The Death of Art
written by: T. Ahzio
I hear the thoughts of the living, and I can tell you this. These thoughts enter you, flick on and off switches, leading you down newly lit paths or expose dark corridors. They’re like tangles, indents, protrusions, logic mixed with mayhem that scrape the soft walls of the universe while polishing the bones of the extinct. They can appear merely functional, or they can look as if they are sacred and mysterious. Like art.
Murder is an art. That is why I follow him.
I follow him into his easels, the houses he breaks into. Houses with collections of moldy books, with yellow plastic over sofas, hardwood floors, the reek of old pets, 48-inch television screens, doll collections leaning haphazardly against one another on shelves, dusty glassware coated with burnt cooking oil. He feels comfortable inside them, inside the blood and guts of a home, where he finds his canvases, the victims. His job, or so he thinks, is to paint them. Here is where their organs are reformed by his paint strokes, blood strewn about like a finger painting. The object of his art (for I have heard him think this) is to reawaken the functions of the living, rearrange their purpose, give them new definitions. A once recognizable face reshaped into coldness, a void, an expression drawn into a new placement of eyes, nose, ears, and mouth.
Someone else might not appreciate his art, not see how beautiful a plastic bag appears over a head, fogging up with the last few struggling breaths, the little bubbles that form at the corner of a mouth, the angelic look of a victim, when all thoughts become nothing but the thought, of death.
I hear what he thinks about his work.
His art is a form of liturgy, ritualistic, a Mass. It is of cleansing and catharsis. To him, humanity is a hinderance, a clog in a drain. He feels it’s a dirty planet, full of deserts and rain, plugged up by overly succulent flowers who leave their throats agape, tilted upwards to the sky in prayers that ask for more of what they already have, like bees who irritate, birds who flutter like flirts, a mouthful too full to speak, throats and thoughts gorged. Better to drain them empty, like a shell or an abandoned living room. Slit their stems so that their nectar bleeds out.
He makes his portraits out of the suffocated quiet ones, the caved-in heads of the obnoxious, the bleeding out of boob tube zombies. I tune into his thoughts, not just to listen, but to try and pry open his synapses, to hear his reasons, like the sublime position of his fingers during strangulation, the well-placed stab of a knife as it punctures a heart. I know the why, the how, and the what for. But this is evil, at least I have the feeling that it’s evil.
Maybe I could find a way to stop him!
I’m not callous or without empathy. But I have no form. No sound can be uttered from my throat. I am dried up beyond mere dust by thousands of years of death. I don’t miss the movement of bone and muscle, the taste of food, the ache of love. I can’t grab him or shout at him or tell him to stop. I’m inside the buzz that resides somewhere outside life. This buzz creates a drive within my form. I think it’s thought, but I’m not sure. This is what leads me to haunt him.
I try to distract him by connecting with physical objects near him. A radio switches on and plays a certain song while he’s arranging the living into death. But to him, all physical movements around him are nonessential. He doesn’t need to listen, for he’s tuned into only himself. Everything else is explained away, they are distractions, meaningless motions of a banal world. To him, only death can make interesting movements.
He creates reasons for my haunting. Faulty electric switches explain flickering lights. He blames creaking floorboards on the age of the house. He claims mysterious voices are the wind. One after another, for everything and everybody, even entities like me. What’s strange is as soon as he creates it, all the explanations become the real reasons for their existence. Which makes me feel as if I am just a thought, an idea he came up with. I am saturated in his thought. Just as they are in me, I am in them, and so they are. I’ve been thought into death. I’m a likeness of what once was life. A painting, a statue in the image of death.
If that’s true, then there is no death, no life, only art. And it is art that decides which way thoughts sound out, which way they breathe, and which way they die.
I increase my thoughts.
Curtains open by themselves. Books on shelves open and turn to specific pages. Rattling chains break the silence. He assumes that it’s just his insanity, the voices in his head. He knows he’s insane and is grateful for it. He prays to his defect, thanking his craziness for the ability to create art, knowing, if he gets caught or killed, others will look at his work with wonder. Books will be written about him, and movies will be made. He will then haunt others, whether he thinks about it or not.
I must detach myself from the opaque, create a tear in the fabric that separates the living and the dead, stop his madness at any cost. I must think like a living being and materialize into a form. Do I dare to think about it?
Materializing isn’t something ghosts should do. But that’s just a suggestion passed around the dead. The dead have no laws, for we are always appearing in plain sight. Yet, to enable the living to see an outline, a misty representation of what once was, comes with uncertainties. Living beings don’t like uncertainties.
I don’t care. He must see me. Fuck the living.
As simple as coming up with a thought, I become visible.
When he sees the semblance of my shape, he isn’t scared. He looks at me as if I’m an old friend, an acquaintance he used to wave to on his way to work, a friendly neighbor who talked about the weather. To him, I’m here to critique his work, its beauty, its creativeness. This is his reasoning, his explanation. I don’t necessarily think he’s wrong. He can make me up just as I can make me up. I am to stay made up as a part of his ritual of murder. I agree. It’s my explanation, too. I begin to believe he’s right on all things, that I am his fan, not just some spirit who has come to save the day. Had I materialized only to prove to him I loved his work? Inside a living room, where he’s finishing a sculpture, I look at a mirror and I see my own image, and it’s strangely familiar to me.
His hands rise, bag in his fingers. He tries to place the bag over my head, his arms repeating the motion several times. I am thinner than air, he can’t feel where my head is. I’m laughing at his folly, a laughter without an echo. He’s a painter, brushes attempting to paint the ether. His fingers can’t feel the clay I’m trying to make myself become.
I hear a humming, it’s that buzz, a slight tone that is neither alive nor dead. It exists in between. It’s through this spirit tone that I’m able to reach for his soft, warm, bloody electricity. I am solidified. In a couple more motions, he’s able to place the plastic bag over my head. I can’t breathe the breaths that I’ve forgotten that I ever took. There is a current alternating between him and me. I’m an echo cooled down to harden, a mold, a mere thought abstracted from the living. He kisses me, and I only feel the cool surface of the mirror. My death is in his hands, shaped again and again and again.
- The Death of Art - May 7, 2025
- Their Orange Suits - October 5, 2024
