Do it for the Aesthetic (part 2)

The next Tuesday, Claire woke up feeling surprisingly good and inspired, even. 

She flung herself out of bed and into the shower, scrubbing herself up as best she could and using the last of her nice conditioner. She dressed nicely for the first time in a week, and flittered out of her apartment building and straight to the art building. 

She was even there early for the senior discussion class, taking her seat and putting two of her finished canvases on the easels. 

When everybody else filed in, looking hungover and exhausted, she just felt giddy. She wasn’t exactly *done* with her project, but it was going really well. She’d be running late in getting the show ready over Thanksgiving break, but that wasn’t so bad. It’d be up and ready when school started again, for sure. 

“My idea is portraying death as an aesthetic achievement,” she gestured to one of her paintings. “Every canvas is myself, dying in a different way. It represents both the death of self when we deny our real personalities for society, and also presents death as not a thing to be feared.”

Mitchell sighed. 

Claire tried not to twitch. She’d heard him out on his squeamishness, and really wasn’t interested in any more of the same critique. 

Drew rose her hand. “Do you think that this theme will be obvious to an observer? I like the concept, but it feels like it’s lacking an extra component.”

The class agreed. Tom didn’t bother to raise his hand. “It looks like you’re attempting to portray society’s arreared idea of a person, and embracing that death of false personhood.”

‘You meant erroneous, you jackass.’ She thought, trying not to kill him with her eyes. God, she hated Tom.

She watched all the other students roll their eyes at him, too, though, which helped. Regrettably, all the professors loved him for some reason. 

Tacky little asshole. He was always on about grossing people out just to make them uncomfortable. There was no depth to it. And everyone just *loved* him because he had the nerve to paint a dismembered arm covered in gangrene. It didn’t say anything. It was just gross. 

And he never, ever, ever used big words correctly. So pretentious. His criticism and pretension would be easier to take if she thought he had any real talent. 

“It’s like you’re taking these subjects out of your own reconnaissance,” he tried again. Professor Garcia nodded. 

‘A secret spy meeting? What the absolute hell are you talking about? Consciousness?’

She grit her teeth and nodded. “The subjects are subverting the idea of death being a negative, which is an aesthetic and message that appeal to me personally.”

Luckily, there was no real resistance after that. Tom tended to drain all the life out of a room. 

“Okay, Claire, that sounds like you’ve thought it through. You may want to look at any elements or other mediums of art that might help your point, but you have approval.” Professor Garcia made a check on her list. “You can use the gallery key whenever to get it all set up.”

“If I’m staying over break, can I use it then?” Claire asked, still in front of the group. She knew damn well most of them were going home. The ones who didn’t already live in town tended to have the funds to go back to see their families. 

Plus, they were already done with their presentations and were getting set up now. They wouldn’t need to come back.

Professor Garcia nodded. “Get it from my office before I leave tomorrow, I don’t think anyone else will need it.”

The rest of class was relatively uneventful for Claire- she was brainstorming ideas in the back. Maybe it needed something more interactive? A section just of paintings might get less attention when so many of her classmates did multiple medias. Tom wasn’t just doing paintings, but some hideous sculptures. Drew was doing photography and metalwork. 

There were some interactive exhibits as well- sculptures you could sit in, exploring form and function. 

So maybe, she needed to do something else? The answer was fairly obvious that it should be herself, in some form. A sculpture of her lying in repose would take more time than she had, and would also mean she’d need to research a lot of stuff. Maybe performance art? She already had herself. 

She’d just need some props- she could get those from the art department and maybe the costume department. They tended to rent out costumes and some props to students for a small fee. 

It was maybe courting something a little ghoulish to actually pretend to be dead for hours at an exhibit, but it was a nice way to pull it all together. 

Claire quickly sketched out how she would frame the paintings around herself to make her body the centerpiece- but then pull them away relatively quickly with other lines to her next painting. It was going to be hard to pretend not to be breathing if people were encouraged to just stand there and gawk. 

After class, she and Drew went up to the roof to watch the cars go by. Mitchell was smoking on the other side. 

“You ready, then?” She asked her friend. “I’m finally starting to feel good about this.”

Drew hummed. “Yeah, I have a lot of stuff to do, but I’ll be done tomorrow and all set up. I’m looking forward to spending the weekend with my family and my puppies.” She smiled beatifically. “We’re going to spend every day going for walks and watching movies inside.”

“Sounds nice.”

Natalie came up after her smoke break and sat next to them, brushing off the roof a bit with her jacket before plopping down. 

“Ugh, did you hear Tom’s new idea today?” She asked, sounding weary. 

Claire could identify. But she wasn’t in that class, so no.

“He’s going to start taking pictures of accidents and stuff. Just really gory shit. Says it’ll ‘shock’ people.” Natalie grimaced. 

“Ew.” Drew covered her mouth. “Why is he like this?”

“No one knows.” Claire said. Her hands were starting to feel cold, so she shoved them into her coat pockets. She really should have remembered gloves this morning. 

Stupid. 

“Anyway, Claire,” Natalie rolled her head to face her. “You’re staying here over break, again?”

“My parents live too far for me to go back.” Claire said, feeling a bit queasy. It was true. If she’d had the money, though, she could. She just didn’t make that much. 

“The reason I’m asking is that my parents want me to leave tonight, and you know my mom.” Natalie huffed. “When we get back she’ll throw all my food out, saying it’s bad, and buy new. You want any of it before she destroys my fridge?”

That was the polite way of saying it. It was true that Natalie’s mom was some sort of health food/expiration date obsessive. It didn’t matter if it wasn’t out of date- if they’d been out of town, she threw it out. She was eternally worried about Natalie getting salmonella and dying. 

To be honest, Claire couldn’t afford to decline even if she wanted to. The cafeteria was going to close tomorrow for the long weekend, and she couldn’t sneak enough food out to last her that long. 

She resigned herself to quinoa snacks and smiled. 

“Yeah, I’d love that. Thank you! When would you want me to get them?”

Natalie grinned. “Within a few hours, if you could. I can help you bring them back to your apartment. I didn’t eat a lot of the snacks this time.”

“You have any classes?” Claire asked, leaning back. She used her hand to support herself. 

Oh shit, that was cold on the concrete. She leaned back up and immediately crammed her frozen hand back into her pocket. 

“Nope,” Natalie popped the p, and winked. “Actually, if you help me out now, I could leave immediately. Then I don’t have to wake up early in the morning.”

“I do love to help out friends.” Claire laughed. “Drew, you wanna come?”

She shook her head, obviously shivering a bit. It was a better hang out spot in the summer, to be perfectly honest. Right now it just meant there was no trees to block the freezing wind. 

“I’ll finish setting up my exhibition and get out of here for the day, probably.” Her teeth were chattering. 

“Okay then,” Claire stood. Oh, her ears hurt. They were probably pink. Drew was right. Outside is bad. They shouldn’t hang out here for long right now. Most of them didn’t even smoke. 

They scuttled down the stairs and into the heated building, bidding Drew goodbye before going to Natalie’s place to grab two huge boxes of organic food. 

Claire did not fail to notice that most of it was dry goods and snacks. They weren’t going bad in a hurry. But Natalie knew that as well as she did, so it wasn’t even worth mentioning. 

Sometimes people were just eccentric, and you got to benefit from their largesse. Claire didn’t want to complain. 

They dumped the boxes just inside Claire’s door, and briefly hugged goodbye. 

“See you on Monday!” Claire called down the stairs, as Natalie left. 

“See you then, stay warm!” Natalie yelled back, and a second or two later the building door thumped shut. 

Claire shut and locked her own door to examine her haul. God, that was a lot of stuff. Some mac and cheese mix, some chips, cookies, noodles and some packets of sauce, and lots of nuts for some reason.  Some of the snacks were outright bizarre- who had ever heard of ‘niblets’ or ‘apricot kernels’?

She read the ingredients- most of them were obvious, but one of them had something called 'amygdalin'. Didn't sound particularly organic to Claire, but whatever.

“Cool.” She said to herself, putting the boxes up on the kitchen counter. “I’ll deal with the rest of it later.”

She snagged a box of oatmeal raisin cookies from the box and ate a couple before resuming work on her paintings. 

The next day, she felt somewhat stiff, but shrugged it off with the cold. Besides, she had a great idea in her sleep- she’d channel Ophelia in her exhibition. The theatre department definitely had that dress in their costume library. Then she’d just need to pin her hair right, and maybe find some drapey fabric and a pillow?

She pulled on some warm clothes, layering more than she would normally think was necessary. Claire had miscalculated yesterday- her hands still felt cold and stiff. Today, she would wear gloves like a person. 

All bundled up, she went out of her building to find that the brown, dead grass had been coated in a thick layer of snow. 

‘Figures. It always snows around Thanksgiving.’ she griped in her head. Luckily, she was wearing boots anyway. She trudged across campus to sign out and pay five dollars to rent an appropriate dress and accompanying accessories, promising she’d return them the day after the exhibition. 

She’d have to carefully wash them on Monday night, but it wasn’t like that was a problem. 

Claire hauled her find to the art building, where the key to the gallery was on a hook next to a picture of Professor Garcia’s dog. 

The building was weirdly cold. 

‘Did someone turn the heat off?’ She poked around. It didn’t look like there was anyone around, but someone had been here. The ceramics lab was messy, and the door had been unlocked. 

She climbed the stairs to the second floor, where she turned on the heat. It had been off. That was weird and dangerous, the pipes in the old building might freeze and explode. 

But Claire could swear she felt a breeze, so she went up the last few flights, checking the doors. At the top, the door to the roof was wide open. There was snow on the last couple of stairs, too. 

‘Whoever did this is a massive asshole.’ 

Claire went out the door, fully intending to give someone an earful. There’d been footprints in the snow, so someone was around here somewhere.

The roof was also empty. 

Ugh. 

But something caught the corner of her eye. She walked towards it, folding up her dress and placing it on the ledge of the building. 

Something just below…

Claire leaned forward, hoisting herself up on the ledge to get a better look.

‘Wow, this is actually kind of high.’ She realized. 

Her heart was pounding, but she couldn’t move. From up here, she could see tiny people walking below her to the science building for their last half-day of classes. Cars drove by on the street. 

Her stomach heaved. 

Her fingers were frozen in her gloves. Claire couldn’t help but feel a strange sense of deja vu. 

The world looked so peaceful, with the little snowflakes falling on it. Like it was a great, big, comforting blanket on the ground and foliage. Even the flat fountain by the main building was covered in snow. 

She had the sudden and inexplicable feeling like she wanted to dive right down into it. She held her breath and closed her eyes, as if she was about to leap into a pool.

‘Nope, nope, that’s bad.’ 

Claire pulled herself back together, shaking her head and feeling snowflakes fall down the back of her neck. 

‘Gotta stop being a stupid, hopeless romantic and get my stuff done.’

She walked down the stairs and out of the building, after making sure the door to the roof was shut and bolted. 

It was weird, though. No one still seemed to be around. Who had turned the heat off?

Well, it wasn’t really her problem. She’d fixed it before anything broke. There was no point in wasting her time trying to find someone to yell at. For all she knew, it was a professor who had made the mistake. 

She snapped up her paintings from the conference room and took them to the gallery. 

It was a tricky balancing act with all the stuff she had in her hands, but she managed to unlock the gallery doors and carefully place her canvas and materials inside. 

The rest of the day was a cold blur- moving painting after painting into the gallery, setting them up just right.

She worked into the night staging and even brought her paints in to fix some color issues- the lights in the gallery weren’t going to highlight what she wanted. She’d need to fix them both. 

Claire found herself finished around midnight, after she convinced two harried-looking music students to help her move a divan from the lounge into the center of her area. She draped the cloth over it and placed the pillow where her head would be. 

She stood back and looked at the staging as a whole.

It told a story, leading people through and out of her area. Her centerpiece hung right above the divan and behind a bit, which meant that the line of the body in it led directly to Claire’s head on the divan. 

Then, they’d follow the line her body made, which connected with another painting. That was eye height with Mitchell’s first set of vases, presenting a good transition to the next exhibit. 

“Excellent.” She breathed. 

Satisfied, she went back home. She peeled out of her thick outerwear and went to eat snacks on the couch. 

Her dreams felt restless.

Claire dreamed of her gallery, and the snow. She felt cold. She woke up around 3, shivering. Her hands were purple with cold, and so stiff. She tried to rub them together to warm them up. 

She shambled to her bed, wrapping herself up in the covers. 

The dreams came back with a vengeance. She was stepping on shards of ice in the dress she had just rented for her gallery. The biting wind whipped at her hair, before she turned a door handle and flipped a switch. 

There were her paintings, but not as she’d intended them. They screamed, and she screamed back. 

She woke with a startle, confused. Where had her blankets gone?

She tried to move, but she couldn’t. 

Claire shifted her head. The room was so dark she couldn’t see anything. 

No, not the room. This wasn’t her room. She was outside. If she squinted, she could see the stars dotting the sky. They didn’t seem very bright from here. 

Her hand came up to her mouth, unbidden. Claire stared at it. What the hell was going on? Was she still dreaming?

Her mouth opened, but she wasn’t aware of doing it. Her hand dropped a massive handful of what looked like strange nuts into her mouth. She chewed and swallowed. 

‘What the fuck?’

Claire tried to sit up, but it felt like she was kind of stuck? 

God, it was so cold. She shifted her eyes to the side, trying to figure out where the hell she was. This was the worst dream ever. 

Her hair was splayed out like tentacles, but it looked like they were under water. 

No.

Not under water. In ice. Claire frantically tried to move, but her body was frozen stiff to the ground. 

Her head snapped back up straight, and her other hand slowly dropped more of the seeds into her mouth. 

She wanted to wake up. She wanted to leave. 

Her mouth finished chewing. 

Then it said, “It doesn’t matter what you want. This is art.”

Claire felt a cloudy sort of sleepiness fall over her, as her arms lightly crossed on her chest. 

“This is what you wanted.” a voice that was and was also not hers, said. “A beautiful death. Everyone will remember, Claire. Everyone.”

“Not like this!” She tried to scream. But evidently she wasn’t in control of her mouth. Nothing came out. 

She wanted to whimper, but she just felt so tired. Claire slid her eyes shut, unable to keep them open any longer. 

Everyone came back to campus Sunday, by degrees. The students trudged through the snow with their heavy bags and heavier hearts, unhappy about the prospect of another month before the real break in the year. 

What no one seemed to know was why the paintings were hung everywhere. 

There was one hung by the arch at the entrance, another in the garden on a stand. After Mitchell dumped his backpack and bag back at his room, he went out to look. 

The path wound around the gallery building. He was getting an uncomfortable feeling. 

They were all Claire’s, which was weird. She was a little unconventional, but putting her canvas out in the snow to get ruined didn’t sound like her. 

He shook off the feeling. She really was quite a painter. Every painting felt real and alive, so vibrant that he could swear that the girls in them might just fall out into the wet snow. 

He turned the corner towards the fountain, following the next set of paintings. But they ended at the fountain. 

He turned to look at it and almost fainted. 

Claire was lying there, in the fountain. In the fountain. Her head was resting on a pillow, and her hands were delicately folded over her chest. The lacey white dress she was wearing made her look like an angel. 

Her skin was almost glowing, but it looked blue. 

She looked like she was sleeping. She definitely wasn’t. 

Mitchell threw up in his mouth and then swallowed it. This was serious. Someone would need to call the police or something. 

A flash caught his eye. 

Tom was standing at the top of the stairs with a camera. 

Mitchell couldn’t explain the fear, or the feeling he had. But that was disgusting. He had to say something. 

“I don’t think you should do that, Tom. She wouldn’t want that, it’s disrespectful.” He called out weakly. Any second now, he was going to throw up again. 

Tom shrugged, and took another shot. It felt like every click hit Mitchell in the heart. Tom turned to look at him with a little half-smile. 

“It kind of seems like something she would have done.” Tom said, gesturing lightly to the paintings that had led them both here. “Anyway, it’s art. She doesn’t get an opinion.”