Revenge
The water canals along the cozy cobblestone streets shone crystal clear. A dark forest green Christmas tree with ornaments lined with gold, sparkly borders towered the city. And the sun was just beginning to set, the sky sprinkled in shades of rose, violet, and touches of orange. Teenage girls raced with their bicycles stocked with flowers down the streets, screaming playful insults at one another. It was a jolly holiday day in Amsterdam.
An artist by the name of Antonio painted by the street corner. His gaze on the canvas was focused. Antonio was a handsome, twenty-something year old man of a lean frame, and long, thin fingers. Identified by his artist beret and dimple smile, the young man was very tender and shy. He entered the Amsterdam artist neighborhood only recently from Colombia, and his Dutch was very weak. Antonio excelled in portrait painting, and he often took portraits of random locals who strolled the streets of Amsterdam in the evening. People always marveled at his fine portraits. However, one foggy, dull evening, after he picked up some groceries and walked towards his apartment, Antonio saw a tall, pale woman with a tan-colored coat saunter down the road. She was scowling, and her features were very sharp. An urge of desire overwhelmed Antonio. He wanted to paint her face, with the right textures, the right colors, that very moment. He inhaled the chilly air sharply.
He ran to her, and tapped her shoulder. Antonio was breathing heavily; he was excited. “Hey, my name is Antonio. I am an artist, I paint portraits. I want to paint your portrait and capture your expression. I will give it to you for free. Just give me thirty minutes.” The woman gave him a nasty glare and gritted her teeth. She was smoking a cigarette. She was a racist woman, and she loathed cultural diversity in Amsterdam. She was one of the few who believed that Amsterdam was meant for only the Dutch. Therefore, Antonio’s broken Dutch and exotic appearance caused her to disrespect him.
“Fine.” She rolled her eyes, and bit her maroon-tinted lips. The woman secretly wanted to see how the portrait would come out, as she was somewhat self-obsessed.
So the next half hour was spent by the thoughtful man and the rude woman. While Antonio polished the woman’s features and gaze on the canvas, the woman smoked her cigarette. As time flew by, her face grew paler and paler, and her eyes drooped down. Antonio was so engrossed in his painting that he did not care to observe the woman while he was finetuning her shoulders, eyebrows, and pale skin tone on the canvas. After two hours of endless finetuning, he smiled proudly to himself. “All done,” he whispered, self-satisfied. Antonio looked up. He saw the body of the woman, leaning against the chair. Her arms looked feeble. The crescent moon glistened against the midnight sky, and Antonio lightly shook the woman. He thought that she had fallen asleep. “Come on now,” he whispered. “I am done. Look at this work of art.”
Antonio then checked the woman’s heart rate. There was no beat, and all what was left of her was her frowning face on the canvas, with plumes of smoke engulfing her beauty.
He was never an honest man in life thus far. Antonio quietly left the scene of his painting and shamefully trudged up the steep road to his flat. There was no point in taking the stranger to the hospital, as she was already dead for a good two hours. “After all, it is her fault for smoking,” Antonio thought to himself as he guiltily looked down at his painting. He stared at the dull aqua eyes and the long, wavy black hair on the canvas, and he placed the canvas in his closet, under a heap of miscellaneous things. Tears streamed down his face and his eyes were bloodshot red. He blamed the woman’s death on his obsession with painting. That winter night, for the first time in a long time, Antonio cried himself to sleep.
The day started off wrong. The next early morning was gloomy, and Antonio was in a sullen mood. When his friends talked about casual matters, he replied cruelly. People were wondering what was wrong with him, why his dimple-smile vanished from his face in just one day. Antonio painted impassionately. His attractive hazel eyes transformed into a dull blue color, and a voice constantly hissed in his head that day. A woman’s voice. It was raspy and slurred, and Antonio carefully listened to that voice. The voice carried into the late hours of the night, when Antonio was trying to fall asleep. “Paint a portrait of yourself, a self-portrait,” the voice snickered. The voice controlled Antonio; his instinct told him to obey that voice. So he did. He got up from bed. He prepared his paints and canvas, and outlined his face with a pencil, using a mirror as a reference. “Now add some red paint to the canvas. Add a cigarette. Add smoke,” The voice laughed eerily. Antonio obeyed. He finished the portrait. He stared at it feverishly; he was clueless. “Now get a knife and slice your neck.” Antonio’s body stiffened and his hand trembled, but after a while of hesitation, he had no choice but to slice his neck. It was as if he was possessed by the voice. Blood gushed onto the canvas. And as he died painfully with his self-portrait in his arms, the cigarette-smoking woman entered as a ghost into his apartment. She laughed mockingly. Her name was Revenge. 