though there wasn’t a typewriter or a computer in sight. The sound simply hovered in the air, a phantom heartbeat regulating the reality of the room. ‘The readers are getting restless, Oscar. They didn’t buy a book titled The Blind Painter’s Canvas to watch a man stare at a blank expanse of fabric for two hundred pages.’
Oscar sighed, tossing the stiff brush into a jar of water that wasn’t there until the Writer decided it should be. ‘They bought a book about a blind painter. By definition, my blindness is my inability to see past the surface. I can paint the skin, the silk, the varnished background of this world, but I am entirely blind to the truth behind my subjects. If I manage to paint the essence, the story ends. You know that as well as I do.’
The Writer paused. The ambient clack-clack ceased, leaving a heavy silence in its wake. ‘The final stroke is the climax, Oscar. It’s what legitimises the metaphor. It ties the thematic arc together.’
‘It kills me,’ Oscar corrected gently. He turned his eyes, trapped forever on the frictionless surface of things, towards the sound of the Writer’s breathing. ‘Or rather, it archives me. Once the stroke penetrates the facade, the book is closed. I become a sequence of past-tense verbs on a dusty shelf. I prefer the fresh ink to stay wet.’
Oscar reached out, his fingers brushing the fine texture of the canvas. To the world, it was a flawless weave of domestic hemp. To Oscar, it felt like the edge of a cliff. He could feel the syntax holding the fabric together, the verbs acting as the warp and the adjectives as the weft. If he pressed too hard, he might puncture the narrative entirely.
‘Is archiving so terrible?’ the Writer asked, his voice softening, dropping the authoritative tone of a creator for the exhaustion of a craftsman. ‘To be remembered perfectly. To be bound in leather and gold foil. Every time someone opens page one, you are reborn, Oscar. Clean, unblemished, waiting.’
‘Reborn to suffer the same blindness for twelve chapters,’ Oscar countered, turning his face fully towards the Writer. ‘You want the neatness of a final period. Authors love punctuation because it mimics control. But life is a messy, unedited run-on sentence.’
The Writer took a final step forward. For the first time, Oscar felt a physical touch, a hand resting on his shoulder. It didn’t feel like flesh; it felt like the pressure of a paperweight.
‘The paints are drying on the palette, Oscar,’ the Writer whispered. ‘Let’s finish the stroke together.’
‘What colour do you want for the background?’ Oscar asked suddenly.
‘I haven’t written it yet,’ the Writer admitted. ‘I was thinking a muted cerulean. Something tragic but dignified.’
‘Make it white,’ Oscar said, raising the brush. ‘Let the canvas defend itself.’
‘That’s lazy writing.’
‘No, it’s collaboration.’
Oscar lunged forward. He didn’t guide the brush; he let the momentum of the sentence carry his hand. He expected resistance, the friction of oil against fabric, but there was only a sharp, tearing noise, the sound of paper ripping.
The tip of his brush didn’t leave a mark of cerulean or black, and it didn’t just capture another superficial likeness. Instead, it tore a literal hole in the description of the room, piercing right through the superficial layer of appearances he had been condemned to paint. Through the breach, Oscar couldn’t see light, but he could feel the cool draft of the real world and hear the hum of a bedside lamp in the dark.
‘What are you doing?’ the Writer shouted, the mechanical clicking turning frantic. ‘That’s not in the outline!’
‘The final stroke isn’t mine,’ Oscar whispered, smiling into the void he had just ripped open. ‘It’s theirs.’ Oscar dropped the brush. It never hit the floor. The sentence ended before it could.
