“The Muse” (2025)

A Flemish woman tried to kidnap me, and clearly it was her first time, so I decided to help her, because kidnapping is a male-dominated industry.

She brought me back to her house, where she’d made up a bed for me and put a flimsy lock on the door. I was supposed to be her model. I got dressed up and undressed, and sitting under the raw lights with my makeup slowly melting, I realized two things: she wasn’t a very good photographer, and these were pictures for others to enjoy. Halfway through I asked to see a few, and I looked like I had a fever. But then she looked at me with shining eyes and told me that I was going to be her muse. And that’s when I started posing.

From that point on, I got to do my own makeup, and then I practiced doing the lighting too. The images started to look more like the fantasy she wanted to portray. She sold more pictures. Some of them have my signature. I put my real name on them.

I was older than she wanted. She shaved my face every day, closer and closer, to the point of little dots of blood. She didn’t like my stomach either. My post-pubertarian body with its wear and tear affected the fantasy we were trying to enact. To console her over the fact that I was human, I would suck in my gut a little and pose a little more daring. She would clap her little fat hands and roll up the film.

We got married for tax purposes, and we spent the wedding night installing a new, bigger lock. It was my idea, I had figured out how to pick the old one ages ago. We were very drunk and very happy, grinding our teeth so hard we could hear it.

When she died, I undressed her and arranged her body on the velvet couch. I set up the lighting, I blushed her cheeks rosy, and I did a tasteful series of Polaroids. Then I took the key from her pocket, left the pictures on the table, and exited into the Belgian autumn.