The Charm

[Badb†]

((Zoe Leverett, continued from Steadier Footing.))

The tragic veneer of the self-indulgent artist was beginning to wear thin. For only so long could she rely upon the tired metaphors of the tortured poets, starting her island hymns with O Muses, O high genius, aid me now! when her true invocation was of Soteria, of safety and recovery. This course was a downward spiral, a helter-skelter in which her ultimate fate at the bottom was self-destruction, and no one would remember her as the portrait of the artist who coined the universal truths of He-Said, She-Said in her life that was cut tragically short, but as the Girl-Who-Did-Not. She was to be the easily forgotten anecdote; mocked and derided between breaths by those with loose, second-hand understandings of her story, who could not grasp why her stammering appeals to the gods of self-importance took so long, were so oblique, were so poorly imitated.

She placed a more appealing fate on the card table, black aces and eights, the dead man's hand and that was the greatest irony because this choice could free her or drive her further down her pretentious path of self-destruction. She offered herself clarity. Just hear me out, she begged herself. The artist was only one aspect of self, in the end, and this was an appeal not to the artist but the person buried beneath. Something Straightforward. How does that sound? Damning with faint prose perhaps, but what was the point of gazing inwards when her worst enemies were outside of her mind? Thoughts turned in her head, two senses of self battling for dominance until the pretension of the artist began, finally, to recede and the designer, focused not on the techniques and the tragedy and the metaphors but on purpose, took dominance.

Something they both agreed with.

---

Zoe missed her sketchpad as she stared into the melancholic ocean vista, wondering whether she would ever get a chance to draw again. She felt jittery, sat shivering on the edge of the cliff with her legs pulled tight against her chest. She rested her elbows on the peaks of her knees, her hands shaking from the chill in the air until she rubbed them together in concentric circles in a vague attempt to warm herself up. Sleeping in the open air meant that when she awoke several hours later, slumped against the jagged rock face of the cliff, her clothes and her skin were damp and her hair was clumped together in wet tresses that rustled limply as the bitter sea wind whistled past her ears, bringing with it the strong smell of salt and flecks of moisture that splattered onto her face and her arms and speckled the lenses of her reading glasses. Gray, shapeless cloud-forms filled the sky and beneath her waves lapped at the foot of the cliff, choppy and tumultuous, lacking the aesthetic splendor that Zoe had wordlessly debated with Oscar.

Wiping her glasses on the hem of her shirt, Zoe rose to her feet, pushing her self-doubt to the back of her mind for as long as possible. It had been days since she had interacted with anyone, lonely wandering days spent agonizing over details. Andi, Gray, Cooper-not-Carter, and Oscar were long gone. She shouldered her bag and reached for her machete, dug in the ground blade-first for easy access as a deterrent to any attackers.

Time to go make trouble.

[font=times new roman][Zoe Leverett, continued in I believe people can change, but only for the worse.][/font]