Fractured Crystal: Sapphires and Submission by M. J. Lawless Page B

surface before picking up one of her charcoals that, she noted, Daniel had left so conveniently to hand. This, she knew, was not a mistake: after only a few days in Comrie, she realised that everything meticulously had its place.
    Her first attempts to sketch were a failure. Her hand simply refused to obey. She tore out the pages and threw them to one side. Usually, this would be an admission of abjection, an excuse not to go on. But not today. Today she was not weak, like she usually was, but strong.
    The breakthrough came when the birdman transformed into a more swanlike form, his head curving round towards the woman in his wings, those wings themselves ending in Ernst like preternatural fingers. And it was another Ernst painting that filled her imagination as she forced her left hand to work, The Robing of the Bride , a virgin in luxuriant, red-feathered robe, her round young belly pointed forward, pudenda covered and threatened by the rapacious spear of another bird man. He visits me every day, she thought to herself, recalling long lost words. He presented me with a heart in a cage, two petals three leaves, a flower and a young girl.
    No need for symbolism in her own sketches. The thickening black lines of grit on white curled into a phallus of more Picasso - esque proportions, Minotaur mixed with the bird superior, a huge erection threatening and enticing the Leda caught up in her birdman’s wings. Her sex was hungry for its own ravager, but it was also strong enough — plenty strong — to devour the fragile spear that rose from the birdman’s loins. With a few careful, delicate flicks of her wrist, she threw down her own spears across the birdman’s face, marking him with precious scars.
    So lost was she in her vision, she did not even notice how, at last, her left hand had become one with her. It was enough, rather, to draw.
    This was how Daniel found her. She did not even hear him enter. As such, he was able to stand there for a few moments in complete silence, watching her sketch image after image of the birdman and his bride, a strange conflict of emotion in him as his eyes flickered between her intense expression, the curve of her pale neck and the way her hand moved effortlessly across the paper.
    At last her conscious mind deigned to acknowledge him. As she looked up, she could not resist a smile — a knowing, utterly fearless smile, a little contemptuous even. Here, that smile seemed to say. I know who you are, with all your secrets. I’m not scared of you anymore . She said nothing.
    “I thought you would be gone.”
    She looked at her keys on the table. “I did consider it. It would probably be the most sensible thing to do, wouldn’t it.”
    He nodded but didn’t reply.
    “Where did you go?” she asked.
    “Towards the hills. I walked for a while. It’s what I often do.”
    “How romantic.” Even he could not ignore the sarcasm in her voice, and for a second his jaws clenched, one of his scars rippling.
    “May I?” he asked, extending his arm towards the pad she held on her lap.
    “Of course.” She passed it towards him, watching him intently with her blue eyes.
    Neither of them spoke for a while until, at last, he said: “You capture me better than any photograph.”
    She nodded. “I thought so too.” As though in surprise, she lifted up her left hand and stared at it, the finger tips blackened from the charcoal. “I thought I’d lost it, but evidently not. It looks as though I finally managed some mastery over this wayward bastard.”
    Daniel’s own hands fell to his side, still clutching the images of the birdman. He turned to the window and looked out. “Mastery, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it. We meet another, in ourselves our outside the self, and we know it will be a fight till the death unless one submits. The master wants the slave to acknowledge, and the slave will be saved from death.”
    “What a sweet worldview you have,” Kris observed ironically.
    This