“Eyes are the Windows of a (fraudulent) Soul”

He was a fraud! While his wife did all the work, he took the credit.

While he went out to play with other women, she was locked away for fourteen hours a day to making their living.

He posed for photographs and squandered away the millions his wife made.

The Big Eyes of sad, melancholy children, stared back at Margaret for she was them and they were her. But the subservient Margaret kept quiet.

Until she didn’t.

She divorced Walter in 1965 and finally, in 1970 she told the truth. “I’m the artist of these paintings.”

After the lawsuit, “poor” Walter filed for bankruptcy and faded into his original, untalented self.

To read more about Margaret and Walter Keane, read here.

 

Daily prompt: Fraud

 

Tick forward

Papa’s hands, so stiff and cold I could feel my guilt when I touched them.

I could not go with him beneath our Texas soil. Instead, I had to swallow the bitter taste of a life void of his teachings and wisdom.

Hands of a clock that have ticked forward four years.

Emil. Funny how knowing a man since childhood, before the development of my breasts or his facial hair, could lead us in a direction of … What is the word exactly? Love seems too strong yet Lust seems tawdry. What I do know is that Emil Eckhardt is slowing squeezing my heart and expanding it at the same time. Leaving him, even for three months, seems unfathomable to me. How do I go about asking him to help me?

Hands. My own forming into fists, as I figuratively spit on the transplanted shoes of the man who swindled his way into my family and tries to take Papa’s place.

A change of course is overdue.

Excerpt from Naked, She Lies, a novel by C. Dennis-Willingham

 

Lust- daily word prompt

A last laugh

 

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photo credit

 

 

A last laugh

a traitor

Deceitful, evil

 

An hourglass,

Beautifully molded

Perfect, the glass

 

Coarse grains of sand

now collected

the pediment rests.

 

A finality of time,

hemorrhaged out

like a single bullet creating two holes

A slashing of both wrists.

 

(A poem I wrote for one of my characters)