Almost comfortably human.
Sweeney walked the room slowly this time, giving himself space to step back and look at the canvases.
Feathers itched and crawled beneath his skin.
And there he was.
The still point at the center of the painting, and feathers were bursting from his skin there, too, but there, it didn’t look like madness, it looked like transcendence.
Sweeney heaved in a breath.
“It does have that effect on people.”
Sweeney glanced at the man standing next to him, the man who hadn’t seemed to realize it was Sweeney in the painting hanging before them.
“Are you familiar with Maeve’s work? Maeve Collins, the artist, I mean,” Brian said.
“Ah. A bit. Only recently. Is she here tonight?”
“Not yet, though I hope she’ll make an appearance later. But if you’re interested in the piece, I’d be happy to assist you with it.”
“If I buy it, can I meet her?”
“I can understand why you’d make the request, but that’s not the usual way art sales work.”
And now the man standing next to him did step back and look at Sweeney. “Wait. Wait. You’re the model for the painting. Oh, this is fantastic.”
Feathers. Feathers unfurling in his blood.
“But of course you’d know Maeve already then.”
“I don’t.” Sweeney braceleted his wrist, his left wrist, downed with white feathers, with his right hand. “But I think I need to.”
He unwrapped his fingers, and extended his feathered hand to the man in the gallery, beneath the painting that was and wasn’t him.
Brian looked down at the feathers. “I’ll call her.”
“Idon’t care how good the party is, Brian, I’m not coming.”
“Your model is here, and he would like to meet you.”
“How many vodka tonics have you had? That doesn’t even make sense. I didn’t use any models in this series.”
“Not even the guy with feathers coming out of his skin? Because he’s standing right in front of the painting, and it certainly looks like him, not to mention this thing where I’m watching him grow feathers on his arms, and what the fuck is going on here, Maeve?”
“What did you say?” The flesh on her arms rose up in goose bumps.
“You heard me. You need to get here.
“Now.”
Maeve took a cab, and went in through the service entrance, where she had loaded the paintings earlier that week.
“Brian, what is—you!”
“Yes,” Sweeney said, and in an explosion of feathers and collapsing clothes, turned into a bird.
Maeve sat with the bird while the celebration trickled out of the gallery. She had gathered up the clothes he had been wearing, and folded them into precise piles, stuffing his socks into the toes of the shoes, spinning the belt into a coil.
At one point, Brian had brought back a mostly empty bottle of vodka, filched from the bar. Maeve took a swig, and thought of taking another before deciding that some degree of sobriety was in order to counterbalance the oddity of the night.
The bird didn’t seem interested in drinking either.
Maeve dropped her head into her hands, and scraped her hair back into a knot. When she sat up again, Sweeney was pulling on his pants. “I am sorry about before. Stress makes me less capable of interacting with people.”
Maeve laughed under her breath. “I can relate.”
Brian walked back. “Oh, good. You’re, ah, dressed again. Have you two figured out what’s going on?”
“I am under a curse,” Sweeney said. “And I think Maeve can paint me free of it. There is some kind of power in her work, something that I would call magic. I’d like to commission a painting from her to see if this is possible.”
“That’s—” Maeve bit down hard on the next word.
“Mad? Impossible?” Sweeney met her eyes. “So am I.”
“I’m not magic,” Maeve said.
“That may be. After all this time and change, I am not a bird, though I sometimes have the shape of one. Magic reshapes truth.”
Maeve could see the bird in the lines of the man, in the way he held his weight, in the shape of the almost-wings the air made space for.
She could see the impossibility, too, of what was asked.
“Please,” said Sweeney. “Try.”
“I’ll need you,” Maeve said, “to pose for me.”
“This has got to be the weirdest contract I have ever negotiated.” “Brian. You negotiated with a guy who had been a bird for a significant part of the evening. Even if it had been straight up sign here boilerplate, it still would have been the weirdest contract you ever negotiated.”
“True.”
“I’m surprised he didn’t ask for a deadline.” Maeve picked up one of the white feathers from the floor, ran it through her fingers. “Some way of marking whether this will work or not, rather than just waiting to find out.”
“You say whether like you genuinely believe it’s a possibility, Maeve.
“And yes, this has been a night of strangeness, but magic is not what happens at the end. The way this ends is that you’re going to wind up painting a very nice picture for a guy who is, I don’t know how, sometimes a bird, and he is still going to be sometimes a bird after it is signed and framed, and once it is, we will never speak of this again because it is just too weird.
“You’re good, Maeve. But you’re not a magician. So stop worrying about whether there’s magic in your painting, because there isn’t.”
“You said people don’t buy paintings just because of what’s on the canvas, they buy the story they think the painting tells,” Maeve said.
Brian nodded.
“Sweeney bought a story where magic might be what happens at the end. He’s bought that hope.
“And that much, I can paint.”
Maeve took a sketchbook and went back to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. It seemed like the right place to start, even if
she didn’t put the church itself into her painting. Full circle, somehow, to try and end the transformation in the same place she had first witnessed it.
Spring had come early, the buds on the trees beginning to limn the branches with a haze of green. The crocuses unfurled their purples in among the feet of the trees, and an occasional bold daffodil waved yellow.
And this was transformation, too, Maeve thought. More regular, less astonishing than a man suddenly enfeathered, but change all the same.
Maeve sat beneath a branch of birdsong, and cleared her mind of the magic she had been asked to make. If the bird—if Sweeney was correct, it would be there anyway.
She opened her sketchbook, and began to draw.
Sweeney walked the streets of his city. It wasn’t often that he wandered on foot, preferring to save his peregrinations for when he wore wings. But tonight, he did not want to be above the grease and char scents of food cooking on sidewalk carts, of the crunch of shattered glass beneath his shoes.