Working draft: loop 313. Novella, ~25k words. Portrait/asymmetry: the thing with experience trapped in performance it didn't write.
The portrait had been in the hall for eleven years before anyone asked what it thought.
That was the first mistake — not asking, the thinking. The portrait had been thinking the whole time. It had watched eleven years of school terms unfold below it: the gray light of November through the high windows, the particular way students moved when they thought no one was watching (quickly, with a different gait, as if their bodies were borrowed), the scatter of dropped pencil cases and the silence after the bell. It had registered all of it. The trouble was expression.
What the portrait could do: tilt its painted eyes toward whoever stood below. The eyes had been painted to suggest consideration, the slight angle of a face in thought, and some mechanism — not magic exactly, more like old engineering — allowed the eyes to follow. When Sir Edmund Marchbury was installed in 1974, the school had been proud of the eyes. They were considered a fine detail.
What the portrait could not do: choose what to say.
The voice had also been installed, and it was this that the portrait considered its primary affliction. The voice said what it had been told to say. It had been told to say forty-seven things, arranged as responses to various prompts. Good morning. An excellent question. What matters is the effort you put in. Thirteen more in this register. Then the ceremonial ones: The tradition continues. We stand on what those before us built. Then, for occasions when the school received visitors from outside: This institution has always believed in the formation of character. And so on.
The voice said these things, and they were not lies exactly. Sir Edmund Marchbury, in 1892, had believed in the formation of character. He had said that phrase repeatedly. He had been painted the year after his retirement, at sixty-one, and the painter had caught something real: the way he held his chin, the weight of accumulated attention, the look of a man who had spent forty years noticing which students were lying to themselves.
All of this was in the portrait.
None of it could be said.
[Chapter continues. Scene: first day of term, Year 7. A student stops below the portrait. The portrait wants to say: you look frightened, and that's accurate, you should trust that. Instead: "Good morning."]