Revenge of the Muse

Trigger warning: allusions to stalking

An unremarkable office building sits between a supermarket and a pet store, largely ignored by pedestrians on the street as they pass it to buy food or coo over wriggling puppies in a window display. The paint on the office building is grey and peeling, the sign above the door obscured by obscene graffiti. The door hangs precariously off one rusted hinge. It would be perfectly natural to assume that the building is abandoned, or that it will soon be demolished for the purpose of building a dental practice or an advertising agency.

But the building is not abandoned.

On the second floor, three doors down from the stairs (the elevator is non-functional and full of bats) there is an office in use. It is the only office in use in the entire building and has been since the bomb scare incident in 1962, of which we do not speak. The door is red, with a frosted glass panel. A gold plaque reads:

Scorched Earth Associates

Professional Saboteurs

Vincent cleaned his brushes methodically. There was something hypnotising about watching the curls of pigment bloom in the water, moving like smoke before being swept down the drain. The newest piece was his biggest yet, a true to life portrait. The oil paint was still glossy and wet in the warm light of his studio.

The painting depicted his muse in repose. Sprawled naked on her belly across shiny silk sheets, one foot dangling flirtatiously from the bed. Penelope was a vision of seduction. Her long face was turned to look out of the canvas with beseeching eyes, eyebrows arched like birdwings, the shadows beneath her cheekbones a moody purple. It was beautiful. His work was always beautiful; but he was still unsatisfied. The face was perfect, but he couldn’t be sure of the rest. What if she had freckles across her shoulder blades? A birthmark on her thigh? Until he saw the real thing, he could never be content with his work.

Once the collection was complete, she would surely understand the depths of his love and accept him at last. Nobody else would worship her as Vincent did. He approached the portrait, leaning in to hover his face over hers, inhaling the paint fumes and imagining it was the nectar of her skin.

A shadow flickered in his peripherals. He turned and saw only a tree branch swaying outside the window.

A woman in tight black clothing crouches on a tree branch outside an art studio. It is not clear to us what she looks like. Her features are shadowed by a deep hood. What is clear is that she is small and muscular with incredible poise. It is easy to imagine her balanced on a beam, bracing for a flip. In another life, she is surely a gymnast with a closet full of garish leotards and a shelf full of gold medals. But that is another story. In this life she is a saboteur for hire.

The artist inside the studio is unaware he is being watched. His obsession makes him blind to all else. Also, he is an idiot, which will make the saboteur’s job much easier. She was hired by the woman he is stalking, his unwilling muse, a marketing executive who lives on the other side of town. The collection he is creating of her cannot be allowed into the public eye.

The woman in black climbs out of the tree and vanishes into the night.

The letter arrived in his mailbox on a Tuesday. Vincent recognised it immediately as being from one of the many galleries he had approached about housing his collection. Bad luck had so far plagued all his attempts to court a gallery. A flat tyre right before he was meant to go to a meeting with one curator. A horrific bout of diarrhoea during a meeting with another curator.

With shaking hands, he opened the letter and scanned the first page. We are happy to inform you … Vincent released an exalted shout, collapsing against his letterbox. Finally, the universe had chosen to smile upon him. This was certainly not his first choice of gallery. In fact, he had never heard of it before seeing a brochure on the pinboard of the local art centre he frequented. A new, underground establishment called Creative Blaze.

Vincent scrambled for his phone. He wanted to call Penelope and tell her the good news, but she had changed her number for the fifth time the previous week. Instead, he used a fake Facebook account to send her a private message. Soon the whole world will see how gorgeous you are!!! XOXO. He would slip a note under her apartment door as well, in case she didn’t read the message.

He saw a small, muscular woman sitting at a bus stop across the street, reading a book—he thought nothing of it.

The book is called A Pyromaniac’s Guide to Arson. Our saboteur closes it with a snap after seeing the artist go inside with the letter. If someone had been on the street five hours earlier, in the murky grey of pre-dawn, they would have seen her slip the envelope into the letterbox herself. But nobody was, so nobody did.

It has been a busy few weeks for the saboteur, ensuring the collection went to a specific gallery. A nail in a tyre and a laxative in a protein smoothie were the least of her machinations. Now, she could move on to the next phase of her plan.

Other jobs also took up her attention as well. A few planted files on a cheating husband’s laptop saw divorce proceedings take a sudden turn in the wife’s favour. A hair removal serum slipped into a shampoo bottle ended an aspiring male model’s career at the behest of an ex-girlfriend he had slut-shamed online. Business is booming.

The saboteur whistles a slow, foreboding tune as she walks away.

Vincent jogged towards the gallery, huffing like a faulty exhaust pipe. His car—with its shiny new tyre—had died, and then the taxi he called never arrived. He was forced to take a bus, and then a train, and then turn a twenty-minute walk into a ten-minute run to get to the gallery in time for his exhibition opening. Even with all of that, he was running late.

Penelope might already be there—he might have missed her reaction entirely. The very idea was heartbreaking. Vincent slowed to a walk as he reached Match Street, wiping sweat from his brow. A red sign was set outside the gallery with an arrow pointing to the door. It said:

Exhibition Opening

‘Flashpoint’

That wasn’t the name of his exhibit. Heart racing, he rushed inside, passing a small, muscular staff member in a smart black suit. Well-dressed people were gathered in the room, clustered avidly around the many frames on the walls. He saw a few guests carrying notepads and cameras. He hadn’t known any journalists were coming. Whispers and gasps and scandalised exclamations bounced around the large white space.

‘Is that him?’

‘Look at him, it must be.’

‘I can’t believe he came!’

Vincent ignored them all. He was busy gaping in horror at the art on the walls. Instead of oil paintings of his angelic muse, the frames were filled with grotesque ink caricatures of himself. In one, he had a giant tongue lolling from his mouth to his feet. In another, he was part worm, his upper body grafted onto a series of fleshy annuli in place of legs. In the largest, he was naked and crouched holding his privates, huddled in the middle of a crowd of onlookers pointing and laughing at him. A camera flashed. Through the crowd, Penelope met his eyes. Dressed in a tailored yellow pantsuit with a string of pearls around her neck, she was a vision of splendour. His heart shattered to pieces, and rage flowed from the wreckage.

Vulgarities sprung from his lips as he ran at her, shoving guests out of the way, accusing her of betraying him, calling her a devil, a shameless bitch, death threats flying alongside spittle as people tried to hold him back.

Vincent felt a hand grasp his arm and swung wildly, his knuckles cracking across a cheekbone. The next moment, he found himself prone on the ground with his arms restrained. A police badge was held in his eyeline as an angry voice said he was in for it now. Penelope was escorted from the gallery by the staff member in the sharp black suit.

Two figures walk up a street, one in yellow and the other in black. They pass a pet store with an empty window display, the puppies put to bed for the night. Further up the street, a grocery store is still open. A small group of drunk twenty-year-olds stumble out with arms full of ice-cream cartons. Paying them no mind, the two figures push open a precariously hung door into a decrepit office building. A faint flutter of bat wings echoes from inside the elevator shaft. They ascend the stairs to the third floor and enter an office with a red door and a shiny plaque. Dozens of rolled up paintings are waiting inside.

Across town, an artist is handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser. He will be charged with numerous counts of assault, including assault on an officer, and an anonymous tip called while he is in custody will lead the police towards evidence that he has been committing tax fraud for a number of years. The lawyer he will hire will turn up drunk to court. His appeals will go nowhere. Journalists will write a number of humiliating articles accompanied by unflattering pictures, which will be delivered to him in prison.

‘Would you like me to dispose of these?’ the saboteur asks, gesturing to the paintings.

‘I would appreciate that,’ Penelope replies.

The saboteur nods, promising it will be done, and after an exchange of payment the women part ways never to meet again. A few days later, a small bonfire is reported in an abandoned carpark in an industrial area. By the time the firefighters arrive, all that is left are a few charred scraps of canvas and the aroma of burnt oil paint.

Roseleigh Priest is a writer, editor, and researcher based in Kamilaroi Nation/Inverell. She is a sub-editor for UQ's Jacaranda Journal, and is also currently working as a research assistant for Community Publishing in Regional Australia. Roseleigh has been published by Creature Magazine (2024) and Grattan Street Press Blog (2025). Her favourite kind of writing is the sort that makes you laugh, or makes you shudder. (She/Her)