THE PORTRAIT OF A DREAM - A FAIRY TALE BY MICHAEL SORBELLO

Silvano painted a portrait of the woman that delightfully haunted his dreams. A sickly blend of ravenous colors slithered across the empty white canvas, contaminating every little recess it managed to touch with a ghostly perfection. It was like watching a lethal cancer infest its human host in real time, its black poison spreading through every vein and tainting the body with its blasphemous darkness.

"Never has there been a woman so infectiously beautiful," Silvano admired his own creation with maniacal glee.

The portrait of the phantasmal woman was perfect. She was a cadaverous beauty with skin pallid enough to make a corpse blush. Streams of stygian locks sprouted from her scalp like a storm of raven feathers and encapsulated her haunting features. While Silvano admired her, she gazed back at him with cold, dead eyes and it set his heart on fire.

Silvano was what many would consider to be a tortured artist, a man that fell deeply in love with things that most would find hideous and repulsive. He was able to find the unique and forbidden beauty in horror and misery. He found love in rejected and outcasted creatures.

Silvano loved the obscure and the macabre, he found women to be no exception to this rule. In the permanent and melancholy state of death, Silvano found a woman to be at her most captivating peak of loveliness. They were untouched and unbothered by the trivial dramas and unpleasantries that life always threw at beautiful girls. They were as pure in death as they were when they were born. They were completely untainted by malice and cruelty.

Despite Silvano's strange obsession with dead girls, he still expressed the desire for heartfelt contact. The act of something as taboo as necrophilia never crossed his mind, heavens no. His obsession was a strange one, but he wasn't a monster. He was a romantic at heart, and that was something he could never escape no matter how many times he tried.

Silvano took up the brush in hopes of achieving the impossible. To create a beautiful dead girl that wasn't truly dead was his life's goal. He wanted a living dead girl, a cadaverous angel that he could hold in his arms and cherish forever. Of course, something of that sort was only possible in the dreams he so desperately wanted to become real. The inability to achieve the impossible burdened Silvano with unquenchable temptation.

"My darling that broods over my mind at every hour of the day, what would it take for me to win your love as you have won mine?" Silvano brushed his hand against the soft, cold canvas that he had poured his heart and soul into, only to be met with a dreadfully painful silence from the beautiful dead girl.

"You break my heart," Silvano said bitterly. "Why did I have to fall in love with a woman that could never be real?"

Silvano paced around the art gallery for quite some time, thinking of ways in which he could win the imaginary woman's affection. There would never be an answer, of course. The woman in the portrait could not speak, she could not feel, she could never be real. Silvano's love could never be returned.

"That's it," Silvano rubbed his palms together as if he had hatched a brilliant plan. "If my darling can only exist in my dreams, then the only thing left for me to do is to become a dream myself!"

Driven wild with lust, Silvano cut his stomach open without hesitation and began to paint a picture of himself within the portrait of the woman he loved using his own blood as ink. The blood trickled across the canvas, shaping itself into the form of the artist that wielded the brush with such fierce and unstoppable passion. With the final stroke of his brush, Silvano's body had given out on him, but the picture he had painted of himself with his own blood remained untarnished within the portrait of his true love.

Silvano couldn't be together with his lover in reality, but in that hauntingly beautiful canvas he had painted with the essence of what remained of his life, they would remain side by side for all eternity. Silvano had achieved true perfection, something every other artist in the world could only dream of. What Silvano had brought to life with his own flesh and blood was the portrait of a dream, the portrait of an artist and his most beloved creation together in harmony until the end of time. 

Within the portrait, Silvano and his cadaverous angel held each other in an eternal embrace.

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Moral of the story?

Don't let your harmless passions and hobbies become unhealthy obsessions or you'll drive yourself mad.