Casper Fowl was a painter. He wasn't making any money at it. He was very superstitious, so he went to an old gypsy woman who told fortunes for spare change and spent
the money on food for her cats, and she told him that if he wanted to make
a living as an artist he should soak his brushes in jars of gold coins.
Angrily, he stomped back up the dusty road to his tiny room above a garage. Someone
might describe it as a studio but to him it was just a prison cell, a physical manifestation of his lack of success. What a fraud, Casper muttered to
himself, if I had a jar full of gold
coins then what would I need to make money for. But if she was a fraud then
Casper was none the better, an artist who couldn’t make a dime. And so he
pulled out an old box of golden costume buttons and he soaked his brushes in
those instead. As a result, many of his paintings had a shiny tint, like
tapestries with gold thread stitched in, visible in only the right light.
It
hadn’t worked. Casper Fowl sold just enough paintings to continue on a stable
diet of diner food, black coffee and tins of beans and tuna. He sold his
fridge to pay for his prison fare and board, and refused to admit that food
should need to be chilled or cooked. So, Casper Fowl became a thief. He
abandoned his idea board where he stuck polaroids of developing art: a road kill at sunset, a dilapidated church, a greenhouse with a tree burst right
through the middle, a crying child, and an egg frying on the pavement on one
particularly hot day. He took them down and put them in his someday drawer,
which was really just a shoebox, and imagined one day taking them out and
hanging the back up with care, touching each one of them and saying don’t worry. I didn’t forget about you.
He replaced these ideas, just as he would begin to do in art
museums. He covered his walls with Pablo Picasso, Monet, Warhol and Dali,
ripping the pictures from magazine and printing copies at the library, always
at different locations, always with different names. And all of his replicas, while
they were good, were mockingly fake in the proper light when the costume button gold would
glint like bad highlights.
Casper
Fowl has never been a good judge of character, but he really fudged up when he
chose to go into a partnership with Jeremiah Fox. Jeremiah was not an artist.
He was a greedy, conniving, clever snake who had been stealing since the day he
left his mother with nothing of her life savings, but a note on the coffee
table to tell her not to bother searching for him. She didn’t bother, and who
could blame her, for Jeremiah was as slimy as a toad, and she had three other
children to worry about, not that she could feed them anymore.
Jeremiah
Fox spoke with a slow drawl and wore expensive suits and paid for the attention of not-expensive ladies. He and Casper Fowl met when
he was passing through, when he offered to pay Casper a sizeable amount of
money for a replica of Dove with Green Peas by Pablo Picasso. He posed as a
curator, taking art, judging its authenticity, and then he would swap them,
taking the real for himself and leaving the replica in its place. Casper Fowl had
no sense, no wits about him, and though he would never intentionally bring
people harm, greed is contagious like a yawn. Greed is the yawn in the middle of
an airless city that fills your lungs with tar and multiplies like so many
flies. Once you’re bitten by greed you’re as gone as a rabid animal, selling
your morals at a pawnshop to buy liquid fire to qualm what’s left of your soul.
And
so a partnership was forged, Jeremiah in the lead, with Casper Fowl trailing
along with his hopes and dreams stuffed in a shoebox.
- The Shutter Muse
[A Note From TSM: This is my newest story which does not yet have a working title. The other MC will be featured in my next post. I've been focusing more on writing so a few of my posts will likely be photo-less. I appreciate your understanding <3]
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