{"id":5552,"date":"2022-09-10T12:20:58","date_gmt":"2022-09-10T12:20:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=5552"},"modified":"2022-09-27T12:25:36","modified_gmt":"2022-09-27T12:25:36","slug":"colors-of-the-immortal-palette-by-caroline-m-yoachim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=5552","title":{"rendered":"Colors of the Immortal Palette by Caroline M. Yoachim"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Colors of the Immortal Palette<\/em><\/strong> by Caroline M. Yoachim (Uncanny<\/em> March-April 2021)1<\/sup> is set in Paris in the time of Manet and Monet (the mid- to late-1800s, I guess), and opens with a Japanese woman called Mariko posing for an unnamed immortal artist (who is also referred to as a \u201cvampire\u201d at points in the story, although he takes life energy from others rather than their blood).
Then, at the end of the session:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m about to give him up as hopeless when he turns to look at me. I\u2019m lost in the darkness of his eyes, drowning in the intensity of his attention. I can barely breathe, but I repeat my invitation, \u201cI could show you other poses.\u201d
\u201cYes.\u201d He sweeps me into an embrace that is strong and cold. White. He is snow and I am determined to melt it.
The sex builds slowly, deliberately, like paint layered on a canvas in broad strokes\u2014tentative at first as we find our way to a shared vision, then faster with a furious intensity and passion.
After, when other artists might hold me and drift off to sleep, he dissipates into a white mist that swirls in restless circles around the room, chilling me down to the bones when it touches my skin. His mist seeps into me and pulses through my veins for several heartbeats. I feel energized, an exhilaration more intense than watching him work, a connection closer even than our sex.
He withdraws, and I am diminished. I hadn\u2019t known until this moment what I was lacking, but now I am filled with a keen sense of my incompleteness. I long for him, for the sensation of vastness I felt when we were one.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Subsequently she becomes his lover, poses for another painting, becomes jealous of his other models, and thinks of the extra time that immortality would give her for her own art (she is a painter too). Later, she convinces him to make her immortal, a process leaves him unable to take any form but mist for over a year.
The rest of the story concerns her subsequent life and development as an artist, and telescopes in time from the point she paints another model called Victorine (which gives Mariko a new found awareness of the woman\u2019s mortality) to (spoiler) her final painting, a self-portrait that will change with time, and which is painted after she learns that her jaded benefactor has dissipated into mist, never to recohere.
There are various other significant events for Mariko during this period: she gets married, achieves artistic success, learns of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (the birthplace of her mother), and, in one of the pivotal passages of the piece, receives a telegram in 1927 informing her of Victorine\u2019s death:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The world has been a week without her in it, but her death did not become a truth for me until the telegram arrived. She is the last. Even Monet has ceased his endless paintings of water lilies, having passed in December. I\u2019ve not seen either of them for decades, but tonight I feel the loss as keenly as if I\u2019d sat with them yesterday, all of us gathered at the Caf\u00e9 Guerbois, Victorine and I engaging the men in passionate discussions on the purpose of art, the role of the model, and whether critical outrage was an attack on the honor of the painter, this last being a topic that always irritated Manet.
They were my cohort\u2014\u00c9douard, \u00c9mile, Claude, Paul and Camille, and of course Victorine. I met them not knowing that I would outlive them, and without having the distance that knowledge brings. My immortal artist was right\u2014I don\u2019t get quite so close to mortals now, I no longer see myself as one of them. But I\u2019m accustomed to navigating a world I do not feel a part of, a place where I am unlike all the others. This has always been my truth.
[. . .]
I have outlived my friends, my colleagues, and for what? All my paintings combined have not garnered the renown of Olympia<\/em> or Impression, Sunrise<\/em>. I am best known as the model from Woman, Reclining (Mari)<\/em>, and maybe my lack of success is not\u2014as I have always told myself\u2014because I am a woman and an outsider, but because I am lacking in talent.
Even being immortal, which should be simple enough, is a task that I am failing for I cannot bear the thought of stealing time from mortals whose lives are already so fleeting. I take just enough here and there from models\u2014always with their consent\u2014to maintain a human form, but if I cannot create beauty, cannot leave my mark on the world of art, their time is wasted, and nothing is so precious as time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I liked this piece well enough but there isn\u2019t much here apart from an extended historical slice of life, the angst of immortals, and talk about artists and painting. This may not be to everyone\u2019s taste.
*** (Good). 12,800 words.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Colors of the Immortal Palette by Caroline M. Yoachim (Uncanny March-April 2021)1 is set in Paris in the time of Manet and Monet (the mid- to late-1800s, I guess), and opens with a Japanese woman called Mariko posing for an unnamed immortal artist (who is also referred to as a \u201cvampire\u201d at points in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1292],"tags":[50,24,1294,1293,1296,774,7,1295,367,754],"class_list":["post-5552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-caroline-m-yoachim","tag-50","tag-3-2","tag-art","tag-caroline-m-yoachim","tag-historical","tag-immortals","tag-novelette","tag-painting","tag-uncanny","tag-vampires"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5552"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5552\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5707,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5552\/revisions\/5707"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}