They spoke of her in whispers; if at all. Her name was a curse they feared, her story too full of resonances to be spoken. Deep dark things call to each other, they said; and the fighting light calls them even more powerfully.
Instead they drew her face in broad strokes on their garden walls; cast the curves of her cheekbones in bronze. Where brave men trembled slightly she was granite, soapstone, marble. Where soft feet beat patterns of retreat on bloody cobblestones she was charcoal, chalk, ink.
She breathed oil paint and turpentine in the upper-left corner of a child’s bedroom mural, almost hidden among the branches of an orange blossom tree. She breathed out a laugh in mosaic chaos around an old fountain in the centre of a square, her face abstract but full of life. On a love letter quickly scrawled on the ripped out page of a book she gave quiet consent to hope of a better world; and in the graveyard where the world-that-was stood sentry she hovered above the names of the dead and mourned them with her empty veins.
They drew the planes of her forehead, sculpted the pucker of her lips. They traced with longing and pride the set of her jaw, the determination and laughter and broken despair in the tilt of her neck.
But her eyes they never painted; her eyes were always closed. For a martyr must, surely, look upon the world they’ve left behind with disappointment.
Photo and sculpture by Amy Fox. Amy is a writer, sculptor, painter, producer, actor, improvist, editor – and apparently she occasionally also sleeps. Check out The Switch, her latest project!