Work Text:
Tools across canvas: brush, fingers, knife. Ghosts attach themselves to every stroke, swipe, splat. Flickering in their vision; hauntings that never belonged to them. Curses they steal from those more deserving.
Other canvases taunt their peripheral. Twisted spectres of fears they long-since abandoned to the dust and cobwebs that gathered. Even the spiders knew better than to deal with the worst of it — the paintings that lay beneath white sheets, unnaturally untouched.
The further they go, the tighter their chest. Colour is chosen at random; whatever feels wrong. Whatever eats at their skull until it pounds behind their eyes. The more the colour piles on, the more their lungs constrict, throat closed to stop the ghosts returning in fumes.
The more viciously they strike, the more their muscles contract. Their arms stiffen, legs trembling in the effort to keep them upright. They feel the shadows closing in, licking at the edges of their vision like blackened flame until all they can see is the canvas and its chaos.
Their heart pounds, stomach churning. Every part of their body protests, like the ghosts don't want to leave; won't let them be free. When bile sits uncomfortably in their throat they know it is almost done.
A swipe of the pallette knife, hissing across the canvas like an execution. Their jaw clenches. The thickest paints jut out like mountain ranges viewed from above; like the edge of a cliff their skull will break on when they fall. The thinnest paint drips steadily, leaving streaks like corrupted tears across the canvas; playing a rhythmic pattern on the floor beneath, blood from an open wound.
They strike and stroke until their body is wound tight, throw the tools aside with a yell and resort to dragging their fingers through the paint; clawing and striking like the paint itself is fighting to escape. Fingerprints swiped into the cliff edges, smearing them into desperate prints, drag paths begging to be followed. The marks of a corpse they will never find.
They scream their agony, echoes in the lonely room that return to them — cries for help that will never be heard absorbed into paintings that will never be seen.
The air leaves their lungs at last. Their body falls limp. The silence reverberates. The ghosts rest until next time.