Disclaimer: I don't own these characters—that honor goes to Ms. Proulx.
January 31, 1933
Jack's hard-tipped shoes made music on the cobblestones, metal against stone, click clack, click clack, punctuating each tired step he took. Fog had swept through the city, the street lights shining weak through heavy distortion. He pushed through a world of grey; the wide sidewalk, lonely asphalt, glistened slick with in the wet night and reflected the ash of the softened skies. The University to his left was equally grey, a ghost-building in the amorphous light. The gates were locked tight, lions atop the columns roaring their voiceless threats into the silence of a city sleeping. Jack spent most his nights like this, meandering home from the clubs, giving himself over to the embrace of nocturnal anonymity. Although the hot light of the stage was his life, the solitude and stillness of the not-quite-morning was his spirit, his balm.
He cut across the Platz, keeping his head down and avoiding eye contact with the few stragglers leftover from the night's reveries. He'd woken up more than one morning in this very spot, mouth gritty with dirt and no memory of how he'd arrived there. He was a little older now, a little wiser; he only woke up in strange beds, nowadays. Pulling out his last cigarette for the week, he lit it with care, exhaling the smoke in a forceful stream to join the colorless nightscape. He stopped out front of his building, leaning against the uneven red brick, tilting his head back and savoring the end of the cigarette, held delicately between this thumb and index finger.
When he'd inhaled the nicotine to its bitter end, he flicked the stub away and took his keys out, pushing his weight against the dark wooden door when it stuck. Up the stairs to his third floor room, hardly more than a shoebox but fine for the time he spent here, he poured himself a nightcap and discarded the heavy black jacket. The brandy warmed him from the inside out, and he began to shed his form-fitting dance gear, wriggling out of the black garments and washing his face quickly in the bathroom sink to get rid of the pasty powder and rouge he wore. Finally, he sat on his bed, untying his shoes, halfway into his dream already. A scrap of white caught his eyes—a piece of a flyer had caught on the bottom of his left shoe. Detaching it, he held it up to the light from the window to see what it was, scowling when he recognized what it said, Wählt Hitler.
"Scheiße."
Vote Hitler, indeed. There was no need—he'd been elected the new Chancellor of Germany yesterday. Jack crumpled up the flier, disgusted, and threw it in the garbage.
Some days he didn't even feel at home in his own country anymore.
Dabbed into the burgundy red, gashed across the pebbled white surface; blood on the snow, a nipple heavy with lust standing in relief against innocent skin? A touch of burnished yellow, a clue to the light, whisked along the edge. Cerulean crept into lavender, pigment branching like veins. In the whorls of hue, a pattern began to take shape, the curve of a cheek lit from the side, an expanse of flesh rendered so finely that it seemed as if it would start respiring any moment. The brush moved along the canvas, resisting ever-so-slightly under Ennis's delicate touch, and he placed the final stroke, stepping back to evaluate his work with a critical eye.
The shape of his room was sketched by the looming shadows dancing the in the candlelight; the only thing Ennis had learned in his semester in Vienna, rich with experiences but stingy on education, was that the essence of a painting's rendering could only be appreciated in the proper light. But he liked the trickery of the dark, the necessity for the viewer to re-adjust perspectives with every shadow's movement; he never picked up the brush before dark any more. His days were spent sleeping or dashing off portraits on the corner for tourists or rich fools—he didn't even consider that to be art, it was merely wasted motions for meaningless pieces of paper.
He sat in stillness before his piece for quite some time, eyes roving over every detail, not moving a muscle. The candlelight sunk, flickering over his face, highlighting the pale cream of his complexion and catching flares of golden fire in his eyelashes when it hit the right angle. Even his breath seemed to crawl through him, cautious of disturbing his reverie.
When his clock chimed the half-hour with its dented bell, he stood, walked before the painting, gripping it by the side and, in one clean motion, punched his left fist through it.
"Scheiße."
Maybe tomorrow night.