The Creative Process Part 2B
His heavy-lidded, dark-blue eyes were topped by fair blond eyebrows, which, if visible at all, were thin and perfectly curved, providing his face with a feminine prettiness. The shape of his face did not lend him any further masculinity: his cheekbones and chin formed a heart shape, and his jaw was a touch soft. His future-granddaughter Delilah had a similarly soft jawline. But her eyebrows were darker, making her gaze more penetrating; she was captivating as she speechified to the room.
In throaty tones she praises the centerpiece of the evening, which Hudson still could not force into focus. He takes a piece of Etruscan pottery trying to keep his chewing noises to a minimum so as to focus on Delilah’s words, lest they provide a clue to his creation. (he found it distasteful to snack in the bathroom, but in this case it helped transport him more fully to that reception room at the Met). Over the crunching of ancient pottery in his mouth, Delilah’s voice seems to go up an octave, hitting piercing, shrill pitches. He looks up from the toothpick dissolving in his hand, noticing that the pixillated effect that had blurred his masterpiece, was spreading, seeping first into the table cloth underneath it, then to the wooden floors and up Delilah’s ruffled dress, to her skin and feathered hairpiece.
His parents had a two-dimensional television that they kept in the antiques room, and still sometimes played old-timey blu-ray classics like Memento or Pirates of the Caribbean on it. Sometimes in those movies, especially if they were showing someone getting arrested on the news, the people would be blurred with colored squares, as though the camera had zoomed in on one cell every few inches and enlarged it over all others. This did not translate into three-dimensional television, because in three-dimensions people can be more easily identified by height, weight, gestures and smell. To obscure a person’s identity, colors and shapes changed constantly, inflating and deflating like a disco-ball balloon and humans all emitted a vanilla smell. The effect spreading across the room looked like the the blurred images Hudson had seen on two-dimensional television.
But the change in Delilah’s voice is not the aural equivalent of the blurry visual distortion. It is far more jagged than that. More like the black bars two-dimensional television censors sometimes used, except to create the equivalent level of aesthetic displeasure, the bars would have to be strobe lights. She was yapping. Like that forsaken Chihuahua, Pocket.
With that thought, the pixels flash through the whole room so quickly Hudson is not even sure it had happened. They then retract back to the masterpiece, like a time-lapse video of a puddle drying.
Delilah’s feather hairpiece flaps outwards from her head, to form what looks like large dog-ears, pink on the inside, golden brown on the outside. Her irises have expanded and darkens, filling the whites of her eyes with a rich brown. She drops her champaign flute, as her hands no longer have opposable thumbs.
The audience is no longer murmuring, instead they’re yapping from Chihuahua faces, with Chihuahua paws protruding from tuxedos and ruffled dresses, standing on two legs, and occasionally crouching to sniff one-another’s genitals.
Hudson looks to his masterpiece, and confirms what he thought he had seen before. Pocket, stuffed and adorned with jewels, on a silver serving platter.
Refocusing his eyes on the image reflected in the mirror, he realized that that depraved canine rodent had made its way into the apartment and was now seated next to him, yelping like a dying fire alarm, inserting himself into Hudson’s imagination.
