A Fatal Fortune

You blew in on the winds of good fortune. Your sailboat alone presented a formidable figure; the waves it made pushed the smallest fishing trawlers out of the way to take pride of place in a tiny port.

I watched you from deep within the recesses of the steep and winding hill that connected our tiny port to the island town. It was a place I had come to often, trudging through the dry, tan coloured dirt to get to this small alcove in the hillside, covered in wild growing flowers and thick, olive green foliage, overlooking the port and the crystalline blue water. I’d come for a bit of peace and quiet, in the hopes that inspiration would strike. You arrived right on time. Your boat had blocked out my view like an ink blotch on fresh paper. I waited impatiently for you to pass. Sailboats were usually headed for the next island over, much more well-populated, much more exciting, and full of other people who could also afford sailboats. You only encroached further on my view as you came in to dock.

The first thing I noticed about you was your broad shoulders. Your back was turned to me as you heaved on a heavy rope, wrapping it through a series of pulleys, operating some form of sailboat mechanics that were foreign to me. As you came onto the island, you were ambushed. People with a sixth sense for heavy pockets surrounded you, offering rides up into town and the flashiest accommodation they had. You doled out thanks with petty distractions, big warm smiles, and handshakes concealing small bills; you skirted by them with no further trouble. You knew how to cut through a crowd and walked with an unshakable sense of self. Shoulders straight up. I feel you out in my memory now, my hands slip through pliable, clean clay, tracing out the curves of your shoulders all the way up to your neck. I’m certain I could capture you in clay from feeling alone.

I had come to this island to take up an eight-week artist's residency. The opportunity fell into my lap unexpectedly. In the art world, I was flailing, working more hours at my day job to cover my expenses. I came home stinking of kitchen grease and old coffee, having less and less time for my sculpting. The work that I was producing wasn’t exactly breaking containment. My online store was stacked up with mugs, fired plates and little trinkets no one wanted. I hadn’t worked on a bigger piece or anything real since art school. I craved the feeling of digging my hands into a hunk of clay, going beyond the spinning wheel to create something epic. A friend of mine, an old art gallery colleague, told me about this artist residency on a tiny Mediterranean island. It was set up as an exercise of isolation. It was not a tourist spot to tick off your bucket list or to draw inspiration from, but a quiet town where you could be in complete solitude with your practice. They only took a handful of people a year. Partly because no one wanted to go to a tiny island completely cut off from the outside world, and partly to make sure the artists weren’t distracted by one another.

When I arrived, I had only met my fellow artists briefly and had seen them around town even less. They took the spirit of solitude seriously, only appearing in the kitchen for mealtimes before racing away back to their corners of the house again. The house was a dusty concrete slab, painted white. Terracotta pots were carefully lined up on the front steps to conceal cracks in the walls. A stray cat and a solitary kitchen hand were the only two permanent residents in a rotating cast of artists. Our chef was named Maria. She had a golden-brown tan and black hair tied up in a ponytail that puffed up in the heat like a dark cloud. In a thick accent, she told me all about the owner. Apparently, he came from an old, now-defunct royal lineage, and for a living, he preserved his centuries-old properties for tourists to wander through. This was one of the many properties he had inherited. It was not so old that it held any real historical significance, and it sat in a town far too quiet to bother renting to holiday-goers, so he turned it into a sanctuary for artists in an effort to cement his own name in the legacy of his lineage through philanthropy. He never actually visited the property or cared about what any of the artists produced. Maria would come to tell me one night as she stood over a pan of fresh-caught fish, making our dinner. She pushed the fish around in the pan, watching the oil sizzle and splatter. He would send a property manager every once in a while and some cleaners after every eight-week stay. She had no idea what he looked like, a nameless face that sent her money once a month.

I didn’t take to solitude well. I had come to form a kind of solidarity with this tiny fishing town. As an outsider, I felt that they had accepted me into the fold. Of course, the language was tricky; I tended to fumble my way through conversations with intense gesturing and clunky wordage, but I generally made the effort to say good morning to people as they passed, to take directions when I got lost, and to buy their fresh produce when I could. In return, they sometimes offered me fresh fruit or a bouquet of flowers. They stopped giving me incredulous looks as I passed by when they realised I wasn’t one of the artistic minds that came through town every few months that would ruin their sleep with loud music and drinking in the streets until the early hours of the morning.

These people I would never have known of otherwise, we were connected by the same North Star. We all railed against the world’s demands for material wealth. We traded what we could with one another out of love and kept each other afloat. I felt their collective weariness upon your arrival. A rich man could bring opportunity, as they had come to know, but could also signal danger.

I met you, officially, in the back of a small tavern. You were giving the bartender his best day of work in months. You made friends with the towns' usually churlish old men wherever you went, offering drinks, slapping paper notes on the bar from your seemingly endless pockets. You caught me watching you enacting this elaborate performance from a small table in the corner, against a back window. You followed the sound of the shutters gently clacking against the back wall in the breeze until your eyes found mine. I had a book laid out in front of me, the plot completely forgotten. Partly, I had put the book down because of how earnest you appeared. You seemed to be brimming with genuine goodwill for these people you had never met before. Another part of me looked for cracks in that generous display, an indication that you were the picture of the usual kind of rich men I had met. Disaffected by ordinary people and little lives.

You only smiled at me, maybe choosing to ignore the distrust in my stare, maybe not noticing it at all. You turned back to the bartender, ordered two more drinks, thanked him with another healthy tip, then walked over to me, drinks in hand, sitting at my table, and introduced yourself as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

You told me your entire story forthrightly. Like you had always meant for me to hear it. You told me how this trip was your final hurrah. You would sail around the world forever if you could, following the wind wherever it led, but your father wanted you to come home and work for him. Like me, you had been flailing, unamenable to the realities of the world. But where my mind roamed in the fantasy of being a famous and successful sculptor, your troubles came with the very real bandage of a family fortune, and a trust account you had been taking from since you turned 25.

A trust account that would no longer be available to you unless you came home. You were 30 now, and supposed to be taking your life more seriously. You told me the job your father had offered you would send you back down the path you had veered off since completing business school. The conventional type, a puffy office job, a family that sent their children to private schools and gave them no sense of the real world, and a summer house everyone else enjoyed, but you could only work at.

You told me your dream was to live free and happy, whatever that meant. You hadn’t quite figured it all out yet. There was a simmering hope in your dark brown eyes as you finished your story. You looked down at your hands, stretching your fingers in and out, tracing the curves of the lacquered wooden table like you were filled with this energy that had nowhere else to go. The confident and suave man I had seen on the dock faded from view behind this idealist sitting before me. Compelled by your crooked grin and soft-spoken words, I believed wholeheartedly that you would find what you were looking for.

In return, I bared my soul back to you. You listened intently, focused on my words as if you were tasked with reciting them from memory. By the end of the night, you knew me better than anyone I had met in the last seven weeks. You walked me back to my place. It was late, but all the lights were still on. My fellow artists claimed the early hours of the morning as their most creative time. You left me there with a gentle kiss on the cheek, promising you would see me again soon.

Now I dig my fingers into the either side of a block of clay intwining them around the form that will be your head. I imagine the feel of your dark curls, wet from the ocean, the smell of saltwater and sunscreen on your neck.

You showed up the next morning with a towel over your shoulder, wondering if I would come down to the dock with you. In the morning sun, you were tanned and glorious. I was supposed to be working. A fresh block of clay sat untouched in my corner of the house. I’d helped Maria lug in the delivery this morning. It was my final shipment before my time on the island was over. I still hadn't made anything I truly liked.

I followed you down to the beach. You took the bag from my shoulder and slung it over your own. You told me all about your boat, or “the old girl” as you called it. What seemed like an extravagance that only someone like you could make and enjoy turned out to be a present with strings attached. It had been sitting in a port somewhere untouched for that reason and was practically new. Your father had gifted you the thing once you’d finished boarding school. You thought the whole ordeal was kind of crass. The way your mother toted about the keys in front of all her friends at your graduation party, basking in the extravagant gesture, knowing full well you couldn’t take it anywhere. You were expected to stay in school; maybe you could use it in the summer, but not on any of those long trips you wanted to do.

You told me these things with no shame and no self-consciousness. It was just your life; you didn’t shrink from complaining about your wealth. You told me because you wanted me to know you, and this was all of you.

You run wild in my memory. I run my fingers into the creases and folds of clay that make up your face, smoothing out the lips, digging in to form your deep-set eyes, pinching on the sides to create your ears. I press my thumb into a bit of clay, forming the ridge of your aquiline nose. I remember how it nudged against mine as you deepened our first kiss.

The rest of that summer day, we spent on your boat. We swam in the impossibly blue water, and lunched on whatever was left in your fridge. Hunks of French cheeses I couldn’t pronounce and slightly stale bread. In the late afternoon, I lay on the deck, stretched out on my back, enjoying the last bit of sun before it began to set. I listened to the slow rocking of the boat in the water. A figure suddenly obstructed my sunlight. You watched over me contemplatively. I shifted up on my forearms, a silent question. With a quick and complete certainty, you leaned over, still damp from the water and kissed me. We came back to town that night warm and bubbly, fizzing like champagne bottles ready to burst.

I imagined casting your hand in stone to hold forever as we walked on the cobbled paths through town the next day. We came back to my alcove on the hill. We each sat astride the narrow bench facing one another, our picnic splayed out between us, a canopy of olive-green trees enveloping us in our own little world on an otherwise dry, hot little island covered in dust and beige sandstone. That night, under soft cotton sheets, we talked, coming to a mutual understanding of what it meant to follow our own paths to freedom and happiness. You were certain you would dash your father’s plans for you. You wrapped your arms around me and asked if I would set sail with you at the end of the week. I had nowhere else to be. Nowhere else could I imagine myself.

I smooth over your clay cheek now the same way I did on that last night we were together. Wiping away a stray tear, I didn’t know why you were crying. We would set sail tomorrow, forging our own path. Happy and free, remember? I recoil at the memory, blood flushing to my face as you told me you were going to leave in the morning. Alone. I pushed you away, berating you under the flickering street lights. Heads poked out of windows as the town watched on, as if they always knew it would come to this.

Today, you have left me without so much as a goodbye. I imagined you disappearing from my view like a cloud of dust. This person, whom I’d come to know so intimately, is gone forever. Instead of a fortunate breeze, you now sail away on the hot air of my rage.

I sink my fist into the clay chest of the bust I made of you. Blinded with a white-hot anger, I grab hold of the fistful where your heart would be. With my other hand, I claw down the side of the bust. Scarring your soft clay face with my fingernails. I feel something slippery and round in your chest. Something I swear I can feel pulsing in my hand. It constricts and opens again, faster now. I twist and pull it out. My hand emerges, dark red, the thing still pulsing wildly in my fist. The burrowed-out chest begins to sputter, splashing dark red across the room. I look at the heart in my hands, and I can think of no impulse stronger than to squeeze down until I feel it ooze between my fingers.

I imagine you far away from here. Clutching at the hole in your chest, struggling to breathe, collapsing to the deck of your precious sailboat.

This far from the coast, they wouldn’t find you until the end of summer, when all the other sailboats started heading home. But you wouldn’t return to your father’s business, or your conventional path.

You would lie there, skin charring in the summer heat, the birds pecking out your innards as you lay twisted and blood-soaked with a gaping hole in your chest.

I shake off the heavy clay and dark blood from my fingers. I place the whole mangled thing in the kiln and fire it, infixing your broken essence to the sculpture forever. My final masterpiece.