#but this one has- pardon my word choice- soul to it
The ballerina’s portrait is cursed. I see her dancing in the greenhouse, her face twisted in grief and rage.
(The following is a verbatim transcription of an account found inside the frame of the Werner painting ‘Ballerina’ during its restoration. According to its owners, the Vogt family, the painting had always been called by the family ‘The Little Kuznetsov’.)
My mother loves this painting, the small, delicate portrait of a ballerina. She says it is beautiful, and gazes at it every day, drinking in the fine lines, the feathery costume, the traces of gleaming silver at brow and throat. It is a dream, for her, a dream of beauty and grace.
The painting is the stuff of my nightmares. Since I was small, I’ve seen the ballerina. I’ve seen her dancing in the library, pirouetting on the balconies, flitting along the halls. The costume is the same, the hair, the form, but her face… her face is twisted into a mask of suffering. She wants to stop, I know she wants to stop, but she can’t. She cannot stop dancing.
She is like a ghost in this house, and she has always frightened me.
I hoped she would go away as I grew older, but she has not. Instead, I see her more often now than ever, sometimes even by bright day, not in twilight or moonlight or candlelight as I did before. I think she sees us - she never dances into anyone - but she has never looked at anyone.
Not until the day that she does. I enter the greenhouse at twilight, and she is there, dancing between the long lines of pots and planters, and in that moment she turns and looks at me, her face twisted with grief and anger, and for a moment she holds out an imploring hand to me. Then she is gone, leaving me shaking and sweating with the shock of it, the terrible pleading in her tortured eyes.
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