The Death of Fine Art

a short story by Benjamin Caro

The itching was the worst part of it. This awful irritation had started almost innocently, a neat little tickling up and down his body. It floated over him like the hands of a masseuse, outlining each of his bones, precisely caressing each muscle and each bulge as if softly communicating, “This is your spine, this is the inside of your thigh, note the crevice between your collarbone and your shoulder.

It had scraped up and down the folds of his face, around the hunch of his back, wrapped around his waist and down around the soles of his feet. There was so much tingling that he couldn’t concentrate on his day-to-day activities. The first time he noticed it he was enwrapped in deep thought, and for awhile that would be the only time it would appear. Sitting against the wall in the foyer, staring at the sunlight splashed onto the wooden floor, some of it bouncing off his own body, he would stop. His mind would just stop. As soon as he turned a new corner in his mind, found a valley, a new villa, the itching would embed its fingers like metal hooks through the skin in his back and pull him miles, flinging then dragging him whiplashed through all the thoughts he traveled through up until that moment, each site and each sound, only in reverse, until he landed back to where he started, dark, cool, a cavern blustering with destitute air. Then, he could do nothing except sit and let his white back press against the wall, his mind and his imagination tranquilized. He could think of nothing.

As a boy, before his sickness, which led to the itching, started, he showed an innate, unquenchable possibility. His skin, and especially his eager face, was pale, almost a bright white, void of any freckles, blemishes, fades of color- a place for impressions. The dreams, the commitments, the releases and scars of his life, his Mother knew would fall over his face in time like shadows cast from the leaves of a tree. She imagined that he could one day run faster than anyone had run before. She imagined that he could make music and cure diseases, discover new facts about life and form religious texts which could change the minds of millions. His possibility was everything to her. This is why her heart broke when she heard.