an audience of Vampires
When blood spills, rather let it spill onto a canvas and become artwork.
Don’t waste blood; don’t let your tears fall for nothing. Did you not know that tears and blood are the paint of life? What makes a greater impact on the human soul than blood? Nothing touches the heart more than art born of one’s blood — of one’s suffering. People are enthralled by blood. It is our obsession. At the essence, we are ultimately blood-sucking vampires.
Artists are the ones who become fluent in the voice of their blood and learn to translate it into art. Blood speaks; its voice reaches the deepest recesses of the human heart. It transcends boundaries. Its arms are long enough to massage and soothe the place where no other person has access. Its arms are long enough to reach even to God — to appease, to plead, a universal language recognized across cultures. Humans have invented submarines to probe the deepest oceans; rockets to pierce the highest skies — but no invention has ever truly delved into the human soul. The only words that can dissuade a person from jumping off a bridge are words smeared in blood: words that reveal one’s scars and say, “I have been there. I know what it feels like to fail as a man, as a mother. I was there too. Here, see my blood.”
awards for pain
Marcelena understood this. That is why her work was so successful and so painfully relatable. She stood back and regarded the large canvas in her studio that afternoon. The apartment itself listened — tall windows framing the city, a skylight that let noon leak like liquid gold, the wide floorboards that had soaked up years of paint and footsteps. Light pooled across the room like an audience. Strokes of red, orange, and blue splatter adorned the canvas — an attempt to map the chaotic landscape inside her. The brush in her hand dripped the color of a blue sky onto the plastic sheeting on the floor, flipping her already complicated world upside down.
She used the back of her wrist to wipe a lone tear. Her face had become another canvas: foundation and concealer smudged into uneven terrain, eyeliner and mascara leaving dark patches beneath her eyes, marring a face that, for all its beauty, had been weathered by sorrow. She always painted with her heart. Over the years, pieces of that heart had hung in the local gallery in Bilbao for strangers to witness. What the world called success demanded the most blood from her. She had stood before many, accepted awards, and offered thanks for what had caused her most pain.
remembering
Suddenly she dipped her brush into brown paint and slashed the canvas in repeated vertical sweeps — dark strands flying as if hair itself were being painted. Anger propelled her: anger at the one who had claimed to love her most. “Why, God? Why?!” she screamed, though she knew the shout would not alter the past. She pressed her hand gently to her belly and traced the scar there. It still throbbed. It would have been better, she thought, never to have carried the child than to have delivered a dead baby. She remembered the delivery room: Josh’s face, the doctors’ hurried voices, the clatter for instruments. “Where are you taking her? Bring back my baby!” she had howled, clutching at Josh’s arm, desperate. Panic in the doctor’s voice, a search for something, anything. “Please don’t let her die!” Josh’s voice had echoed as he followed the doctor out of the room, leaving her on the table, cut open and numb from the waist down because of anesthesia. If only they had numbed her heart too.
But doctors are mortal; they are not gods who can reverse stillbirth. The one who might have prevented it chose instead to watch from some loftier place.
colours of the night
Marcelena took another step back and regarded her canvas as the apartment watched with her. The walls, plastered and sun-streaked, seemed to hold their breath; the window sash creaked an indifferent sympathy. She breathed, dipped her brush in red, and swept again — east and west, the reds colliding like weather fronts. The light of the setting sun filtered through the park trees beyond her window, dappling the studio with movement, with the memory of that lonely forest she sometimes walked when the city felt too loud. The red paint met the blood at her wrists, so that soon she could not tell where paint ended and skin began. Night was coming; though announced by brilliant colors, it always arrived as deep darkness.
survival
Josh had wanted this baby as if a part of him were missing without it. By two months, before they even knew the sex, he had prepared the room, bought toys, fitted the cot. “Boy or girl,” he would laugh, “I’m cool with either — I’ll keep the colors unisex.” Desire, she thought, has a way of setting people up for profound heartbreak. Josh was not an artist. He could not transmute his grief into color or canvas, so grief cracked him. In breaking, he broke her. After the loss, his interest in their relationship waned. He remained physically, but he was not present. She gave him the choice to leave; eventually he took it, and she was left alone to tend the wound of their child. Perhaps forgetting was his strategy; perhaps her sullen face was a mirror he could not bear. Who was she to judge his way of surviving?
easter eggs
She still saw him in the streets of Bilbao sometimes, slouched and content beside another woman with her pregnant belly round and proud. It hurt to see him — a small, sharp thing — but she consoled herself with the thought that at least he had left by choice rather than by betrayal.
She dipped the last brush in silver and tapped a tiny dot into the red sky. The brightest star often appears before the sun has fully set. That dot was hope. Marcelena always tucked hope into her paintings like an easter egg — a small thing one might miss unless one searched. Night seemed to be closing in around her, but hope remained, faint and stubborn; she only needed to look.
a reason
Outside, the city continued: shutters clacked, a tram sighed past, the building opposite kept its own counsel — balconies with drying clothes, a child shouting somewhere below. Inside, her studio held the painting like a witness. The walls kept every spilled color, every tear. The floorboards remembered the rhythm of her footsteps. The skylight caught each new streak of paint and threw it back in fragments. Architecture was not inert; it had listened as she painted and as she wept, and in listening it bore witness. The studio, like an old friend, received her blood and turned it into something that might speak to someone else — might say to another lonely person, “I have been here too.”
That hope — that stubborn, hidden star — gave her reason to survive.
Lives Between Walls 
What do you think about this?