The Virgins

The Virgins (inspired by Gustav Klimt)

Tangled patchwork limbs and sheets. Brunette, flame and ice blonde hair twisted and indecently entwined. Scarlet flowers adorn Olga’s loose coiffure as she gazes knowingly, intimately, at the painter. He nods imperceptibly and murmurs ‘don’t move’ and they all tighten their resolve. His burgeoning erection distracts him from the tableau and he inadvertently changes Stasia’s hue in his lust stupefaction. A hasty glug of rough wine, intended to distract him, spilt, courses down his stubble enveloped chin and he catches Sonia coveting it, or him, he can’t be sure and he doesn’t differentiate between the two any more. He fuels his excitement as he imagines this ice maiden licking the redwineriver off of him, it flowing down his spare, hairless white frame, while her frozen blue eyes are fixed on his, as if she is sharing the vision played out on the loop film spool of his overheated mind. “Get up” he snarls, capitulating. “You can all go now” he pauses for a moment, wondering fleetingly if he should, “all except Sonia” he does. The tangled bodies unwind, the girls unselfconsciously revealed in all their splendid youthful unabashed nakedness, pert breasts, round, high, peachy arses, nipples tautening as the cold of the studio hits them with the contrast of the warmth of the crumpled bodily pile. They reach for shifts and corsets, kites of crackling taffeta and heavy bombazine engulfing their many shaded heads and bodies. Sonia waits, pulling the patterned cover over her nakedness, curiously young and vulnerable though otherworldly distant, laying staring at the ceiling and the cobwebs that curtain the rough corners. The artist lights a pungent cigarette and coughs at the sharp, bitter inhalation, meticulously cleaning his few brushes in a cup of dirty paint clouded turpentine. Squinting at her, capturing and recording the tonality of her translucent vein shadowed white skin in his mental sketchbook he . Ignoring the chattering semi deshabille women, he shrugs off his necessary jacket and dips a clean brush in a blob of the purest carmine he can afford. Wordlessly he kneels and pulls back the rainbow cover, up close to the marble white flesh. The paintbrush dabs her blossom pink nipple turning it a garish shade of red, a startling contrast to the milky breast. Sonia laughs, the laughter of someone far away on another dream, her mind telescoping with the fug of opium hanging above the set. “That’s the way I like to paint girls” he whispers to himself and bends to kiss her, his nicotine tongue and bristly lips savouring the Parma violet taste of her smiling face. They dissolve into the cover, and the daylight disappears.