OPHELIA’S BATH
Slicked porcelain hands, joints arthritic aching against the cold white ceramic lip of the tub. The waters are near frigid now; a chill boring into her stomach and every cavity of her chest. The oil lamps under the bath ran out an hour ago. The oblong curve of the glass - etched with interlacing lilies - is sooty and black; now cool to the touch. Mr. Millais sits hunched, wholly contained by the small strokes of paint on the canvas. His boyish curls sit around his ears and his thin arms hang the cotton smock from his body like a child snuck into his father’s dresser. Knees tucked under him, toe-tips holding a balancing grip on the thin stretcher bar of the wooden stool; a school boy with his head held to a spelling sheet, tongue tipped in concentration. His eyes flick between the canvas and the still body, watching not her shallow shivered breath but the soft floating auburn hair against the ivory angle of her neck. His brows furrowed in concentration, soft blond lashes on cold blue eyes. The room weighs in a sepulchral silence only woken by Millais’ ‘hmms’ and gasps of self congratulations or frustration.
The turpentine spins the room leaving her head hollow. The woman’s cold parted lips feel the thin dribble of mucus from her pointed, reedy nose, achingly chilled; drip into her open mouth. Her eyes set, a still focus on the glass vase atop the old wooden cupboard. The clear light of the sun reflecting against the old water and the cut edge of the clear crystal; Small clusters of columbines and daisies now drooping and weeping toward the floor. The fine star-pointed petals of the columbines rounding in on themselves, purple tips turning to an old bruise brown; the white bright centre now shrivelled and contorted into loose rolls, the yellow pollen floating on the water's surface. She’d held the fine stems three days ago. Her fingers had cupped them gently, just holding them from floating endlessly round the bath. A growing pile of studies of these flowers, her hands, the point of her nose, the line where her breast and the water's surface met, sits quietly on a bench at the far side of the room; beyond where her eyes could trail, if they trailed at all.
She’d flicked her eyes around the room once, counting the shiplap of the ceiling, every nail that held it, every surface stacked with miscellaneous knick knacks, every scrap of torn paper and discarded wood panel surreptitiously stuffed into drawers and leaning against all the walls and upright furniture. She was met with a whining harsh voice caught in the silence, fluttering at her to “keep every breath of you quite still”. There was a demand to it, and a bizarre brogue he seemed to adopt in his panic. It was unnerving coming from him. Hearing his voice like that was odd, Mr Millais always being the quieter amongst hordes of gesticulating over-triumphant poets, preferring the canvas, almost embarrassed by his own enthusiasm. Perhaps he always demanding and bright, it was just saved for the moments when all the Lizzie Siddalls of the world were out of the way and out of mind, sitting in rooms with closed doors. She’d shattered his reverie, small grey eyes sweeping the room, a rude reminder of the woman lying in front of him rather than the abstract forms of her limbs. Now her lungs felt heavy in the cold water under the weight of the fabric on her body. She couldn’t have moved if she’d wanted to. Corpuscles grew in her throat, a clambering sensation. If she spoke it would be croaked. The time it took for breath felt meditative, thick and viscous on her lungs. The ring of violets around her neck tickled against the skin. In a week her father would be having a fit down the hall from her weezing body wrapped in quilts, attended to by a doctor leaking gold from his purse. But here there was a solitude in this stillness, even with the man's eyes boring into every inch of her body. Through the abstract shapes between the crooks of her fingers. There was a sweet nothing in this, held by the cooling water, and the strangling fabric, mind only on the way light filtered fine dust through the air.
Emma Elisabeth Lee, 18, Blue Mountains - Australia ✯