Okay, here's my attempt for the first picture. Kind of flash-fiction in that it's less than 500 words and I don't really have too much time. Anyway.
Immortality is not a lie.
The hag was the proof. Clomping up the steps, she creaked open the door, staggered into the studio and smiled - stretched leather framing white mesas in a desert of gum. My ability to smile back was a testament to my choice of vocation. I paint portraits. Lying is second nature. The most convincing lies are unspoken.
I cannot recall her precise words. Something about her daughter’s young sons, about how her own grip on life loosened and how she wanted the boys to look upon the picture as a testament to the beauty of their grandmother.
“Paint me not as I am,” was her silent request, “but as I
was.”
So I’d taken her shawl, watched her skeletal frame hobble away, heard her black shroud rustle as she sat on the stool.
I prepared my oils while she gazed around the room, chin cupped in palm, fingers hooking her cheek. As if she were a young lady. As if she were beautiful.
Some deceptions are so sweet I wonder if enjoying them is harmful. My gut twisted and fizzed and spiralled into my chest and channelled through my arms and made them fetch two canvases. I set them up before her, answering her curiosity with painterly sagacity involving my three magic words “Outlines. Elegance. Technique.”
She flitted in and out of the studio for a month, always curious about my interpretation of her past beauty, always sated with my assurances that it was of fullness, of richness, of fertility. Which wasn’t a lie.
At least regarding the picture I would give her.
The other canvas contained that image and one more. A beautiful young lady before a hag. A juxtaposition of elegance and ugliness, of past and present, of life and death.
Of deception and truth.
At the month’s end, I received my payment and she received her picture. Painterly sagacity silenced questions of the other canvas. She nodded, leather wrinkling around her desert-mouth, and left to hang her painted effigy.
Let her. For as her offspring’s spawn will honour the dishonest beauty she mothered and I fathered, so too will I honour my canvas. My truth.
Their image will not last forever. They’ll suspend it for all to behold and believe, but it is beauty based on a lie and so it will crumble doubly fast. My truthful image will lay covered, protected, forever.
Immortality is not a lie. Immortality is truth.