Death Song (Tales from the Tarot)

1. Charlie

Chapter one

Charlie

Present Day

H e is singing.

Though I can’t capture it with my brush, as I create the lines that make up his angled jaw on the canvas in front of me, I know there’s a song rising from between his plump lips. I don’t even know what song it is, I’ve never heard it before, though it keeps playing in my mind like a broken record as I paint his face. The tones that rise from his lungs are slow and stilted as he breathes through them. He is mourning, and his sorrow and despair filter through what I have of him in my head to become realized on the canvas in front of me in tear tracks that trickle down his cheeks.

Though I’ve painted his face many times, I have never painted him quite like this.

He has never come to my dreams so filled with a sorrow and grief so deep that I was thrown from my sleep with tears streaming down my own face.

My tears are long gone now, replaced with the bone-deep exhaustion that I always feel on nights like this. I yawn as I reach for the crimson paint, knowing that’s the next color I need to use. His lips are reddened, but that color wants to drip down from his mouth and land on the pure white tunic he wears. I let it fall like a stream, creating the thin lines that trickle down his chin with one of my finest brushes before letting it splash on his clothing.

Just like it did in my dream.

Outside, the world is quiet and dark, moonlight my only company as I sit here in my bedroom, scraping paint over a canvas. It’s long past the time I should be sleeping, but that doesn’t ever seem to matter much on the nights I forget to load my body with so many sleeping pills that the dreams of this man stay away from me. Said pills sit on the bedside table along with the glass of water I intended to wash them down with before I fell asleep. As I yawn again, my eyes tearing up this time, I regret not taking them before I climbed into bed earlier.

“Fuck,” I mutter, as I am struck with the need for a color I don’t have close at hand. I thought I’d done well with stocking the corner of my bedroom I use to paint these paintings, but a blue I know I don’t have in the box on the floor rises in the picture in my head left behind by my dream, and I groan my frustration into the quiet.

I could leave it out, but the missing color will eat at me, which is infinitely worse than taking the time to shuffle to the studio like a zombie to grab it. With an irritated sigh, I pull myself off the stool and stumble down the short hallway to my open studio space at the back of the main living area. The night lights I’ve left in the outlets above the baseboards guide my way, illuminating the floor so I don’t trip or fall as I’ve done before. With a yawn, I make it to the studio and head for my paint storage cabinet beneath the window to sort through blues until I find the one I’m looking for.

Cobalt blue.

It goes on the white flowers in the dirt below his feet, I know. I thought I could perhaps mix some of the royal blue and white together to approximate the color I saw in my dream, but like the idea I had to omit the color completely, that would never work. I grab it, then shuffle my way back through the loft to my bedroom where the unfinished canvas sits. My head pounds as I move closer to it, the strange urgency to get back to this painting pulling at me like it has claws.

“I know. I’ll finish it,” I mumble to no one, because no one else is here.

Not anymore. My last boyfriend packed up his shit and left a little over five months ago after an explosive argument that ended much as our fights often did. While I was icing my swelling jaw in the bathroom with the door locked and wondering if the cut in my lip needed stitches, he’d shouted through the door that he wasn’t going to be forced into spending nights like this anymore with a “fucking idiot” like me. Interrupting his sleep on a nightly basis was never my plan, but he never understood that once this urge to paint the things I see in my dreams starts I can’t simply ignore it.

Believe me, I’ve tried.

How I have fucking tried. I’ve spent nights wide awake in my bed, feeling my heartbeat pulse in my head send cascading waves of agony through my entire body until I gave in and went to paint. I’ve tried sketching pieces of the dreams on a sheet of paper left beside my bed instead of getting up to paint it, but that too failed miserably. Many nights have been spent in blinding pain leaving me curled in the sheets, clawing at my eyes from the pressure that had built inside of them simply because I refused to get up and paint when I should have. This urge inside me owns me.

It won’t be ignored.

It can’t be ignored.

And so, I must paint until I am finished enough of the picture that the urge to capture what I see in my dreams settles and I can get back to my much-needed rest. When this first started happening, I’d been thrilled to have inspiration, even if said inspiration struck me in the middle of the night when I was sleeping. The push to get out of bed and paint the things I’d seen in my dream was overwhelming, but back then I had welcomed it. Been excited about it, even if Colin, my ex, had never understood how good it had felt to have something to create and the drive to see it through.

Now, months into this pattern of broken sleep with the knowledge that I can’t simply choose to not paint these things that come to me exactly as I saw them in my dreams, I’ve become bitter about it. It’s not inspiration anymore, it’s pure duty, though I don’t know what the point of it all is. Unlike other art pieces I work on during the day, they won’t get me any money. I don’t sell them, or even show them to anyone else. There’s no need when the rest of my completed and sold works aren’t in the same realm as these dream things I am compelled to paint. I’ve made a name for myself by painting canvases of ancient architecture and landscapes with modern pop culture references hidden inside of them, not this intense, intimate portraiture.

I wouldn’t even know where to begin with marketing this shit since it’s so far from what I am known for, but still, I do as the dreams command or else there will be hell to pay.

Making my way back to my bedroom, I settle down on my wooden stool and open the cap for the cobalt blue, adding it to my palette. Grabbing a fine tip brush, I pick up some of the new color and start placing highlights into the flowers at the man’s feet.

As I add more blue, I can feel the urgency easing inside of me. The claws that shoved me from my sleep and forced me here to my easel are loosening on my mind, and I yawn again as my eyes grow heavy. Apparently, that blue was the final piece that was needed and I’ve painted enough of the dream into the canvas to appease whatever force it is that makes me have to do this. I yawn into the quiet of the room as I finally put my paintbrush down for the night.

Exhaustion grips me as I stand up from my stool, not even caring to look at the whole painting before I get to bed. I used to stand and marvel at what I’d created, but I don’t give a shit anymore. It’s always the same. Always this handsome blond-haired man. Sometimes, I paint him in intimate positions with a copper-haired man who is equally as handsome but that is about the sum of it. It’s hard to revel in the glory of a new painting when it’s the same shit every night I’m called to put brush to canvas.

Except for the night I painted him completely naked, that is. That was a night in which I had to really consider that I was losing my entire mind. Dreaming of the blond-haired man naked, laying in a shallow pool of water with his lust filled eyes gleaming outwards and hardened cock resting on his belly was one thing, being pushed to paint it on the canvas was quite another. My cheeks had never been quite so red and my skin had never felt quite as heated as when I’d been painting the fine, blond hairs that lay between his legs and the swollen vein that ran down the underside of his dick.

Tonight, I gather a sheet from the floor and drape it over the unfinished painting. I used to finish them out in full a few days after the first night I was awoken out of dreams to paint, but not anymore. This one will sit there exactly as it is beneath the cloth until the morning, and then I will grab it and throw it in the locked closet in the studio with the rest of them. One day, I’ll paint over the stack of them with something more my style, or maybe figure out a way to put what is already on them to good use so I can make some actual money off them, but for now they can sit and collect dust as far as I’m concerned.

Beyond tired at this point of the night, I make my way over to my mattress and throw myself onto it. I’m probably covered in paint, but that’s a problem for tomorrow. I shuffle around in the bed, getting comfortable and pulling the blankets up around me like a cocoon before reaching for the pills I failed to take before. Popping them into my mouth, I swallow them with a bit of the water I’d also left, then settle down to let the dreamless sleep carry me away.

I’m awoken what feels like mere hours later by someone digging their knuckles into my sternum while shouting my name into my ears.

“Ow,” I moan, smacking the knuckles away from my chest. I briefly open my eyes but can only make out a figure of a person before they close again. I am not ready to be awake yet.

“Fuck’s sake,” a voice mumbles as a hand lands on my shoulder. “I thought you were dead.”

I mumble something in response, not even words I don’t think, just noises, as I roll over and face away from the person rudely interrupting my sleep. That person, who is likely my best friend Finn because nobody else has a key to my place except for him, says something I can’t make out. My head is swimming with the need for more sleep and my ears feel like cotton balls have been shoved into them. Everything is dulled by the sleeping pills still making their way through my system. I settle into my mattress as Finn keeps talking, though I don’t care what he’s saying.

I just want some fucking sleep.

Sadly, Finn seems to not want to give that to me this morning. Or is it afternoon? I don’t know how long I’ve slept after crawling back into bed after I finished painting. The bed dips and he grips my shoulder in his hand, giving it a shake.

“What?” I mumble through sleepy lips. I don’t want to be mean and piss him off, because I do genuinely adore my best friend, but damn, Finn. Take a hint.

“Do I need to call an ambulance? Did you take something?”

“No.” Just a handful of the very best over-the-counter sleeping pills, that’s all. Nothing more than I usually take in a night to knock me out so deep that the dreams leave me the fuck alone. I know that isn’t what he means though, Finn is well aware that I have sleep issues. He doesn’t know the exact reason I can’t stay asleep at night, but he understands that broken sleep is part of my life now.

“Heath Ledger.”

“What about him?”

“He died from taking too many pills,” Finn says, his hand squeezing my shoulder tight.

“I didn’t. Just the usual. Took ’em late, that’s all.” Finn is silent, and I’m almost asleep again when he shoves my shoulder and says my name. I roll over and open my eyes, blinking into the bright sunlight that streams through the windows of my bedroom. “What?”

“If you’re taking something else, something other than the right amount of sleeping pills, you’d tell me, right?”

“Yes.”

“Charlie.”

“I said yes,” I mumble. Though sometimes I wonder if there isn’t something better out there than handfuls of sleeping pills. I wouldn’t head out on purpose to find someone selling something more potent. I’m not that desperate. Not yet, anyway.

“Promise me right here and now.”

“I do, Finn. I promise.”

“Good,” he comments, giving my shoulder a squeeze. “I was going to invite you for breakfast before I take your stuff to the gallery, but I assume you’ll be sleeping a bit more?”

“You assume right.” I yawn. “Sorry, Finn. It was a long night. I don’t mean to be shit company.”

“As long as you’re still up for tomorrow night’s gala, you can be the shittiest company in the world.”

Right. The gala. A fundraising event for the art gallery Finn works for. I volunteered one of my smaller pieces that didn’t have a buyer set in stone to be auctioned off with the proceeds going right into the gallery’s artist-in-residence program. That program is where I first met Finn and was a huge tipping point in my life that brought me to where I am now. I had almost given up on pursuing something as fleeting as art for a living, and the letter accepting me into the artist-in-residence program at Bowman Galleries was the only thing that kept me looking forward at possibilities.

“You’re still coming, right?”

“Of course.”

“Cool. I’ll go collect what you have?”

“It’s all packed.”

One of the things I did last night before crawling my tired ass into bed was ensure that the paintings Finn was coming to collect were ready to go for him to take. I spent the night packing everything and setting it by the door of the studio by the closet that holds the dream paintings, where I always leave my work intended for sale. Though Bowman Galleries and I have a percentage agreement in place for each painting sold, I slip Finn a little extra directly for transporting my art to and from the gallery for me. He used to fight me on it, citing that he was just doing it because we’re friends, but I refuse to let his work go uncompensated. He now pretends to ignore the fee I e-transfer into his account on a monthly basis, and our friendship is better off for it.

The bed moves as Finn stands and I hear his footsteps trailing away from the bedroom as I flirt with the line between sleeping and awake. Time fades away and I drift deeper into my mattress, sighing as I sink into the pillows beneath my head and the blanket burrito I’ve created to keep me warm. Some moments later, the squeaky opening of my front door meets my ears, and I smile into my pillows, settling even more as things come together in the waking world.

“Leaving now, see you tomorrow night,” Finn calls out from the front door.

I don’t get a chance to mumble something back before the door closes and sleep takes me under again.