BY GEORGIA BEARD
Counterfeit
Madness in Bloom
November 2021
November 2021
‘My family doesn’t want you here for the holidays.’ Tristan squeezed the words through his teeth like they were giving him abdominal pain.
Clinging to her duffel bag, Ainsley knew those words should’ve struck her in the abdomen too. She waited for that lingering ache, lowered her gaze when it didn’t come, searched for an answer in the toiletries and half-folded clothes strewn across her mattress.
‘I still need to return that book your mother gave me,’ she said.
Silence stretched out.
Tristan sighed, slow and brassy over the phone. ‘She won’t miss it.’
‘Are you sure? I was the one who asked for it.’
‘Not worth the trip.’
‘You could come and pick it up, at least.’
‘I’m not driving all the way back into the city for a book.’
‘Of course not, but maybe next time—’
‘Forget it, Ainz. There’s not gonna be a next time. My family doesn’t want you here at all, and I don’t—’ He broke off, in pain again. He was probably standing in the cluttered bedroom he moved out of at 17, pressing his fingers into his side.
Ainsley wanted to hurt more than he did. She wanted to yell at him for thinking he was the casualty here, but she couldn’t find a gash or an entry wound. ‘I already paid for my train ticket,’ she said softly.
‘Stop. You’re not allowed to do that, not when I can’t tell if anything you say is real or just another pity grab. After last time—’
‘I apologised for that.’
‘You think that’s all you had to do? You just checked it off your list like everything else? God, it’s worse than I thought.’
And there it was. She knew this kind of pain, buried low and blistering. Hot ash on the floor of her stomach someone forgot to stamp out. ‘Why did you really call me?’
‘I—I’ve wanted to say this for months, ok? I can’t—I’s not something I—and my parents think it’s for the best.’
Smoke rose in her throat. ‘What is it?’
‘I can’t keep loving you,’ Tristan blurted. ‘You don’t even know how it feels or what to do with it. I don’t think you ever knew.’
She dropped the duffel bag, and the rest of her body ignited, tearing through flesh and muscle and bone, soothing her as it scorched every nerve ending.
She told him about watching his favourite movies. Eating all the shitty dinners he made for her when she stayed at his apartment. Following him through the gallery uptown and letting him analyse the overanalysed art just to keep him talking.
That was love, wasn’t it?
When she had nothing left to say, she smouldered. She crossed the cramped space between her walls and waited for Tristan to apologise and tell her she was right and ask her to bring his mother’s book when she visited.
Something shuffled on the other end of the line. ‘You did all that because you wanted to keep me around,’ Tristan muttered. ‘I wanted you to see me. But when I looked at you, there was nothing there.’
Ainsley flinched. She ended the call and pushed her phone into her back pocket.
Nothing there.
Cold light fell into her room, striking last night’s water glass, the empty bin, the hospital corners. She’d skipped breakfast, and now she didn’t know if eating would
make her satisfied or nauseous.
Nothing there.
He used to joke that he couldn’t find anything behind those frigid grey eyes of hers.
She snatched her keys from the dresser. She would give him something to see.
On the sandstone stairs of the gallery, crowds hid in coats and turned their faces away from the street. They passed through security gates in currents, voices clambering on top of each other. This place always grew busy when the wind grew bitter.
Ainsley rubbed her bare arms and wove her way to the arched doors. As she entered the hall, she came up to her ears in laughing, touching, pulsing people. All their best emotions rose to the surface of their skin, loud and radiant. It was a state of being that frightened her, and one she could never reach.
She pulled her gaze to the walls instead, the canvases painted with lovers and garden parties and children holding hands. Oils and watercolours diluted their emotions.
Is that what people saw when they looked at art? The loose outline of a feeling they coloured in themselves? Is that what Tristan saw? He could stand in front of a portrait for 10 minutes and still find something in the arch of an eyebrow or the tilt of a head. He saw everything, even her.
She had to see these feelings for herself.
The hall spilled into smaller chambers, and she swept into a room where people were few and emotions were fewer. A sign stamped into the wall read: Impressionist Works by Mary Cassatt. She skirted the room, glancing at women wearing high-collar dresses and gentle frowns. She didn’t know them. She didn’t see anything in their eyes. She wanted desperately to give something back.
Then she saw it. In the corner, a pastel-drawn mother and child clung to each other, smearing at the edges as they coalesced. Pushing her lips against her son’s cheek, the faceless mother seemed to push all her love into him too—warm, stubborn and uncontainable.
Ainsley had never felt warm before, but she couldn’t mistake the feeling when it broke free from the canvas, took root behind her ribcage and unfurled. It was a belly laugh. It was closing her eyes against the sun. She didn’t have to take it; it was given. She was the one holding onto the mother’s neck and receiving the mother’s kiss. She couldn’t look away.
The warmth stayed wrapped around her ribs as she ran to the gift shop and asked the clerk for a reprint of A Goodnight Hug. As she pressed cash into his hand, she expected the feeling to grow cold like the rest of her. But it didn’t, not even when she stepped out into the wind in her short sleeves. She didn’t know what to do with it except hold on.
A Goodnight Hug went propped against the wall on her bedroom floor because the landlord wouldn’t let her hang up pictures. After tossing bubble wrap and she crossed her legs in front of it. The mother still cradled paper aside, the child to her chest. The child still lifted his arms to grasp her. Ainsley imagined herself in the where she could intercept this thing called love without space between, the collateral damage it wreaked.
The coalescing. The kiss. The warmth.
Why didn’t she feel warm anymore?
White-hot panic burgeoned in her stomach, and she reached out for the feeling. All she found was the cold weight of a memory.
Callum sat in the barren backyard, eyes red with tears and palms red with blood. Mum crouched and hoisted him into her lap. She checked over his hands like they were ceramic.
‘Did you do this, Ainsley?’ she asked.
‘She pushed me,’ Callum sobbed. ‘I didn’t do anything. I just wanted a hug.’
He burrowed his face into Mum’s chest, and Ainsley couldn’t understand why. She kicked at the dirt next to them.
‘You know you can’t do things like that,’ Mum said, glancing up.
Her voice wasn’t angry enough.
‘Come here, love. He needs that hug,’ She reached out and squeezed her elbow.
Her skin wasn’t cold enough. This feeling Mum was trying to plant inside her—it didn’t belong there.
‘Stop touching me,’ Ainsley shouted, slapping Mum’s hand away. ‘I don’t care if I pushed him. He deserved it.’
As the memory shrank, Ainsley scrambled to her feet and kicked the painting down, burying the mother and child in white carpet. This wasn’t what she wanted. Fire rose from the floor of her stomach, licking at her lungs. She tugged on a jumper and strode into the apartment hallway. There would be another painting. Another feeling, one that wouldn’t unravel. She just had to look again.
La Danse had an audience. At the back of the hall, bodies pressed in, murmurs swelled and phones reached up to take photos. The colours grabbed her first—clover green, lightning blue, a violent, overbright orange. Ainsley saw them in bursts between heads and shoulders as she moved closer.
She knew the moment when a light switched on in the dark rooms of her heart. On the canvas, naked figures swung in a turbulent circle, hands joined and heads bent as if praying. They created a circuit that surged with exhilarating love, fusing their skin together.
They were pulling her into the dance, heating up her filaments and making her glow. She laughed at the feeling, shrill and incredulous. She’d never laughed like that. With a coloured gleam in her frigid grey eyes, she didn’t care about the startled looks of the crowd.
The vaulted halls, the gift shop, the concrete path to her apartment—all of it passed without her notice. She gazed at the reprint in her hands, caught in her own incandescent light and desperate to stay there. She was only halfway home when she burnt out.
The figures in the painting kept turning, turning—
Laura and Jasmine were turning in the kitchen, slow and lopsided. Laura was dry sobbing into the bony part of Jasmine’s shoulder. Jasmine was rubbing circles on her back.
Ainsley slouched in her stool and held onto the bench separating her from her friends. Every time Laura’s cry pealed out, her grip on the laminate tightened. She didn’t know what to do. She wanted Laura to stop sobbing so she could stop wondering what to do.
As Jasmine shifted around, she met her gaze and nodded down at Laura.
Come here, she was saying. Prove that you care.
Unease settled in Ainsley’s stomach. She didn’t move. She just stared at Laura’s shaking frame and grimaced.
Jasmine stuck out her chin. ‘Her parents just threw her out,’ she hissed. ‘You can’t even stand next to her?’
Ainsley couldn’t say that comforting a friend felt like moving around in the dark with arms outstretched to find the furniture. ‘It doesn’t look like you guys need me.’
Jasmine watched her for a moment. ‘You might be right.’
Ainsley lurched out of the memory. The spiralling dancers spun her out of balance, and she braced herself on a brick wall. She tried to breathe, but there were shadows in her lungs and over her heart.
She wanted the light back. She wanted a feeling she didn’t have. Something other than fear, frenzy and spite, the only emotions she could shelter and stir up in her stomach.
The reprint slid from her fingers. She wanted art that reached out and dragged her in without dragging up memories too.
Landscapes and portraits discarded in op-shops. Wall art displayed in homeware stores. Illustrations hidden in social media feeds. Ainsley overran her three-room apartment with all the pieces she could find. They ran the lengths of her walls and took up space on her furniture. They stood against the kitchen backsplash, slumped in the bath, sat on windowsills blocking the sun and the view of rooftops. A lot of the paintings had long since exhausted their reserves of emotion.
Each one started in Ainsley’s heart and flared out, glorious and good. Enough to make her believe it had pushed everything else out—until it landed on a vision of her old life, of feelings that moved around her instead of picking her up in their currents.
She stayed in her apartment for days, eyes tracing brushstrokes for a glimpse of something she hadn’t felt yet. The only time she opened her door was to collect a delivery—another canvas, another panel, another print. Meanwhile, her clothes collected sweat, and her meals became bare ingredients she could nick from the pantry.
When her savings ran low and the art stopped coming, she refreshed the website for the gallery uptown. Something jerked in her chest. They had opened a new exhibition: Real Romanticism.
She left the apartment with bedraggled hair and a stained hoodie, all smudged at the edges. At the gallery doors, the security guard stared at her a little too long before letting her pass.
The exhibition unfurled across the walls of a rotunda, drawing visitors to every Blake, Cabanel and Delacroix. Ainsley reeled around the room and felt nothing. Then, The Roses of Heliogabalus grabbed at her periphery. She sensed the pull and succumbed to it, jostling to the front of the crowd and seizing the roped barrier. As she gazed up at the canvas, her chest opened.
It was hedonistic. Rose petals plunged from the ceiling of a Roman villa in a languid rush. While an emperor looked on with dim amusement, his circle of dinner guests suffocated under the deluge. They sprawled and flailed, half-buried in pink and white—some more serene than others. But one figure turned his face to the roses, resigning himself to the crush and reeling from their touch at the same time.
That inexplicable contradiction swelled in Ainsley’s chest, churning with all the things she ran from and all the things she wanted. She felt it then: a thick surge of love, slow and overwhelming. Congealing between her heart and her lungs, clogging up her throat.
She thought of Tristan. In the two years she spent with him, she hadn’t felt that surge. She wanted to tell him before the emotion leached out.
He didn’t answer the phone when she called.
‘You were right about me,’ she gasped after the tone, staring at the figure in the painting. ‘And I’m sorry. But I love you now. I found a way.’
Then love shuddered out of her, more violent than any other emotion. Like someone had reached into her chest and wrenched out her organs, breaking arteries and tearing tissue. They left another memory behind.
The dining table bore candles and homecooked casserole. Tristan’s family grinned at each other like school kids. He sat on her left, covering his rosy face with a free hand while the other held her own. His skin felt like sandpaper, wearing her down with every caress.
Tristan’s mother asked her what she loved about him.
Ainsley couldn’t think of anything.
By the end of the night, she’d come up with seven things. But his mother wasn’t listening anymore and his father was scraping plates in the sink and his younger sisters had been sent to bed early. Tristan hid his hands in his pockets as he saw Ainsley out the door. She wanted him to hold her and wear her down one last time.
Ainsley dug her nails into the rope, shoulders hunched and quivering. She pulled in a breath and looked up at the painting again, where the figure reached out from the roses with one hand. A beckoning. She stepped over the rope and crossed the empty space between. Voices behind her stopped and simmered. Somewhere, a security guard cried out.
When she touched the figure’s hand, it was nothing more than skin on dried acrylic. Then the tether fastened, and she felt everything.
The flesh-like curl of petals. The coarse grasp of fingers. Heat, inside her and everywhere. She fell into the feeling.
Later, when handlers came to collect The Roses of Heliogabalus, visitors would talk for months of the woman who walked into the canvas. Only they would remember how the figure disappeared from under the petals and left another in his place: bedraggled hair, a stained hoodie and paralysed eyes—once a frigid grey, now burning with kaleidoscopic colour.
Clinging to her duffel bag, Ainsley knew those words should’ve struck her in the abdomen too. She waited for that lingering ache, lowered her gaze when it didn’t come, searched for an answer in the toiletries and half-folded clothes strewn across her mattress.
‘I still need to return that book your mother gave me,’ she said.
Silence stretched out.
Tristan sighed, slow and brassy over the phone. ‘She won’t miss it.’
‘Are you sure? I was the one who asked for it.’
‘Not worth the trip.’
‘You could come and pick it up, at least.’
‘I’m not driving all the way back into the city for a book.’
‘Of course not, but maybe next time—’
‘Forget it, Ainz. There’s not gonna be a next time. My family doesn’t want you here at all, and I don’t—’ He broke off, in pain again. He was probably standing in the cluttered bedroom he moved out of at 17, pressing his fingers into his side.
Ainsley wanted to hurt more than he did. She wanted to yell at him for thinking he was the casualty here, but she couldn’t find a gash or an entry wound. ‘I already paid for my train ticket,’ she said softly.
‘Stop. You’re not allowed to do that, not when I can’t tell if anything you say is real or just another pity grab. After last time—’
‘I apologised for that.’
‘You think that’s all you had to do? You just checked it off your list like everything else? God, it’s worse than I thought.’
And there it was. She knew this kind of pain, buried low and blistering. Hot ash on the floor of her stomach someone forgot to stamp out. ‘Why did you really call me?’
‘I—I’ve wanted to say this for months, ok? I can’t—I’s not something I—and my parents think it’s for the best.’
Smoke rose in her throat. ‘What is it?’
‘I can’t keep loving you,’ Tristan blurted. ‘You don’t even know how it feels or what to do with it. I don’t think you ever knew.’
She dropped the duffel bag, and the rest of her body ignited, tearing through flesh and muscle and bone, soothing her as it scorched every nerve ending.
She told him about watching his favourite movies. Eating all the shitty dinners he made for her when she stayed at his apartment. Following him through the gallery uptown and letting him analyse the overanalysed art just to keep him talking.
That was love, wasn’t it?
When she had nothing left to say, she smouldered. She crossed the cramped space between her walls and waited for Tristan to apologise and tell her she was right and ask her to bring his mother’s book when she visited.
Something shuffled on the other end of the line. ‘You did all that because you wanted to keep me around,’ Tristan muttered. ‘I wanted you to see me. But when I looked at you, there was nothing there.’
Ainsley flinched. She ended the call and pushed her phone into her back pocket.
Nothing there.
Cold light fell into her room, striking last night’s water glass, the empty bin, the hospital corners. She’d skipped breakfast, and now she didn’t know if eating would
make her satisfied or nauseous.
Nothing there.
He used to joke that he couldn’t find anything behind those frigid grey eyes of hers.
She snatched her keys from the dresser. She would give him something to see.
On the sandstone stairs of the gallery, crowds hid in coats and turned their faces away from the street. They passed through security gates in currents, voices clambering on top of each other. This place always grew busy when the wind grew bitter.
Ainsley rubbed her bare arms and wove her way to the arched doors. As she entered the hall, she came up to her ears in laughing, touching, pulsing people. All their best emotions rose to the surface of their skin, loud and radiant. It was a state of being that frightened her, and one she could never reach.
She pulled her gaze to the walls instead, the canvases painted with lovers and garden parties and children holding hands. Oils and watercolours diluted their emotions.
Is that what people saw when they looked at art? The loose outline of a feeling they coloured in themselves? Is that what Tristan saw? He could stand in front of a portrait for 10 minutes and still find something in the arch of an eyebrow or the tilt of a head. He saw everything, even her.
She had to see these feelings for herself.
The hall spilled into smaller chambers, and she swept into a room where people were few and emotions were fewer. A sign stamped into the wall read: Impressionist Works by Mary Cassatt. She skirted the room, glancing at women wearing high-collar dresses and gentle frowns. She didn’t know them. She didn’t see anything in their eyes. She wanted desperately to give something back.
Then she saw it. In the corner, a pastel-drawn mother and child clung to each other, smearing at the edges as they coalesced. Pushing her lips against her son’s cheek, the faceless mother seemed to push all her love into him too—warm, stubborn and uncontainable.
Ainsley had never felt warm before, but she couldn’t mistake the feeling when it broke free from the canvas, took root behind her ribcage and unfurled. It was a belly laugh. It was closing her eyes against the sun. She didn’t have to take it; it was given. She was the one holding onto the mother’s neck and receiving the mother’s kiss. She couldn’t look away.
The warmth stayed wrapped around her ribs as she ran to the gift shop and asked the clerk for a reprint of A Goodnight Hug. As she pressed cash into his hand, she expected the feeling to grow cold like the rest of her. But it didn’t, not even when she stepped out into the wind in her short sleeves. She didn’t know what to do with it except hold on.
A Goodnight Hug went propped against the wall on her bedroom floor because the landlord wouldn’t let her hang up pictures. After tossing bubble wrap and she crossed her legs in front of it. The mother still cradled paper aside, the child to her chest. The child still lifted his arms to grasp her. Ainsley imagined herself in the where she could intercept this thing called love without space between, the collateral damage it wreaked.
The coalescing. The kiss. The warmth.
Why didn’t she feel warm anymore?
White-hot panic burgeoned in her stomach, and she reached out for the feeling. All she found was the cold weight of a memory.
Callum sat in the barren backyard, eyes red with tears and palms red with blood. Mum crouched and hoisted him into her lap. She checked over his hands like they were ceramic.
‘Did you do this, Ainsley?’ she asked.
‘She pushed me,’ Callum sobbed. ‘I didn’t do anything. I just wanted a hug.’
He burrowed his face into Mum’s chest, and Ainsley couldn’t understand why. She kicked at the dirt next to them.
‘You know you can’t do things like that,’ Mum said, glancing up.
Her voice wasn’t angry enough.
‘Come here, love. He needs that hug,’ She reached out and squeezed her elbow.
Her skin wasn’t cold enough. This feeling Mum was trying to plant inside her—it didn’t belong there.
‘Stop touching me,’ Ainsley shouted, slapping Mum’s hand away. ‘I don’t care if I pushed him. He deserved it.’
As the memory shrank, Ainsley scrambled to her feet and kicked the painting down, burying the mother and child in white carpet. This wasn’t what she wanted. Fire rose from the floor of her stomach, licking at her lungs. She tugged on a jumper and strode into the apartment hallway. There would be another painting. Another feeling, one that wouldn’t unravel. She just had to look again.
La Danse had an audience. At the back of the hall, bodies pressed in, murmurs swelled and phones reached up to take photos. The colours grabbed her first—clover green, lightning blue, a violent, overbright orange. Ainsley saw them in bursts between heads and shoulders as she moved closer.
She knew the moment when a light switched on in the dark rooms of her heart. On the canvas, naked figures swung in a turbulent circle, hands joined and heads bent as if praying. They created a circuit that surged with exhilarating love, fusing their skin together.
They were pulling her into the dance, heating up her filaments and making her glow. She laughed at the feeling, shrill and incredulous. She’d never laughed like that. With a coloured gleam in her frigid grey eyes, she didn’t care about the startled looks of the crowd.
The vaulted halls, the gift shop, the concrete path to her apartment—all of it passed without her notice. She gazed at the reprint in her hands, caught in her own incandescent light and desperate to stay there. She was only halfway home when she burnt out.
The figures in the painting kept turning, turning—
Laura and Jasmine were turning in the kitchen, slow and lopsided. Laura was dry sobbing into the bony part of Jasmine’s shoulder. Jasmine was rubbing circles on her back.
Ainsley slouched in her stool and held onto the bench separating her from her friends. Every time Laura’s cry pealed out, her grip on the laminate tightened. She didn’t know what to do. She wanted Laura to stop sobbing so she could stop wondering what to do.
As Jasmine shifted around, she met her gaze and nodded down at Laura.
Come here, she was saying. Prove that you care.
Unease settled in Ainsley’s stomach. She didn’t move. She just stared at Laura’s shaking frame and grimaced.
Jasmine stuck out her chin. ‘Her parents just threw her out,’ she hissed. ‘You can’t even stand next to her?’
Ainsley couldn’t say that comforting a friend felt like moving around in the dark with arms outstretched to find the furniture. ‘It doesn’t look like you guys need me.’
Jasmine watched her for a moment. ‘You might be right.’
Ainsley lurched out of the memory. The spiralling dancers spun her out of balance, and she braced herself on a brick wall. She tried to breathe, but there were shadows in her lungs and over her heart.
She wanted the light back. She wanted a feeling she didn’t have. Something other than fear, frenzy and spite, the only emotions she could shelter and stir up in her stomach.
The reprint slid from her fingers. She wanted art that reached out and dragged her in without dragging up memories too.
Landscapes and portraits discarded in op-shops. Wall art displayed in homeware stores. Illustrations hidden in social media feeds. Ainsley overran her three-room apartment with all the pieces she could find. They ran the lengths of her walls and took up space on her furniture. They stood against the kitchen backsplash, slumped in the bath, sat on windowsills blocking the sun and the view of rooftops. A lot of the paintings had long since exhausted their reserves of emotion.
Each one started in Ainsley’s heart and flared out, glorious and good. Enough to make her believe it had pushed everything else out—until it landed on a vision of her old life, of feelings that moved around her instead of picking her up in their currents.
She stayed in her apartment for days, eyes tracing brushstrokes for a glimpse of something she hadn’t felt yet. The only time she opened her door was to collect a delivery—another canvas, another panel, another print. Meanwhile, her clothes collected sweat, and her meals became bare ingredients she could nick from the pantry.
When her savings ran low and the art stopped coming, she refreshed the website for the gallery uptown. Something jerked in her chest. They had opened a new exhibition: Real Romanticism.
She left the apartment with bedraggled hair and a stained hoodie, all smudged at the edges. At the gallery doors, the security guard stared at her a little too long before letting her pass.
The exhibition unfurled across the walls of a rotunda, drawing visitors to every Blake, Cabanel and Delacroix. Ainsley reeled around the room and felt nothing. Then, The Roses of Heliogabalus grabbed at her periphery. She sensed the pull and succumbed to it, jostling to the front of the crowd and seizing the roped barrier. As she gazed up at the canvas, her chest opened.
It was hedonistic. Rose petals plunged from the ceiling of a Roman villa in a languid rush. While an emperor looked on with dim amusement, his circle of dinner guests suffocated under the deluge. They sprawled and flailed, half-buried in pink and white—some more serene than others. But one figure turned his face to the roses, resigning himself to the crush and reeling from their touch at the same time.
That inexplicable contradiction swelled in Ainsley’s chest, churning with all the things she ran from and all the things she wanted. She felt it then: a thick surge of love, slow and overwhelming. Congealing between her heart and her lungs, clogging up her throat.
She thought of Tristan. In the two years she spent with him, she hadn’t felt that surge. She wanted to tell him before the emotion leached out.
He didn’t answer the phone when she called.
‘You were right about me,’ she gasped after the tone, staring at the figure in the painting. ‘And I’m sorry. But I love you now. I found a way.’
Then love shuddered out of her, more violent than any other emotion. Like someone had reached into her chest and wrenched out her organs, breaking arteries and tearing tissue. They left another memory behind.
The dining table bore candles and homecooked casserole. Tristan’s family grinned at each other like school kids. He sat on her left, covering his rosy face with a free hand while the other held her own. His skin felt like sandpaper, wearing her down with every caress.
Tristan’s mother asked her what she loved about him.
Ainsley couldn’t think of anything.
By the end of the night, she’d come up with seven things. But his mother wasn’t listening anymore and his father was scraping plates in the sink and his younger sisters had been sent to bed early. Tristan hid his hands in his pockets as he saw Ainsley out the door. She wanted him to hold her and wear her down one last time.
Ainsley dug her nails into the rope, shoulders hunched and quivering. She pulled in a breath and looked up at the painting again, where the figure reached out from the roses with one hand. A beckoning. She stepped over the rope and crossed the empty space between. Voices behind her stopped and simmered. Somewhere, a security guard cried out.
When she touched the figure’s hand, it was nothing more than skin on dried acrylic. Then the tether fastened, and she felt everything.
The flesh-like curl of petals. The coarse grasp of fingers. Heat, inside her and everywhere. She fell into the feeling.
Later, when handlers came to collect The Roses of Heliogabalus, visitors would talk for months of the woman who walked into the canvas. Only they would remember how the figure disappeared from under the petals and left another in his place: bedraggled hair, a stained hoodie and paralysed eyes—once a frigid grey, now burning with kaleidoscopic colour.
Madness in Bloom
Edited by Ross Watkins & Jay Ludowyke
Succumb to madness.
To the euphoria of love, the torment of loss, the yearning for truth, the whimsy of daydreams and the reckoning of nightmares.
This eclectic collection of 62 works by emerging Australian writers features realism and surrealism, romance and murder, the paranormal and the poetic, the magical and the monstrous. Humour. Death. Sci-fi, fantasy, essay, epistle, fiction and nonfiction. The erotic. The historic. Even the religious and the political.
There are no boundaries. Only possibilities. Existing in dreams, reality and reverie…
A game of wits between a girl, a glass horse, a blurred woman and a black knight. Reflections of a sex worker tending a new client. Intimacy and conception—or neither and both. A pickleball champion in a deadly match. Emotions stolen from artistic masterpieces. Astronauts on a ship who are not alone. Thoughts behind the veil. Islands of dreams. Infidelity and revenge. First love. Secrets. The unspeakable. The unfathomable.
It’s rare for one collection to house such breadth of imagination and insanity. To prod at our hearts with emotional electrodes. And to remind us that we’re all puppets in padded cells.
Enter the asylum. Experience Madness in Bloom.
Succumb to madness.
To the euphoria of love, the torment of loss, the yearning for truth, the whimsy of daydreams and the reckoning of nightmares.
This eclectic collection of 62 works by emerging Australian writers features realism and surrealism, romance and murder, the paranormal and the poetic, the magical and the monstrous. Humour. Death. Sci-fi, fantasy, essay, epistle, fiction and nonfiction. The erotic. The historic. Even the religious and the political.
There are no boundaries. Only possibilities. Existing in dreams, reality and reverie…
A game of wits between a girl, a glass horse, a blurred woman and a black knight. Reflections of a sex worker tending a new client. Intimacy and conception—or neither and both. A pickleball champion in a deadly match. Emotions stolen from artistic masterpieces. Astronauts on a ship who are not alone. Thoughts behind the veil. Islands of dreams. Infidelity and revenge. First love. Secrets. The unspeakable. The unfathomable.
It’s rare for one collection to house such breadth of imagination and insanity. To prod at our hearts with emotional electrodes. And to remind us that we’re all puppets in padded cells.
Enter the asylum. Experience Madness in Bloom.
