For art's sake

He clamped his lint ridden mittens over my eyes and leads me carefully over the slippery rocks that I had barely managed to see from the jeep. He had pounced on me and shushed my eyes into denying even the beveled landscape which frilled the road on which we parked our vehicle.

"No, no. Don't look. Shhhh. Shhhh."

I could feel his heavy breath curling its way down my neck and twirling the soft down of my nape in their transparent fingers. I tilted my head hoping to slip away from the warm air which was his, but how do I escape the memory? Isn't it the memory of a breath that tingles way after the life breath has ceased to oscillate between him and the world that we now made ours? Isn't it the memory of last night which makes me stop and pull my stomach in? Isn't it the shy guilt of such memory which makes me reply with:
"No, nothing. I was just being careful of where I walk. Nothing."
He slowly rolls his thumbs along the edge of my ear to their rear and directs me with the firm grip he has on my head. Do I hear something squealing?
We walk carefully and I am aware of nothing more than the gurgling waters of either a brook or an open sewer. The smell of dead trees and biting frost denies me the power of discriminating between the possible source of the rolling sounds. How much we depend on our senses, and in the mummification of these very senses, how beautiful the world promises to be... until we are re-sensitised? Another strong feeling lurks in the cold black that he has ensconced me in... his growing excitement. Andre' is only excited by paintings, colours, textures and, hence, women.

What will it be this time? As we clomp over twigs straining to crackle under our weight but muffled by the dampness of an unwelcome winter, I wonder how it would be to live forever like this? Blind, deaf, tasteless, mute and being guided through the unknown by a hand that creates and relishes in the joy of beauty? Wouldn't it be remarkable? This absolute faith in the unseen Force which can be felt and realised by none other than "I"? I nearly trip over my foot wedged between slippery stones and I feel myself held upright by the vice like hands holding my head. He is panting, and I hear the song of excitement rumble through his nostrils and pulse its way through the mittens and against my eyelids. In all this human rush, I hear the squeals again.

"Alright. Now slowly open your eyes and look only ahead of you."
He loosens his fingers around my eyes and I feel them gradually peel away while leaving a familiar sinuous pressure around them. I roll my eye balls within and slowly open them to a stinging blanket of pure white under soft blue.. or is it blue over white? My eyes flicker straining under the sharp gaze and the urgency that Andre' exudes in knowing what I feel about it.

"Beautiful. This is so..."
I can't open my eyes fully, so I sink to my feet and lower my head.
"Wow! You feel that way about this?"
He holds me around my waist and spoons himself over me. Slowly he raises me to my feet.
"Wait till you see this."
He lets go of me and I continue to adjust my eyes to the blankness of beauty. I slowly smile and find any and every face I can recall on this large white canvas. Not a bird and not the wind has sullied the smooth surface of this expanse, but my mind rapidly splashes landscapes and pyramids and upturned faces all over. With equal dexterity, the mind restores the serenity of the canvas and indulges in another effort of conjuring faces across the white.

The squealing grows louder and I turn to watch Andre' a few yards away holding a conical glass flask in his mouth and struggling with something in a bag. A glint of metal in one hand and a feel a shiver run through me. How can the unknown stoke fear? I wonder what he is doing but he turns his back towards me. The squealing is unbearable and threatens to scar the quietness of the white spread ahead of me. Then suddenly there is silence. I turn to look at Andre and watch him do something with the conical flask. He shakes his left hand before turning around and in the same motion discards a bag to the ground and holding his flask aloft. I raise my eyes to spot the flask with a red fluid in it. I shudder down the length of my spine and find the echo of that shudder rise up my alimentary canal in a distasteful manner.

"Andre'" I scream and turn to look at the bag on the ground.
"Beauty, my love, must be created in the breath, then in the mind and then created for others to behold."

He swings his arm and sprays a blanket of red through the blue and onto the white. I hear the snow sizzle under the scalding weight of a murder in the name of art, murder of a ferret which helped create art with its life.