She would’ve liked to have had it mailed, but the postal system flatly refused.
She would’ve liked to have had someone purchase it for her, but the local couriers wouldn’t do it and the idea of employing – even temporarily – someone who wouldn’t wear a uniform made her nose twitch. Paid in cash, even? Disgusting.
So Shelley drove a car down to town, downtown, and paid a certain specialist a certain sum of money off her credit like a civilized human, even if she had to carry the goods back in her own two hands.
Gingerly. Carefully. Even through the packaging, it was dangerous. She’d need to have someone clean the car afterwards.
At home she cut away the cords and the wrappers and the box and the padding and the second box and the airtight seal and lifted out her prize. Still fresh.
The durian was smaller than she’d expected, if slightly spikier. Its smell, however, was right on target.
Still, it wasn’t the smell she was there for.
Behind Shelley was a wall, and on that wall was a picture frame, and held captive in that cradle was an apple.
Beside that was a banana. To the left of THAT was a pineapple and so on and on and on from raspberries to pitaya to papaya to kiwis to kumquats.
There was an empty space at the end, at the bottom left. It needed something round and thorny that tasted like fine custard and stank like mustard gas. So Shelley sat at her easel, her canvas before her, the durian (on its own – no bowl, no lesser fruit) behind that, and she looked, and she looked, and she thought about art.
She thought about the curve of the brush, of the selection of the colour, of the blending of eye and hand together – one unmoving, the other never ceasing.
Then she shrugged her shoulders and stopped thinking and began to paint instead.
When you’re really concentrating you’re barely awake. Time and space go away, the body stops existing and the mind follows. All that’s left is motion.
Shelley sat in that state for a long beautiful moment and then sneezed.
God, the durian smelled. It smelled bad. Really bad. Worse than she’d thought. And that wasn’t even the problem, the problem was the PERSISTENCE. She wasn’t getting used to it. She couldn’t ignore it.
So she sealed it inside a plastic bag and sat down again and picked up her brush.
Time went away, space went away.
The body vanished and boy that reeked GODDAMNIT
Shelley got up and walked around the house and found a clothespin in a drawer she’d last opened about twenty years ago and slammed that thing shut on her nose.
She sat down with unnecessary force, hissed to herself, put time in her pocket and space in her wallet and counted to three and
Nope.
She put the durian in another room. It didn’t help.
She took a picture of the durian and painted from that. It didn’t help.
She moved to a different part of the house. It didn’t help.
She threw away her work, threw away her reference photos, threw out the durian, went to her summer cottage, found a picture of a durian on the internet with her tablet, and began to paint.
Five brushstrokes in she stopped and sniffed.
“Fuck.”
Then she leaned over, very carefully, and sniffed the canvas.
Her eyes watered.
“FUCK.”
She tried febreeze.
She tried lemon juice in water.
She tried lighting matches, then she tried burning candles, scented and unscented.
She tried sniffing garlic really hard to see if it was her imagination or if there was something else going on (it wasn’t her imagination, and the garlic smell didn’t last long).
She tried, in a fit of desperation, switching entirely to drawing in charcoal to trap the scent. It didn’t work either but it was a nice effect so she kept doing it, and all her durian attempts became black and white and various compromises of grey.
She was getting closer, Shelley suspected. Closer. It was fainter now. Yes, that was it. It was fainter. Just a little closer. Yes.
The next day she finished it.
She woke up and she finished it.
She woke up and finished it and had an extra-long breakfast and then had a long, long walk along her private beach and tried very hard not to cackle. That would be admitting a struggle had taken place, which was all too close to admitting a defeat.
That last corner in the bottom left was going to look AMAZING when it didn’t exist anymore.
Then she walked back in, and stopped, and felt that buzz in the air before she even inhaled and confirmed it.
Durian.
The stairs to her studio room were broad and generous but she still took them four at a time, fury lending her wings, and even moreso the reek in the room as she flung the door wide.
Oh god it stank. Like a whale carcass in the sun, like a wheel of limburger in a chemical toilet, like rotten flesh in a blender full of peach juice.
“I FIXED THAT!” she yelled at the canvas. Oh god how did it still look normal? How was it still just a charcoal sketch? How was it not oozing, dissolving under the stench?
So many questions it made her want to fall apart and scream until her head split open and there was a durian in there too. How? How? HOW?
But Shelley was an artist, and so she stopped doing that and let time and space fall away and raised her brush and made art happen. Pointy-end first.
It hissed, and then it all came out at once and no amount of matches could’ve done anything at all.
Shelley was still lying there when they found her four days later. The body reeked, but the rest of the house was as still and sterile as a doctor’s office.
Except for the canvas, which smelled a little like febreeze and lemons and charcoal. But in a nice way.
The paintings weren’t left to anyone in particular and were auctioned off by a distant cousin to raise funds for charity, which worked very well – the strangeness of the artist’s passing was still in the news, which helped drive the prices up.
The Portrait of Durian: Grey in particular went for over half a million.