Never Tears

The riots are fewer, but, as Dr.Kane suggests, it does not mean the project is being accepted. Protesters get tired, and Cynthia is showing promise.

It may work. It may truly work.

It is the years of investment in the project that propels her to imagine what will follow Cynthia. A race of Human Canvases, beautiful and blank.

And not unhappy. Unhappiness is not the absence of happiness.

Absence is only absence, if there was something there before it, she reasons.

After all, Cynthia has never cried.

Art by Joanne Young

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Insistance

The years pass as smoothly as water, and it is with extreme care that Cynthia does not come to hear the title Human Canvas or understand what it means. Prototype and experiment are words disallowed in her presence.

They are few of many things disallowed around Cynthia.

Mother and father are equally distant concepts, though she hears the words.

There are innumerable rules regarding the project: her eating habits, the sounds and conversations she is allowed to hear, the questions she can ask or be asked.

No one tells Dr.Kane’s son these rules. 

Art by Joanne Young

Text by Lucie MacAulay

All the Colours

Cynthia hasn’t seen Justin for days, and maybe that wouldn’t scare her, but their last encounter was taut with his angry silence and her uncertain attempts at conversation.

Cynthia stands behind the curtain, to the side of the floodlights, where Dr.Kane balances two clipboards in her hands.

“Ready, Cynthia?” Dr.Kane asks, absently. She isn’t expecting an answer. Her mind is already on the runway, and Cynthia’s future walk along it.

Cynthia moves her hands restlessly at her sides, and resists the impulse to brush her fake eyelashes with her fingertips.

“Where is Justin?” she asks.

Dr.Kane does not glance up as she exchanges one clipboard for another. The click of her pen makes Cynthia’s heart skip.

“Justin’s gone.”

“No.” The word falls from Cynthia’s mouth like a gunshot.

“He’s at Boston University. He moved into residence on Tuesday.”

The rest of Cynthia’s words die in her throat. The floodlights blur like sunspots on a camera.

“Cynthia, are you alright?” This time, Dr.Kane is expecting answer.

Cynthia nods. “Justin-“

But the speakers are turned on, and in the din of the audience and the music, Dr.Kane does not hear her reply.

She gives Cynthia a gentle shove onto the stage, with what could be construed as affection, were her hands not ice cold.

Cynthia’s feet pull her body like an anchor. She is already sinking when she reaches the edge of the stage.

The crowds are a mass of colour; swirls of dots of faces with eyes that never bother to see.

But then Cynthia’s eyes feel warm, and the faces blur together.

Because the colours all form Justin.

Art by Cynthia L.

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Grounding

Cynthia was surprised that no one seemed to notice her. Nobody glanced into her face and saw a thousand others. Or perhaps they did, and that was why she was so well hidden in broad daylight.

People see what they want to see. It should have concerned Cynthia that the voice in her head sounded like Dr.Kane.

Justin led her onto the subway, and away from the facility and his usual haunts. When they disembarked, in a neighbourhood she did not recognize, he stuck his hands in his pockets and smiled boyishly. “We can go to Starbucks first, if you want.”

Cynthia shrugged, but Justin was already crossing the street, weaving around cars.

When they left Starbucks, coffees in hand, he took her down a system of side streets into a wealthy neighbourhood. They passed a billboard, and though Cynthia’s head turned, Justin’s didn’t. She wondered how many times he had seen her face suspended on a high rise.

Cynthia brushed her finger over her brow, down her nose, over the bow of her lips. It was something she did in times of stress, to trace the face she really has beneath layers of make up and spray paint, and never in front of anyone. (Somewhere alone the line, Justin stopped counting as someone.)

“Number twenty three,” Justin said, and stopped.

It was more than the series of boarded up windows that presented the house as out of place. The brick was unwashed, the bushes uncut.

Justin pulled the address from his pocket.

“It’s dated a while back,” he said, passing it to Cynthia.

Though she stared at the address, the letters refused to resolve into words.

Above, the sky split into a thousand sunset colours that arced and swooped like the paths of birds.

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Intersects

What Cynthia liked about Justin, was that he genuinely didn’t seem to see the difference between her and the rest of the world.

He sat beside her in her bedroom or on the grass outside with the same ease with which he sat beside the doctors and analysts. He carried with him a subtle energy that seemed to extend to everyone around him.

He brings it with him to her bedroom when he visits, along with two brown files leaking pictures that Cynthia identifies before she reads the accompanying documents.

“This one’s your Mom,” Justin says, laying it before her, like a tarot card.

“She’s pretty,” Cynthia remarks.

“And this one is your Dad.” The pictures are similar fluorescently lit photographs, like passport pictures.

Cynthia skims the documents, lists of positives and negatives. Negative for hereditary diseases, for nickel allergies, no police records. There are contact details for familial relations, but Cynthia flips those pages quickly.

There are brief details about their personal lives, hobbies. Justin is silent as she reads through them.

None of them resemble her own.

Not that she has any.

“Their phone numbers and stuff are there too,” Justin says, suddenly, drawing her attention to him. “I could call them, or you could visit them.”

“Dr.Kane wouldn’t let me,” Cynthia says. Her insides feel disjointed, in pieces like a jigsaw puzzle.

“Then we wouldn’t tell her. I could get you out, just for the day; your Mom is in the city. She’s across the bridge.”

Cynthia glances at her open door. The hallway beyond it stretches out like a vacuum.

People didn’t live in a vacuum, she realized. She wouldn’t either. 

Art by Joanne Young

Text by Lucie MacAulay

The Subtext of Smiles

Dr.Kane smiles and Cynthia wonders what it would feel like to rip her mouth off, pull the offending pink flesh from her face. The feeling passes like a heat wave and she smiles back. She has to clench her jaw to keep it from slipping. Dr.Kane pushes her hair from her face in a gentle gesture that is almost kind. Cynthia finds that she would claw her smile off, if she could get away with it. Dr.Kane leaves, but the feeling does not.

Art by Silvia Pelissero

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Dirty Canvas

“I wanted to rip his mouth off,” He says, bending to whisper in Cynthia’s ear. She turns to him, not question on her face.

“Didn’t you? When he kissed your hand? It was creepy.”

Cynthia copies one of his favourite movements and shrugs.

He turns to her. “Is it always like that? They just touch you? Wherever they want?”

“Yes.” When he pulls back she continues. “Should they not? I don’t know what they want so they do it themselves.”

He turns away. “It’s disgusting. I can’t believe you just let that happen.” Cynthia can hear the anger in his voice but before she recognizes it he is gone, through the double doors, away from the smell of powder and alcohol wipes. He takes the smell of gasoline and grass with him. 

Art from MirrorMask

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Canvas Unravelled

Claws of ice dug into her skin, her flesh erupted into tiny goose bumps. She watched with jealousy as the boy wiped a tear away. Jealousy, she decided, was something to be avoided. She pushed it effortlessly away. Her eyes followed the path of the tear from his cheek to his finger to his pants where it left a tiny darkened stain on denim. 

Art by Silvia Pelissero

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Panthers

The giant cats do not respond to her reflective eye makeup and light-catching clothing. Cynthia herself cannot feel her hair burned in straight curtains or her skin sprayed with fine bronze mist. But they raise their noses at her, sniff and become bored. She lifts her arm to her nose, her skin smells as it always has.

The panthers prowl on the white floor, black fur shedding and pelt gleaming in the lights. Cynthia watches their pupils grow to black pools, and then shrink until their eyes are jaundiced orbs. She poses a thousand ways. Draped over the creatures, cowering from them, morphing her expression but keeping her eyes on their listless ones. She tries to prowl with them, mimicking the smooth ripple from their shoulders to their paws and the sway of their head. The photographer follows her but she follows the panthers.

The set ends. There will be no more animals now, someone says as the panthers are rounded up. They return to their cages and she returns to hers.  

Art from Q Magazine 2009

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Playing With Paint

“Sometimes you look like a painting I saw,” he said. “Half of it was gold, really pale and the rest was all shadows and light.” He lifted his finger and traced her face, putting pressure under her cheekbones and around her sunken eyes. “You’re blonde but your face is so white, then you have these shadows here,” he pressed into her cheeks, “and under your eyes.”

Cynthia blinked; white spidery eye lashes against the dark shadows they cast on his index finger.

“But people probably tell you you’re pretty all the time. Since you model.” He pulled his hand away.

“People make me pretty,” Cynthia murmured, looking down at the pictures, ivory hair hanging in her face like an antique wedding veil.

“Yeah, but not the way other people make themselves pretty. You don’t have to try. You just let them paint you anyway,” he said it bitterly. “You let them.”

Cynthia’s heartbeat filled her head, heavy rain on pavement. His face turned red.

“Sorry, I meant that it’s wrong. What they do to you. You don’t let them, they just do it.”

Text by Lucie MacAulay