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‘This city stands on sticks’. Those words came to my mind one night crossing the Grand Canal after a day spent in Venice.
For the first time in my life I had grasped Venice and its metaphor: something beautiful but perilous, the hidden danger, a castle in the sand. That’s how this story formed in my mind, just like a flash-fiction piece where the lines are led by emotion and the strange dance between prose and poetry.
Emma Tricca is one of our most valuable and interesting songwriters, capable of strange and beautiful sonic flights of fancy and unexpected lyrical turns.
Thomas Blake, KLOF Mag
Down the Rabbit Hole (Painting the portrait of a very ordinary story)
‘This City stands on sticks.’
Ben thinks to himself, looking at Venice from the boat as it crosses the Grand Canal: ‘This city stands on sticks.’
He runs his hand through his hair, careful not to scratch the growth on his skull, well hidden by his grey, wavy hair, which he’s told is still luscious. But he knows that, he knows his hair is still luscious. He knows what haircut suits him best. He knows how a painter should appear. He follows the trend down to a tee by casually throwing on a Billy Childish look: paint stains on his T-shirt, paint stains on the back pocket of his vintage Levis, paint stains on his Clarks. Every move is thoroughly calculated. Every move cut and drawn out with the laser focus precision of a master manifestor. Down to a tee.
‘Strange and exciting to be working here in Venice for the first time’. He continues to think. ‘This city stands on sticks’.
‘It’s strange how I got here, but everyone knows. Everyone knows how I got here. They got me here’.
Ben had tried to leave Them before autumn turned into winter. He really had tried. But They got sick. They got sicker and sicker. Sick in their moods. The more he tried, the sicker things became.
So many fights: ‘It’s all over if you leave me. You got me into this situation.’
‘All true’, he admits to himself, ‘But now, I want out’.
He suddenly felt overcome with fear: ‘I’m stuck here, I’m stuck with Them: I have a choice to make that is no choice, my next choice is dictated by work: If this ends, my career is over, and my reputation will suffer. God, I feel sick.’
Split between love and illusion, Ben picks up the brush and gets on with the work. He mixes the colors briskly which suddenly appear to him like his messed-up mind and deceptive soul. He mixes the colors in a sort of rage and thinks of Caravaggio.
Caravaggio. Anna loves Caravaggio. The passion and strength she sees in his work inspired her to start writing poems: to her, words are like paintings, just like the musical notes she sees bouncing off her piano when she plays; they too are like drawings.
He knows what he is doing, but he can’t let go: Anna. Anna. Anna.
Anna is in his thoughts constantly; he wakes in the middle of the night thinking about her and feels something so profound that he can barely breathe. One night, deep into the early hours, he reached for his phone and messaged her to see if she was awake. She was awake… He had been reeling her in so subtly that she didn’t even realise she was now under his spell.
Anna is constantly on his mind, an obsession. He makes plans to go see her.
Gifts, songs, poems, books and a painting for Christmas.
He promised her a life together, a dream. And she had believed him.
The longing she has now developed for him has turned into something so akin to love as to be indistinguishable from the true love of fantasy. Yet, what he had promised her, and begged her to believe, was exactly what she longed for: a future together; that he would keep her safe always. And he knew this was what she wanted to hear.
Anna had been recovering from heartbreaks since she could remember, he knew that; through the late nights she had confided in him, yet, still, he went for her like someone who could not keep away from his own bad doing.
Ben’s is a double life… he can’t let go of the person he is with, but Anna is the one he wants. Days spent hiding and sending Anna delirious messages from anywhere he could, and deliberately trying to pick fights at home hoping his person would call it quits instead of him. He knew this was cowardly.
‘I’m in a right mess; how can I escape all of this?’
The arguing with his person became heavier and heavier; verbally heavy, almost violent: It’s a terrible situation, but he still could not let go of Anna.
He tells Anna words of love with an artist’s guile. He tells her: ‘All this will be over soon’. Except that it won’t; now he has commitments with his person. They are life-changing commitments – he cannot leave this behind. He cannot leave; he’d be cancelled.
Out of fear of losing her, Ben does not tell Anna what’s going on. The lies continue. Finally, Anna asks him to either separate or to leave her alone. He confesses. Spring is just over a month away.
Anna is distraught.
Months later, Anna remembers what she had thought of Ben’s work when she first saw it: ‘This guy is very talented, but his work is weak, very weak. How strange.’
Then she remembers something else… when, very early on in their romance, Ben had told her he wasn’t into Hemingway. There was no reason for him to talk about Hemingway in that instance; they were not discussing literature or anything that could remotely ask for that writer to be brought into the equation. Anna realises that that was the precise moment he started to reel her in, it was his way of creating some sort of mystique. A mystery by which to become enraptured.
Ben and Anna are no longer in touch.
‘This city stands on sticks’ Ben thinks to himself again.
‘I will paint another weak portrait of Venice that won’t change the world. Paris next, I feel sick.’
Emma Tricca: https://www.emmatricca.com/
