The Painter

A gaunt wanderer, half-matted in oils and turpentine, drags a splintered easel across a frontier town whose dust seems to sneer at beauty. Each dawn he daubs the same face—an absent beloved—onto warped canvas, only to scrape it clean by dusk, as though memory itself were a palimpsest he must torture into truth. The local marshal, a man carved from petrified guilt, commissions a portrait to immortalize his dying daughter; the painter agrees, sensing raw marrow for his obsession. Between sittings the girl’s coughs echo like distant artillery, her pallor intensifying as pigments thicken. Gamblers, soiled doves, and a travelling priest orbit the studio, each demanding frescoes of their own sins, yet the painter’s gaze never strays long from the child’s waxen cheekbones. When the portrait nears completion, the town ignites—literally—when a lantern topples onto rags soaked in linseed. Flames lick across the wooden façades, turning every boarded window into a makeshift frame for the inferno. In the smoke-choked church he finally finishes the likeness: she appears both beatific and already ash, a chromatic ghost that outlives the flesh. At sunrise the townsfolk sift rubble while the painter, clothes singed, straps the canvas to his back and vanishes into the prairie, leaving behind only the scent of burnt umber and a single scarlet brush-stroke on the jailhouse wall.