Begin in medias res, prose style spare. A hot day, a white room, a spattered wooden workbench. In a corner, a kiln. A space of lack, within which objects harden into being.

Demonstrate rather than describe the Artist’s appeal. Visitors throb around him; the woman darts glances his way. Ignoring his public, the Artist is silent. Lacking the courage to say anything to the Artist, the woman, embarrassed, leaves.

She walks home slowly, noticing details along the route: sensory perceptions juxtaposed to cumulative effect.

The woman performs mundane household chores while thinking about the Artist. Her thoughts are interspersed with meta-thoughts presented in free indirect discourse. Why is the artist lodged inside her mind? Tasks complete, she pours herself a drink.

[Drinking the vodka martini on the garden patio, the sun’s glare reflected off the wrought iron table, causes in the woman an unfurling of memory, her mind alighting on moments of her past. Or does it? Perhaps, instead, a sudden inexplicable event.]

The woman’s partner returns home, extracting a packet of filter coffee from his man-bag. (He is a writer for a broadsheet newspaper). She tries to describe the Artist & his work. The partner is scathing: ‘Ceramics are a bit passe, don’t you think?’ (Consider also expressionism, surrealism, ‘all that pomo crap’?). The woman is crushed. She tries to explain. The partner continues to mock, before realizing that the woman is genuinely upset. They embrace & are reconciled. The partner prepares a superior salad comprised of ingredients purchased from Waitrose. They eat it on the terrace, staring out at their exquisite garden as darkness descends.

ii

Several days later. The woman is shopping in her local supermarket. She turns the corner onto the next aisle & there ahead of her is the Artist. Without questioning the impulse, she decides to spy on him. Hurriedly adjourning to a neighboring aisle, she peers between rows of bottled sauces. The Artist appears taller here amid the shelves. Appropriating the woman’s gaze, the narrative lingers for a paragraph or so upon the Artist’s body. His muscular arms, his tattooed wrists emerging from a shirt the creases of which signal his creative prowess. He turns to examine a jar of sun-dried tomatoes, jeans straining over buttocks tight & compact. But he is not, despite this, an attractive man. His hair is lank; he possesses an unfortunate beard. He has a basket, & she a trolley. Their selection of temporary containers for their produce carries a vague symbolic weight.

The woman pays for her shopping & wheels the trolley to her car. She unloads the bags, then remembers she needs cash to pay for her daughter’s piano lesson. She returns to the supermarket to use the cashpoint. As she is putting away the folded notes, she turns & encounters the Artist. Forms of greeting & minor social niceties are exchanged. The woman is red in the face. The Artist looks at her with interest.

iii

So it has come to pass that the woman has agreed to model for the Artist. She drives home slowly, in a daze. When she arrives she remembers nothing of the journey. Her mind is blank, yet something has opened her eyes.

Masturbation, mirror scene. Alone in her bedroom, the thick blinds pulled against the light. The woman unbuttons her sleeveless blouse, folds it & places it on a chair. She unties & unzips her loose linen trousers, steps out of the tangled legs. She looks at her body in the full-length mirror, thinks of the Artist behind her. Cupping her breasts in his hands. She imagines she can see them, a different flesh tone to her own. But it’s her own hands that touch her body. Her own clenched fist, her knuckles, sliding across the surface of herself.

That night the woman dreams about the Artist. Again, she’s in his studio. There are others browsing the wares, but it’s she the Artist takes by the hand. Without hesitation he leads her to the kiln.

iv

Finally, the scene at the Artist’s studio, returning to the story’s initial setting with a pleasing circularity. First describe her journey, during which she pauses for several minutes in a visual encounter with a cat, continuing only when said cat blinks & moves away, coalescing with a patch of shade beneath a neighbor’s car. A metaphor, perhaps, of one’s desires retreating from view. (She thinks she desires the Artist. But is this not just a screen, a masque, if you will, for her real desire to be him? Her partner, the writer, disparaging. The Artist with his tattooed hands: creative power coded as male. In this case, then, the woman as ‘the woman’?) The hothouse orchids of another garden, their labial blossoms signifying blah.

Finally, the scene at the Artist’s studio, returning to the story’s initial setting with a pleasing etc. etc. The woman removes her clothing. Although it would only be fair, she doesn’t ask him to remove his own. He asks if he can touch her to gauge her dimensions. His calculating hands disappoint the woman, who had expected a much more sexual event. With a sense that the moment is slipping away, she puts her hand on his penis.

There is a silence. Children’s voices come in from the street; the hot air buzzes; sirens are heard from several streets away.

The woman reacts first to his body’s non-reaction. She recants, apologizing, how inappropriate etc etc. The Artist then. The importance of retaining professional boundaries. The consequently irrelevant but personally exculpating fact of his preference for men. The woman imagines closing her body with clay. Pushing the clay into her eye sockets, her belly button, her vagina & her mouth. Shaping the clay with her body as she expels it from each orifice in turn.

Is there a revelation? A realization? Emphasize, but decline to spell out, the moment’s significance.

[The woman leaves her clothes behind. The woman strides out, burning, into the burning day.]

---

Jen Adams (she/they) is a UK-based researcher, feminist and writer.