Her room is lit with tiny low light bulbs and her three tall windows look out over a hazy pink tinted horizon. The artist is collecting plates and ideas for her mosaic, yet something stops her. She’s hungry and has become a part of the starving community of humble egotists looking to get ahead. With her pastels and away from the world, far up in this colonial mansion rotted from the outside but grown as a modern trinket of this age’s art form, the artist struggles still, looking at her painting, beginning with a horizon. But what horizon? Where does it go after here, she wonders. Will it be harmful to myself? Does my benefit exist? She begins to outline her piece. Scribbling ideas down as layers of poetry lie stacked on her desk. She thinks of her art as not new wave but accomplishing to her. It isn't her. But why won’t it conform to her? Each painting, each dress, each plant in this garden aviary of winter has always rebelled. She will do yoga naked and meditate to the sound of birds during the spring. The artist will venture out into the open when no one has come looking for her. She’ll go to town to pick up pastels and mattes and brushes and canvases. It never ends for a perfectionist, waiting for two years to project her thoughts onto that one painting that will out-sell them all. The pink hue under the winter night sky is the perfect setting for the perfect painting for the perfect artist. She no longer lives in the village. The gilded and lumber folk have all turned on her since her return from college. Is that what she is reduced to? A flake of a thousand in a snow pile of cold hearts and frozen dreams? All by these folk who show their simplicity off by stirring their greed into the pot. She leaves for the mountains without saying a word. A friend of hers who runs an isolated lodge agrees to have her live in the great big colonial house with the aviary garden that remains in summer through winter, fall, and spring. She sighs, beginning her canvas slowly. The artist wonders why her father was so angry. Or why those boys just wanted less. Or why this painting had time after time rebelled against her true vision. The artist imagines demons… she waits in the cold, looking up at her lamplight on the cool eve of late December. “This painting will be done,” she states, looking down at her animals, the birds and cats and dogs that sit by her as she wanders about and dances the room to no music at all. She twirls in the looming fog of the aviary. It steams up by forces not to her relation but she sees more, she sees two pairs of red globes in the fog but when her head returns to the reality of the painting, it is a mere landscape, but with those big reds staring back at her in the dark. In anger she rips the canvas and tosses it toward the dress that she began to make and decided not to since the past time would only fail her. She smokes a bit and drinks her tea while reading books of people hurt by their own mentality. How they struggled to hold onto their sanity. Maybe she thinks the author is projecting themselves onto her. The artist could never say for sure but she puts down her book and reads the paper on the upcoming Algonquin appreciation festival. Feeling hungry, she goes to the cupboard to make some food though all that is there are webs and cans of tomatoes and grapefruit juice (possibly expired). She groans in her mire and returns to her sofa as she watches the night pass on. The pink hue’s now gone as the storm begins its rage outside. A blizzard of ceaseless torment. No quick food to make. All require patience… and perfection. She did not care to live a lie to herself. But she did ask to be a perfect lie. Or a perfect form of her lies or a perfect form of herself. The artist hates that word. Perfect. She still does. She plays around with words and colors to add flavor into her life but the word perfect creeps in like the ever reaching icicles and clouding snow that begins to pour into the room, her darkness ever consumed by it. But where does the world get off from that? The vicious and mighty are the successful not the soft and repressed she thinks. The world is a better place away from her. The artist thinks that her own perfection is haunted. Haunted by an invitation to greed. A lust for her own inert hurtings. The pain he caused. The trust wore away like a spring day jumping into Father Winter’s lap and him saying, “It’s over,” and quietly suffocating the last petal of the little flower. Her plants were her only babies. Her earth is not of the pain of his ignorance or the passion of her heart. But it is the subtle creation of the snow blocking off the green in the aviary. She wanders again and dances to no music. She thinks that it’s great to be in this studio apartment of her own. The aviary, the dorm, the studio, it’s all the same to her. Is that what it is? No it can’t be. All is perfect under the weather eye of the blizzard that blows its harsh stones of tears onto the artist's window. There were talks. Of a beast beyond perfection. A wendigo they call it. A creature bent on their fullest self by losing what they have with humanity. She wants to damn herself from humanity. The world does not need imperfections. Afraid to hurt others, she wants to do her greatest work. Her finest painting. The greatest experimentation. She feels the cold breath of death on her shoulders because there is nothing left. The plants are dead and so are her animals, frozen like toys in a toybox disregarded by the innocent owner who did not recall every last detail to their toys until they left. The icy touch of a bloody claw comes from her left and when she turns, it is gone. Her animals live but they do not move. Her plants are paralyzed but they will not die. The artist paints away again, thinking that this icy hand is her key to the life she believes is her greatest work. Where can she perfect the icy touch of her own despair? The avaricious artist who seeks to create the perfect self. There’s that word again, she thinks: perfect… A screech comes from the empty mountains. No snowmobiles live on this side of the mountain. No human nor animal. It goes up by snowshoes. It goes even further by gondola. There is no way out but to draw water and feed herself. She walks over to the cupboard again and opens it up, seeing it full of nothing. So she goes to the fridge. She sees it stock full of livers, lungs, hearts, kidneys, legs, arms, brains. All of it was so raw. So delicious. The artist takes the raw steak that is now purple rather than red and slathers it up. Almost slurping it down like a spaghetti noodle. She finds intestines and rounds them up together and examines her cold reddened hands. They’re from him and she accepts it. Turning around her, animals and plants are dead again and the big reds are looking at her and the shadow of antlers can be faintly identified in the blizzard. It consumes the aviary as she paints. Each trial and failure has led her to toss every canvas over and watch her pretty little aviary safe from winter’s garden fling open its doors from the pink hue that is actually red. It floods in. The snow mutes out the cries of the birds and kittens and puppies. The world around the artist begins to fold by the snow. But she continues to paint it. It’s coming along beautifully this time, she thinks to herself. For once it’s not an error, it’s an expression of herself. An experiment. Like the rest of the world, she wants to connect the primal instinct to the evocation. And as she feels the icy touch of its hand she knows this time that the snow and the music that did not play were real and the big reds that stare back at her are lost in a haze. She looks around seeing every brush thrown, every icicle poking through into her secluded world. The shatter of glass rings and screams through her ears as they become lost in the snow. The blizzard takes every little cut into flakes so that every bit of blood will paint Father Winter red. She knows who stands over her. Not her father, no. Not the boys who she hurt or turned away from. But as the haze clears she realizes what the big reds were and why she saw her animals dead and the appetite for raw food. She’s looking at herself in a broken mirror. A crooked smile and pale big reds she calls her eyes welcomes her. She smiles and sees all is dead and she begins to understand that the music that formed her greatest artwork did not come from paper but the lick of the wet snow. The snow was in itself vain. Easily changed by any form of contact. However it builds and molds and transforms into a desert owned by those darkest at heart to take it. She never advertised herself as a dark artist. She didn’t beg the community. She wants herself. The artist sees her painting in her reflection. The hands matted with blood from the clawing at him, wanting to hate him but never can. She hears his voice and the words he wrote about her. They changed her and the blood she gave after was all she could afford. The artist is aware that their work is welcome into the arms of imperials. Bedrooms are locked away and every paint too. To weave her image is to spread it with her hands now. The bed was the very beginning of her perfection. When she saw her broken glass beau in the arms of another. The avarice lives. In her paintings rises what she’s always known to be. She laughs knowing she is not a house of four walls and empty insides with broken glass and cries. She is of full flesh, a craving for blood, breath amongst the rubbles of ice. The glass is not broken. It is attached to her. It grows on her nails to leave marks deep enough to be bee stingers that don’t kill her by leaving them behind. The artist forms her own paintings and in her pile of corpses sits the canvas. Covered in her finest piece. And finally spring comes. She sees the sun, and the corpses are decomposed, the flies have returned and she smiles and laughs out onto the open valley of Somewhere’s Nowhere Peak. She knows where to go. She feels the itch and her canvas sit leaned up against the double glass door that led out onto the balcony. She leaves her blood. She leaves the love and pain that was caused. And what better way to suffer than to be immortal? Immortal with a consequence. But with everything, it always seems that immortality is the devil’s advocate in art. It will not last, but she can, with every tooth and nail and flesh she’ll tear from her next missing canvas. Her next brush is at the tip of a wandering child’s intestines. The finest of all works is knowing your worth, she thinks as she bites into bones of narrow-minded marrows. The world is dull and weak, no bone has any flavor. They are thin and the flesh is little too. The family’s campfire dwindles as they call out to their son and in the wake of the snow walker’s newest painting, she returns to winter. Hoping to remain cold, dormant, and asleep, “That is eternity,” she says.