But all of it (the blood and the exile, and the loss of ten toe-rings) began long before Ohán’s last day in the city, long before his last day in Tamin’s presence, with an accidental splotch of Tamin’s blood on the vaguely-crenulated nail of his right-pinky toe. It began shortly after they’d met in class at Journeyman’s Gymnasium 248, where Tamin commandeered Ohán between classes and steered him into the empty silence of a painting studio. Empty. The air was full of smells: linseed oil, canvas, and fixatives like formaldehyde and alcohol: distinct aromas at odds with the presence of paint on canvases. “I want to show you,” he’d said: Tamin. His hair was disheveled: a coffee-colored mop with sideburns flanking Tamin’s face, like the legs of a child, straddling a wooden rocking horse, only the horse was Tamin’s head, and his hair—no child, despite the implication of straddling legs, as drawn by his sideburns—made Ohán think of a Gorgon’s dust-mop. He’d set up a bench in the middle of the room, he’d placed a flat thing on an easel and hid it beneath a pigment-splattered drop cloth. “Just look at it for a while,” Tamin said. “Doin’t say anything just yet. I want to try something, I want to know if I was successful at it, but I can’t know if you say anything right away. Just sit. Just look at it.” The painting was a nightmare composite of decapitations, a self-portrait, Ohán realized, in seeing the central figure, a human shape—meticulously rendered in brooding chiaroscuro. He recognized Tamin’s knee-breeches and billowing, white tunic; he recognized the anklet Tamin wore. But the figure stopped at the neck, standing—with stiff formality—between a headless dog, and a headless sow, corpulent with eight swollen teats, suckled by eight headless, disturbingly human babies. There was a background of almost fractal complexity: the dabs and truncated brush strokes of a master Impressionist, and Tamin was nothing, if not an Impressionist savant. Ohán couldn’t decide if he liked it or not, and so he’d kept his silence, as Tamin suggested, and when Tamin asked him to explain it, he fumbled for words and finally ended all of it with a shrug and head-shake, rife with perplexity. “I’m not a painter,” Tamin said. “I thought I was, and I’ve become good at it, but it demands to much, and when I’m done with each painting I make, I have to think about who I am. Every time I finish a painting, I’m struck with amnesia, and I have to re-make myself and dredge up memories that may or may not be my own. It’s too much, Ohán, and I can’t keep doing that. I’m stopping, Ohán; this is my final painting, and because you’re my best friend, you’re the only one I want to show it to. I think you’ll understand, one day…I hope you will, because you’re the only one who’ll ever see this. I’m burning it, tomorrow.” But that was a long time ago, and Ohán has left the city. Now, he sits in a curved, wicker house, listening to a chorus duo of frogs (tenor males) practicing their rendering of Litanies: a famous composition, he’s been told, though he knows nothing of Froggish art, Froggish music, or the meaning of a litany for two tenor, alien, voices. * I think this is something of a fill-in; I’d written a story, “Ulterior Immanence” for the challenge topic of “Freedom” last July. Though I know I’m nowhere near done with stories of “the Ulterior” I thought I’d closed the first chapter of Ohán’s life; I thought I could move forward—a little bit—but Ohán wanted to show me something else. I think he likes (liked?) Tamin, and wanted to tell me that, and this is what came of that fictional character’s muse-driving urge. I hope you’ve enjoyed it. Thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope you’re all having a great week.