bones

a story i'm interested in pursuing, a model who manages to look dead in photographs. obviously an early idea of how i'll approach it, but i feel good about it so far.


it didn't matter that the wall wasn't quite full up, or that it stood out against all the chipped and peeling mint veneer. the intentions didn't matter, and hollow screaming way it looked didn't matter. looking at it, it didn't look like much at all.the photograph in the frame just should not have been a big deal.
sitting and looking at it, it should not have been a big deal.
sitting and thinking about when it was, what it was; that was when it mattered. she sat, drunk as hell, just looking and not really seeing, not ever stopping.the cracked open rib way it looked, it felt like watching yourself being butterflied like a shrimp. the photograph, he hung it there on the wall all shitty and fucked up.
when it was taken there wasn't any way anyone could have known it would look like that. the knees that don't look like they could bend without tearing through the skins. the twisted way her waist makes it seem like she's about to burst, not that anything would come out. the cavernous ribs pasted with cream tissue paper, the violin string neck, the way a dead person's teeth look so infeasibly big in their empty face. it makes you wonder how they fitted in there when they were still being used. you'd swear you can see her heart straining out while it beats, timekeeping for itself until it doesn't need to anymore. a toothpick is that thin because that's as thin as it needs to be. people shouldn't work that way.
a photograph of a dead person is the closest thing we'll ever have to a ghost. the precense, the aching way that what it is isn't tangible, the fact that what it is just isn't possible. the way it's unbearable to look at. so how could a picture of something alive look like that?sitting stewing in her cheap gin fog with her mouth smelling like wet kisses and penis, her scab red dress dotted in black mascara tears like some sick ladybird, it's crumpled. she's looking into something that makes her chest feel like it's a black hole, her brain bursts from her skull behind blank eyes. and yet it's awakening. there's a misery, a grief, something pungent and raw that creates itself in how she looks.
introduce an element of chaos:
'babe' they had said. 'it's holocaust chic. beauty queen bones. you've got something rare here; a real look'
a real look, she later reflected, of a carcass. of stripped, bleached bones, the most honest of things. bones can't lie, can't pretend that they're something they're not. what they are speaks for them. self-contained and real. having previously been a working man's dancer, the red and black lights of her stage had puffed out her flesh, hidden the bone shadows. when she danced it didn't seem that she needed fixing. the alabaster of her skin meant that her pencilled eyebrows, her dyed hair looked like the props an old lady uses to be beautiful. her varnished nails were a measure to stop her looking so worn out. now in this photograph, this instant of eternity, nothing hides her.
sitting and peering through her alcohol haze she might as well be very very dead.