Genesis Babineaux (accrescent) wrote in nevermore_logs, @ 2022-02-04 00:15:00 |
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Entry tags: | genesis babineaux |
WHO Genesis
WHEN Friday, 4th February
WHERE Coffee shop / The MET
WHAT Taking in some art and other culture
WARNINGS excessive npc focus, mentions of torture in paintings?
Genesis' feet were bare and the sand beneath them cold and slipping away from her under a night sky full of stars. When turning her head, the only sound was that of wind rushing through the cracks in ancient stone walls. The smell of something sweet and night-blooming clung to her. Genesis walked slowly through the MET, trying to take in a sense of peace from all the art. Genesis loved art - she did bad watercolours herself - but she was always left with the very strong feeling that she didn’t get art. As much as she could stand in front of a beautiful painting, she worried that she was missing its meaning or that she wasn’t appreciating it in the right way. She sometimes had the concern that someone would approach her and suddenly demand she explain, exactly, what the painting in front of them meant. Ludicrous, and yet. But the MET was one of the places in this city where a person could actually go on a freezing day and find some sort of entertainment for free, and so Genesis tried to remind herself that maybe she didn’t have to ‘get’ it completely. It was enough to just like something. So Genesis made her way through the brightly lit corridors, now and then sitting on one of the benches to message people and lazily check Reddit. There was a ridiculous argument about the correct way to make cheesecake going on in, of all places, a subreddit for short horror stories, and Genesis couldn’t help but start getting invested. Everyone had a lot of opinions about cheesecake. Damn. Genesis looked up and frowned at the painting across from her, of Jesus’ body being removed from the cross. I could really go some cheesecake right now. But she didn’t have the money this week to be spending it on cheesecake, or the things to try and badly make cheesecake. (Even though reddit had, sort of, made it clear what mistakes not to make. Or… to make. Whichever side turned out to be correct in the end.) Jesus may have been dead in the painting, but one of the other figures seemed to be watching Genesis specifically. At the bottom of the painting while all the others looked to their task with Jesus, this figure was looking at the viewer, and Genesis thought she saw judgment painted on those features. The woman in the red dress was saying, he died for your sins and all you can think about while seeing it is cheesecake? Genesis broke eye contact with the woman in the painting. She’d never been any good at understanding what paintings were supposed to mean. When Genesis got up to move she first checked the legend beside the painting, with the little outlined drawing of all the figures and who they were. The woman in red, the woman who knew Genesis wasn’t there to think upon the Lord’s sacrifice (and probably knew she didn’t even attend church anymore) was Mary Magdalene. The repentant whore who’d washed Jesus’ feet with her hair. Genesis cast her gaze sideways to look at the painting again, but from this angle Mary Magdalene wasn’t watching anyone at all, just staring out ahead. Which… of course she was. It was all just paint from hundreds of years ago, it didn’t have any secret power to judge Genesis. Besides, Mary Magdalene had never even tasted cheesecake, what did she know. Genesis didn’t look at the painting again, the suffering of Jesus uncomfortable at the back of her neck as she moved further into the museum. She was moving slowly but not really stopping to take anything in more deeply than that, not until she had moved into the Ancient Egyptian section and something forced her to stop. She turned back to the glass case beside her, assorted ancient treasures within. But the one that she’d briefly glanced and the one that she was fully focused on now was some sort of box. The box was made of pale stone, hieroglyphs on the side and little drawings of gods beside them. But on top there sat a carving made of a completely black stone, although Genesis could see there had been touches of gold paint on it once, that the eyes had been gold. It was her black dog, sleek and elongated and perfectly still. It wasn’t her dog, obviously. She hadn’t been dreaming about some statue in the MET of - Genesis looked to the side to find what this statue had written about it - of Anubis, god of death. Genesis felt like she could hear the whistling of a hot desert wind and she felt sick. Her hand came up to brace against the wall as she looked at the little statue. That was her dog. Genesis didn’t understand what art was supposed to be telling her, but she knew for sure what this was the dream dog. This was one hundred percent, fully and totally, the dog she dreamed of. Genesis moved away from the case and sat down on the closest seat she could find, out of view of the dog. (Or, the dog was out of her view. She didn’t think the dog could see her. That would be insane.) There was a feeling of weird discomfort, that feeling that came when a strange coincidence had struck you and it felt too wild to ever be coincidence. But that was all coincidence was, wasn’t it? Just something that made your skin crawl a little but didn’t mean anything more than that. But… Genesis looked over in the direction of the case, the light from within it glowing in a way that unsettled her. (She was already unsettled.) But… she had dreamed about that dog, about some long forgotten pagan god standing among the ruins of its long forgotten land. Genesis knew that dog, but she couldn’t explain to anyone the ways in which she did. Yes, maybe she had just seen a statue like this and just picked it up subconsciously but... no, no, that wasn't it, and Genesis didn't know why she knew that. Genesis went the longer way around so that she didn’t have to pass back through the Egyptian section. She wasn’t scared of the dog, she just… didn’t want to see it again. At a safe distance from the Egyptian section, Genesis sat down on one of the benches beside another woman, leaving a comfortable distance between the two of them. Then she pulled out her phone and returned to the reddit thread to see where the cheesecake argument had gone. Someone would not back down from their take that the perfect cheesecake had to have a sour cream topping, and there were people jumping in from all sides. Genesis wanted so much to also throw herself into it, because it was dumb, because it meant nothing, because she could feel the suggestion of hot sand blowing against her neck. Genesis readjusted her hair, as though to block it. The woman beside her suddenly made a slightly strangled sound, quiet but enough for Genesis to look over at her. They were around the same age, Genesis thought. White, dark brown hair, a long sleeved black shirt with a colorful chest tattoo visible. She was staring straight ahead at the painting, lips pressed into a thin line and eyes intense. Genesis frowned and leaned forward a little so the woman could see her, and see that Genesis wasn’t trying to push into her space. (Maybe that social work training was still all in there somewhere. She would have been good at it, had her path not changed.) “Are you okay?” she asked the woman gently. The woman seemed surprised by Genesis’ voice and she looked at her with something that was, for just a moment, close to fear. But then it was gone and the woman’s face became more neutral, an almost smile coming to her lips. Genesis cast a glance towards the painting they were sitting in front of. Oh for fuck’s- It was Jesus again, this time having thorns nailed into his head as he allowed it to happen. Dying, once again, for Genesis' sins. She knew this painting more than the other, because this painting was incredibly famous and by someone incredibly famous as well. Genesis knew enough of art to know the work of Caravaggio. She even had a small postcard print of one of his paintings stuck to the side of her fridge. Not this one though. She didn’t want a suffering Jesus Christ on her fridge to remind her she should be at church. But Genesis, looking at that beautifully painted face of Christ, felt like maybe she knew what was going on here with this woman. “It’s a very moving painting, isn’t it?” Genesis said, turning away from the woman again to look at it. “I hate it,” the woman said, her voice hard but wavering and her eyes not leaving the canvas even when Genesis glanced towards her. “Makes me feel like I’m dying.” “Yeah?” Genesis said, keeping it simple in case the woman wanted to elaborate on that. “Caravaggio,” she hissed, picking up her coat roughly and wiping at her heavy eye makeup. “What a fucking joke.” And then she strode away from the hated painting and Genesis. Well… at least Genesis wasn’t the only person having a lot of feelings at the MET today. Genesis looked back at the canvas. Jesus in his red cloth and his deep shadows, with his long hair over his face and his expression of acceptance through the pain. She thought about her mother and father wanting to know why she was refusing to go to church anymore, thought about how angry they’d been about it, how hurt, how they saw it as a personal failing that their daughter, still under their roof, wouldn’t even go to church one day a week. Can you imagine how your rejection makes Father Larsen feel? her father had demanded. Genesis swallowed that lump of guilt in her throat. “I’m sorry,” she whispered to Jesus, though he remained still and impassive. “You know why I can’t.” |