Louise is Color

by Karen Walker

“Breasts, if you please,” Paul says to Louise.

He adjusts his mistress of a camera and she, on the chaise, her jewelled bodice. In a corner of the studio, an apprentice shifts on a stool.

“Don’t look at me. Out the window, mademoiselle.”

His garden is green and the day sunny. Too bright for a girl who lives in a dim attic at the top of steep stairs. On what little he pays, it is all she can afford and buy clothes in gold and scarlet and emerald, too.

Paul photographs color now. He does not want funeral black or her virginal white, no shades of grey or sepia from the tintype life of a hungry model.

The apprentice—he winks at Louise when Paul’s back is turned—once explained how her color is captured.

“A glass plate is varnished,” the boy said to Louise.

She nodded. When Paul pushed her chin this way or that, his hands were strangely sticky.

“Then covered in colored grains of potato starch.”

Potato! Louise laughed.

In an important voice, as if he had mastered the technique, the boy told her about rolling the plate with weights, about applying a silvery substance to capture the light of her beauty.

What a tedious process. Louise resumed a flat model’s face and did not reward the boy with a blush or a kiss.

Louise closes her eyes. Paul stands over the chaise. He fingers the long bead necklace, tightens it around her neck. No, no. Not pleasing. He loosens the strand and lays it between her breasts, his touch the cold tickle of a fly. One buzzes against the window.

The master sighs in Louise’s face and his breath, sour like chemicals, disturbs the froth of ginger curls. With thumb and forefinger, he arranges them in a frame around her pale face.

When he thrusts a hand under her, to where the cold satin is warm, Louise arches her back. He wants her sleeved arm, and she releases. It drops heavily across her body like the lover the boy could become.

Paul returns to his mechanical madam and inserts a glass plate, opens the shutter and stares at the magic of Louise’s image.

In a corner of the studio, the apprentice bites his lip to a passionate red. His soft moan disturbs the silence.

“Quiet,” Paul shouts at him. And at her: “Be still.”

About the author

Karen writes in a basement. Her words are in or forthcoming in FlashBack Fiction, Scapegoat Review, Reflex Fiction, Funny Pearls, Sundial Magazine, Briefly Zine, The Ekphrastic Review, Versification, and others. She/her. @MeKawalker883.

About the illustration

The illustration is an autochrome of a woman posing with bare breasts, autochrome on paper, by Paul Bergon, ca. 1910. In the collection of the French Photography Society. © French Photography Society - All rights reserved. Via https://sfp.asso.fr/.