a miscellany of portraits

[of clover and thistle]

Blaise Aguillard
"Lacy"

Trouble in a velvet dress and a wine-stained smile.

A young woman who carries herself with the devil-may-care air of an artist in between work. Prone to sighs like a lazy summer breeze. Her hair falls in tides down the curving coast of her silhouette.

Sea glass green eyes carry a vorpal edge of intellect. Veiled with playful mirth and an unabating warmth in her mannerisms. Her perfume carries the memory of lavender.

[of clover and thistle]

His name was Norbert.

Tall, broad shouldered, like the Maker started making a barn out of his ribs instead of a man. He was the sort of guy you'd see with a hammer, not a brush. It was sort of funny, seeing this ox of a man handle watercolors with delicacy and smallness. Sometimes I would watch him for hours doting over his work with great care while I lounged on his couch and drank his wine.

It's a shame he hadn't a fraction of talent in him.

There's really nothing worse than watching someone do something they clearly love with every fiber of their being, but butcher the execution. Some people are just cursed like that, to forever be the appreciator, and never the actor in the thing they love most. But, men of his position don't have to worry about things like 'talent' or 'skill', he had the next best thing: status.

I think he wanted to be beautiful, he wanted- no, needed it so desperately he would fill his house with beautiful things, yet he could not create it or be it himself. That's why he had me. We would sit close while I painted so he could study my technique, the ways I coaxed color like a billows does a fire. I could give him hours of instruction, but he never took to them. So he would at times, believing himself very clever, describe to me his 'vision'. And I would add a stroke of paint here and there to his canvas, until he had me painting the whole thing for him. He'd smile like he was so proud of himself and go off to do the same, taking my work with him for 'reference'.

Then he would return in an hour with my painting with a few of his own 'personal touches', including his signature at the bottom of the page. I would never notice, of course. Men like him don't steal the work of commoners; they don't need to. I was just his muse. His brush. But even so, my hand wasn't enough to give vision to the blind.

I would stand there beside him, his velvet anchor in the smoking room turned gallery for one of his 'private showings' of his work. Suits and skirts would loiter among the pieces I finished for him, commenting on the symbology of an apple that sat in the hand of what was either a caliban child or some kind of ugly, naked dog. He would go and speak with his guests, who would shower him with unearned adoration, and then they would stumble through a conversation where they tried to determine the meaning of the crooked house (which wasn't intended to be crooked) while he tried to make philosophy out of half-done scribbles.

All the while I would be there on his arm, laughing at all his jokes (however flat), soothing his anxieties with a little touch here, a smile there. Sometimes I even liked it.

When it was over and the guests had gone home, he would take up my hands and kiss each one. "My muse," he'd say. "How was I? Do you really think the perspective of the house is off? It makes sense by my measure," and on he'd go. I would smile at him, cup my palm to hold his right cheek, and say "Your art is without flaw, mon coeur. They simply aren't used to elevated forms of art here in the country."

He would be soothed, of course, so soothed by his muse he would embrace, then devour me in a thousand starving kisses, each one seeking to take a mouthful of me as though to make my beauty part of him.

I liked him more when he was painting.

(I kept his first one.)

[of clover and thistle]

His name was Lorenzo Foucatti.

Our meeting was happenstance arranged by our vices: he lived in the apartment next to the tavern I worked, and our need for cigarettes brought us out into the rain at half past two in the morning. We laughed as awkward strangers, squeezing together beneath the awning from his door to hide from the rain.

He had dark hair and darker eyes, and a narrow jaw that made him look younger than he was. I could call him boyish if misery didn't cling to him like a fine silk sheet. Self-loathing bled from his every pore infecting his smile, his laughter, and too made his touch shy. Little white scars made webs across his fingers; the love-mark from his trade in stained glass.

Like all artists, he found a respectable boom early in his career and saw many patrons from wealthy aristocrats and people pretending to be such, and made good money decorating wealthy homes with fused shards of broken glass. But the money went through his fingers like water, and it wasn't a year after he lost novelty that he was a pauper, living on the allowances of his sponsor who, too, was starting to grow bored of him.

When he stopped coming out for his nightly cigarette, I started going to him. I can't remember what brought me to his door, but I would be there like the church bells ring at the end of my shift. He would let me in, stumbling over apologies for the mess the place was in, and I would navigate the clutter to make myself at home on his lounge.

He kept a gun on his coffee table, a Gearling pistol of no great remark, except that it was the only thing on the table when every other surface in the apartment was choked with things purchased when money trivial. It sat there with intent that he and I both knew, but I was too scared to ask.

I would find excuses to be near him, to touch his hands or explore his suit with my fingertips, drawn to him like a moth to flame. He did not acknowledge my touch, my warmth, and hardly ever would he acknowledge my presence as though I were a specter haunting his lounge. His distance would grow this unfamiliar neediness in me: I would want so badly to be close to him, to know what his private garden that served as his mental retreat was like, and if there was space for me there too. Perhaps if I could be in his eye, then he would not be so miserable, and he might replace that gun with me.

He would never leave the apartment out of fear of returning to an eviction notice, so I would bring him little comforts like bread and wine pilfered from my honest work. One day, on total whim, I brought him flowers fashioned into a bouquet with an errant wine bottle I found on his floor. He took them so cautiously, as though I had just handed him a newborn babe. "I've never gotten flowers before," he would say quietly, marveled by the clippings.

Those flowers replaced the gun on the table. He would draw them for hours. Hundreds of drawings of the same bouquet, from every angle, every position; he wanted to immortalize some intangible truth he saw in them, but it was such a grand concept he saw that it would take hundreds of drafts to express it. When entropy took it's tool, I assumed that would be the end of his endeavors, but, I was wrong. Now there was simply more to render, more care to be had. He would keep telling me that he would be finished once he captured every detail.

This went on all summer. I would go and watch him work, drink his wine, lounge on his couch, and we would talk of life, death, art, markets, perceptions, and my words would come from me so freely I thought they might be from someone else. Sometimes there would even be merriment and ease in hazy clouds of poppy, where then we would stretch out on the floor and marvel at the cracks in the ceiling like they were constellations in the night. We became inseparable: I a stranger to my own bed and work, and he a man emerged from his mental garden of solitude. We lived adrift in our craft and our vices, going no where, doing nothing, like a dream with no meaning, only rest. I thought, truly thought, that perhaps we could be like this forever.

But rot would not be limited to just the flowers. Eventually I would come to realize this private paradise we had made ourselves was not much different than a prison. We lived in squalor, off a dwindling account that was spent on pleasures instead of needs. We would encourage sloth in each other, like two people drowning, chained together by the feet. As one struggled, the other sank, and so on and so forth. Like the flowers, our illusion of bliss was undone, petal by petal, until all we were left with was the dependency we had on each other to stay afloat.

So I, like everything else in his life, left.

(I still taste him on my cigarettes.)

[of clover and thistle]

His name was Houlle.

When I was young I began to present an affinity for magic, at least, that's what my mother told me, my father, the neighbor, the banker, and her sponsor. This led to monsieur Houlle, a "friend of the family:" an academic of the arcane sciences with enough free time to teach a child a few fundamentals over the winter seasons when work was slow in exchange for house work I was to perform for him.

Arcanists are all funny people and Houlle was no different. His beard and hair grew out from his head like a lion's mane, though his gait was more of a pathetic limp than a lion's prideful stride. While he did walk in our world, he lived several thousand years away from us in the palace of his thoughts, where the walls were made of arcana and intangible truths. His mind was couched in illusions of grandeur and esoteric secrets, he fancied himself very clever.  To his credit, these hours of day dreaming led him to be a very capable illusionist.

My winters there at that little cottage of his outside the city were not so dream-like. I found him to be like most men that I knew; he liked his wine white and dry like the old pages of his manuscripts, enjoyed a pipe by the fire, and was very eager to show a young girl just how smart he was with everything he knew. Our lessons would be long, and he would talk for most of them, waxing on and on about the complexities of spell construction, the philosophy of illusion, and scoffing at any mention of the vulgar magical schools. "Illusion is the art of showing people what they want to see," he would say, with heavy emphasis on 'art'. He was not just a scholar, you see, he was an artist, like me. My colored scribbles and his magical glamours were not so different, not really. He would touch my hair fondly as I worked, and at times I could smell his white-wine perfume from over my shoulder as he scrutinized my penmanship- he was very doting like that.

Arcanists are funny people, but they are still people. He was lonely. He never had children of his own, never a wife, though he enjoyed academic success and honest pay for his publications. His belly still hungered, mouth still watered, and hands still longed for touch.

Illusions don't just take place in magic spells, in glamours, phantoms, or veils. They are also the little lies born when we cut the corners off a truth, bend it around, fit it just so in frame.

So, he would go on to teach me the truth about his discipline: Illusion is the art of negotiating the truth through lies.

And he was a very good liar.

"You're so mature for your age."
"No one would understand the bond we have between us."
"It's cold tonight, why don't we share a blanket?"
"Boys your age don't know how to treat a woman like you."


When I returned home from these lessons of ours, I would sit and consider the peeling wallpaper of my room. At times he would send letters, and my mother would encourage I return them, though I had no interest. When she would ask why, I would try to explain it to her, as best as I could put words to the things that didn't have words yet. Every time her reply would be the same. "That old man? No, he would never. It's terrible to make up such lies about good people," she would say.
I would come to accept that the truth is not something that can be nakedly delivered.

And so, I became a very good liar too.

We argued through the doors. I wanted them closed, he wanted them open. All day the doors would be opening and closing, back and forth. His door open, so mine could be shut. My bath door open, but the curtains shut. All the little things he did, the little lies he told, held snippets of that ugly truth he wanted from me, and so gave me the means to negotiate. His door open, so mine could be shut. Those days were flirting with danger.

Then there was an accident of vulgarity, one my hand played a part in.

He was in the cellar. His silhouette stood out in the dark, outlined by the magic light from his finger tip. He looked like an old, mangled tree, his limbs gnarled and twisted as one. I heard the crash from upstairs, an unsteady shelf had tumbled onto him, and now he was crushed under old arcana and fractured bottles of wine that bled over everything. I heard him groan. That heap of debris called for me. For the sweet hand he thought was pliant and subdued.

I closed the cellar hatch, and shut the bolt.

(I'm still a good liar.)

[of clover and thistle]

Her name was Grace.

The heavy blanket of winter was beginning to ebb to the stirrings of spring-- not just the snow from the roads, but that cold, bitter funeral veil too was starting to draw from the eyes of the country. Soldiers were returning home, the lucky ones in boxes, and lands given to those who made the right friends, taken from those who chose wrong. Her family had made the right decision, and found themselves newly minted in the Peerage, the papers written in the ink of the people that died to get them there.

I met Grace from behind the easel-- no, I heard her, first. This timid laughter that twinkled in her mouth and left sparkles in her eyes. I didn't know there were so many ways to laugh, but she had the monopoly over five different kinds. Then I noticed her hair: long, dark, and tumbling over her shoulders like waves crashing to shore. She was beautiful.

It's normal to think women are beautiful, isn't it?

We started holding hands by accident. She would ask me what I was doing, leaning so close to me that it was all I could do not to drown in her citrus perfume. And I would say, "Let me show you," and take her hand in mine. (So delicate! Like cradling a baby bird.) Like that, I'd lead her through brush strokes, pretending to take my time so we could stay like that longer.

The onlookers at the Promenade were the auditors of our proximity. They watched our every movement, counted the times our fingers brushed, how long she laughed, how long my hand lingered on her arm. We both felt the sense of guilt that heavy scrutiny leaves- as though their eyes laid eggs upon our skin that would hatch and writhe as filthy crimes beneath our clothes. Yet the warmth of her hand, how could something so beautiful be such a crime?

Sometimes we'd take long ways home, our boots caked in salt and mud from short cuts through the thawing grass to avoid being seen. But that wouldn't stop the whispers. The looks. The tired, impatient sigh of her father when I once again came to their door. We kept our intimacy to dark and filthy places under bridges and in garbage choked alleys, but rats have eyes too.  Maybe they had seen us, caught us, our hands lingered too long for the jury's liking.

One day she bid me set down my brush so she could look at my work. Birds twittered outside the window as voyeurs. She looked at the painting long and quiet, her hand brushed against mine. "I think it's done," she didn't look at me when she spoke. Then, she drew away. She went on to say that she's made a mistake with me-- to take up so much of my time, to allow us to be so familiar. It wasn't right, she'd say. The painting was finished.

I walked home feeling a sick sense of 'wrongness' poisoning my gut. I felt the eyes that had been on us in the promenade, at the cafe, in the street now burning into my back now that the madamoiselle had sent me away. Whispers slithered down my skin and I became acutely aware of the vulgar lie I'd been telling myself.

So I went to the bar instead to find a buck to make me 'right'.

(I try not to think about her anymore.)

[of clover and thistle]

His name was...

We both know this dance. It begins with a smile; it doesn't call for an exchange of names. His hair had the color and texture of wheat, and he smelled of fresh soil. He liked his beer like he liked his women, blonde and heady, and I checked both boxes. Or so he thought two bottles in.

We talked of things that didn't matter, they were just pretenses to find reasons to hide the vulgarity of our intentions. It isn't as easy as it seems, he wants to feel like he earned this somehow, so I play into the lie like this is a romance of happenstance, not a mission with intent.

His ceiling had half finished paintings of flowers on it. I counted them when he finished devouring me and all the wrongness. Our electric touch assured me I was still 'right,' yet his urgency told me he hated me, and maybe I hated him too. Vulgarity is the means of lesser creatures, but in these moments, that's what we are. Creatures starved for truth only touch can tell.

By the end we laid with tangled fingers, counting the unfinished flowers on the ceiling, drifting as two paper boats that had collided in the night.

I never saw him again.

[of clover and thistle]

Her name is ...

Well, a name would say very little-- she shed them as snakes shed their skin, which left her identity an ever changing portrait. She could command any room through her larger than life presence, (though her sizable height also had something to do with it.) I've heard her described a hundred different ways by dozens of men; trouble in a velvet dress, a hurricane of life. Her history was an enigma too-- one week she was the noblewoman on the run from wedding bells, another she was curator of Rokuman art for a private gallery, and the next, she was a pretty musician, caught in a bind, who needed a little charity. There were a few constants that persisted in every form she took. Her eyes held a precise attentiveness that was disarmed by her easy going smile, and regardless of the many face she wore, she remained my mother.

Identity, my mother would say, is a construct. The careful expression of our motivation and experiences. When you separate yourself from the notion that your identity is a static thing, you liberate yourself to a world of possibilities. Our society is a game of balancing the private expression of the self with the public performance of who we want to be. Acknowledging the game, the impermanence of identity, and the truth told through lies allows back-stage access. Mobility between the performance, the private, and the hazy in-between. Who my mother was doesn't matter; tomorrow she could be a nobleman's wife, while today she might be an opera singer, and next week an art thief. The lines in our playground that dictate the rules of our game are just that. Lines in the sand.

When I was younger, I would sit next to her vanity and watch her do her make up. She had all manner of tools there for her craft. Rouges for every time of day. A selection of perfumes, curated with care. Bright red heels she called her 'good luck' shoes. Necklaces set with glass masquerading as diamonds. Hair pins with tiny teeth that could tickle unreasonable locks. And the things she could do with colored powder and a brush! Like build an entirely new life out of a red dress and khol lined eyes. Detective Ray's special closet of doo-dads had nothing on my mother's altar to mischief. Resourceful, cunning, and beautiful--  a thief who stole through the heart to get to the safe. My mother's triple-threat made her career in lies lucrative.

Sometimes her work would take her from us for months. "Business trips" she called them. In her absence, I would sit at her vanity and try to do my make up like her. (She would go on to teach me everything she knew, for better or worse.) When she'd return it would be like the return of Ezra, bearing gifts in the form of baubles lifted from unguarded bedrooms. Each gift came with a story grander than the last, and we ate up her words like starved dogs. Prizes won from lesser men who didn't play the game as well. We'd meet her at the door, and latch onto her legs to stop her from going through it again, while Pa watched on from the stairs.


I'm not certain if Pa was a victim or an admirer. I know for certain he wasn't my 'real' father- that man could have been any number of "jobs" gone too far. Despite that, Pa raised me and the rest of us as though we were his own. He made her the little lie of a family home she sought for private pleasure. That made him unlike my mother's usual marks, and perhaps, was why she always returned to him.

Until the day she didn't.

(Would she be proud of me?)
(I miss her.)

[of clover and thistle]

His name was Eosin-Deupin.


Our love affair would take place along Rue de Pierot between the hours of eleven in the evening to four in the morning. It would all begin on a heavy, humid night in November, the streets slicked with rain like grease through a debonair's hair. Every evening he would take his place under a crooked lamp post, surrounded by his pack of jackal-men.  They were armed with the means of mischief; cigarettes and half-drunk bottles, lamp-lighter torches and midnight oil, and bright red sashes collaring their waists.

We'd lived in each others lives for so long, but we hadn't realized it. Every evening I'd pass him by, him on his crooked post, and me to my bar. Our lives wouldn't collide like some explosion of romance, either. No, it would all begin with:

"How about a kiss?"

The next evening I saw him, he broke from his pack of chuckling hyenas, and came to heel at my side. Away from his stage, the hunter of his jackal's countenance melted away, leaving a soft eyed puppy in paws too big. He asked for a light, I asked for a cigarette, (you should always deal in exchanges) and we stood in the dark away from the lamps, our faces lit by our vices. He smelled like old wood and tobacco, and his hands were big and square from a long career in violence.

I humored him. We'd talk together until the end of the street, talking about good bars and better towns than this one. He wasn't very politically driven for a Sash. Violence, he told me, was just the language he was fluent in. Being so big, so tall, so sour faced, the Sashes had assumed him one of their own and dressed him up in the pamphlets and the regalia. He didn't mind, he told me. It was good to feel like he was doing something more meaningful than shaking debtors down for their dues. Sometimes I'd forget my destination, and we'd talk for hours. About the Revolution, the Council, the foremen, the bankers, the frills, if any of it mattered. When it'd be time to part, he'd ask me again, "How about a kiss?"

Our conversations would become peppered with playful exchanges of distractions. He'd bring me flowers, and we'd take turns plucking petals, daring each other on each petal until we fell on the last one. Kiss me, court me, kiss me, court me, kiss me, court me. On a court me day, he took my hand and led me within, the dive bar of Rue de Pierot. The tavern was old and crumbling under the weight of autumn's rains and neglected building inspectors. It looked like any other corpse on this street, except for the chorus of laughter, scuffles, and rowdy conversation held over cheap drink.

It was like being inside a whale's carcass, hot and humid, ripe with the pungent perfume of laboring men. And Eosin-Deupin was their lord. The Lord of Rue de Pierot. He wanted to impress me with his fiefdom, thriving out of spite inside the carcass of the slums that were supposed to kill us. He was powerful; it showed in the promise of violence in his laugh, the dangerous glint of his smile, the strength of his hands. When he spoke people listened, drawn in by the same magnetized allure that had me coming back to Rue de Pierot every night.

We were two, maybe three blocks down Pierot when his hand brushed against mine. There were fresh wounds on his knuckles from fighting. There had been some skirmishes between the Periot jackals and the foreman of the textile house two roads down. The scrapes were just a trophy for the jaws he'd broken. I thought they were attractive. He watched me from the side of his eye, pretending not to notice. So I continued the game. My fingers drew into his, and caressed the puckered scars with my thumb. I remember I was fascinated by how these hands that wrought so much violence could be so gentle, so light. The teeth of that wild dog I'd saw was gone, replaced by the big, dopey puppy of Rue de Pierot. I liked the danger, and I liked how I could be what de-fanged the hound, all just for a kiss.

The cold makes the skin feel sharp, makes the joints stiff, shrinks metal, expands water. Rain mingled with snow in drifts on the street burying the debris. Tonight was different: he wasn't under the spotlight on his corner. When I walked further I saw the commotion, the undulating bodies outside the old dive bar, tossing each other around like waves wrestling with loose bottles. The wonderful cries of shattering glass broke through the din of violence, the percussion of fists and batons on big hollow bellies.

I was dumbstruck, awed and horrified at the great debate of violence, the universal conversation of beasts. Before I could decide what to do with myself, or remember my proximity to the danger, there was this awful, terrible POP.

All at once, that old, bloated carcass of a tavern groaned. Languishing in it's final death cry as the whole frame shuddered. Men screamed and howled along with the sound, while the wise ones began to escape the bowing foundation. Water and steam flooded the street. Fire blossomed from the kitchen window. Then, the court of Rue de Pierot collapsed in on itself like a deflated balloon.

I found him, among the rubble. My body was moving before I knew what I was doing. Drawn to him, with our magnetized pull. He looked like a child's abused toy. Limbs twisted in ways they shouldn't be able to go. A shin bone protruding from his pant leg. And his face. Blood greased his hair to his face. His eye had ruptured in the explosion, and pooled in his skull like jelly. His movements were infantile, like the gurgling sounds that came from his bruised lips. I heard him ask for his mother, as his fingers hooked into my skirt. He begged for me for something. Was it kiss? Kill? Kiss? Kill?

There was a large sheet of ceramic in arm's reach. The jelly of his eye, his head, kept tilting toward it. The stench of death was suffocating. His gurgling was deafening. My hands were going numb. I was choking on my own tongue. The five o'clock bells were ringing. Kiss? Kill? Kiss me. Kill me. Kiss me. Kill me.

I did both.

(I hate politics.)