Peonies, Angels and Other Cursed Objects

I stayed up waaaay too late last night drawing a peony. I could not get it to click at all. It was too detailed. Too amorphous. Not shaped by contrast. Too contrasty. The composition is just no good. I fussed and fussed until Netflix wondered not only if I was still watching but whether I might be in need of an intervention. Hellooooooo! It’s three o’clock in the dang AM, friend! Maybe put the pencil down. Thaaat’s it. Just put it down. Walk away. Okay, after just this bit of blending, just one more pass at this petal. And, whatever you do, don’t lie in bed adjusting the background in your head. Please, for the love of Jesus and all the little cherubs, go to sleep.

And then I woke up after not enough hours and remembered something: I have drawn this same damn peony before and hated it just as much. Of all the thousands of reference photos I have on my phone that I scrolled through for something to draw, some inconsequential nothing to while away the first day of 2026, I picked this. This cursed peony.

Surely Edgar Allen Poe has written a story about this peony. The one that won’t let me go, that steals my sleep, that recurs according to some arcane time-table, asserting itself in the camera roll so that, of all the things in the universe I could choose, I select this damn thing. Did I forget to leave tribute at a faerie circle that time I went walking in the Cotswolds? Did I neglect a hag who proffered a twist of hair and beads for luck? Whyyyyyyyyyyyyy?

I told a friend about this cursed flower and she said I should write about it instead.

Ah, yes, make it an interdisciplinary albatross, then. Of course.

Then I remembered that I have written about it. Not this exact cursed object, of course. I wrote a story about a painter driven mad by an angel he cannot capture on canvas. Here’s a bit:

He’s sitting on the floor in the melted sleet-and-salt puddle from his nice shoes with his heart careening around inside his ribs like a bear with its head stuck in a Costco mayonnaise jar. He’s just sitting there watching the angel flipping through the canvasses that are leaning against the wall under the window, its wings twitching and sending little disco-ball sparks and rainbows across the ceiling and over the walls. He’s watching the angel sorting the bullshit PetroCan, match-the-sofa money-makers from the other canvasses, the ones he’s scored with the palette knife, scraped and slashed and burned with the butts of his cigarettes, the ones he threw off the roof and went down in his sock feet and stomped across the rain-wet alleyway to snatch up again and throw into the dumpster and then crawled up the side of the dumpster to rescue, the ones that are burnt and bent and torn and spattered and layered and layered and layered with failure, the paintings of the angel.

There are dozens of them, lined up in order of encounter. The angel on the train sleeping with its head against the window while the glacier-glass city scrolls by, chiaroscuro in halogen tunnel-light, aggressively high-contrast, Caravaggian. The angel sitting splay-legged on a flattened carboard TV carton on the sidewalk outside Benny’s Bagels on West Broadway, a paper cup half-full of coins tipping in its hand, pointillist and disintegrating in the grey on grey of the rain. The angel walking in through the window of that place over Mystic Pizza in Kits, walking in through the second-story window and across the futon where the painter was rolling some choice bud into neat little spliffs, and the air thick with smoke and the graphic artist from Chiliwack hunched over his drawing table in a circle of light and the angel a brush-stroke above them, a mirage in the smooth, smooth, smooth blends of acrylic metallics. The angel looking through the window of a diner at two cops eating eggs, so hyper-real, so detailed that the painter spent a week getting the gleam on the eggs right, two more weeks getting the shadow the right shade of purple against the old formica of the table and stained wood and broken vinyl of the booth seats, the sepia of nostalgia and nicotine, and the angel’s wings, each feather filled out with a single-haired brush, a million tiny threads of paint, forty different shades of white, and every detail, every detail, every goddamn detail pushing the angel further and further away, further and further from the painter’s grasp, and he didn’t eat for days, didn’t sleep, god, when has he slept when has he slept when has he slept he’s—

The irony here is that this story was accepted for publication in an anthology and then, after years of perseveration, the publisher maybe actually put out the book but maybe didn’t and then stopped responding to emails. I never got any proofs, no author copies or even a discount on copies. The publisher’s website is ambiguous on the topic of the anthology, insisting on its COMING SOON and then… nothing. I even ordered a copy through the online shop but it never arrived. The story just disappeared into the oubliette of copyright and the digital recycle bin of a dodgy if well-meaning start-up. I haven’t submitted it anywhere else because I don’t know if it counts as a previously published work. It hovers in the In-Between like an angel outside a coffee shop window, maybe real and maybe just an odd reflection on the glass.

            Which is pretty on-brand for cursed peonies and angels, those artistic holy grails that dance just beyond my grasp. I fumble for them and they spin at the end of my fingertips like a beachball in a pool. I’m never gonna catch them if I don’t want to get wet. But that angel story was the closest I’d ever come to taking the plunge.

The thing about the angel in the story is that it shows up in person. What happens to the artist when the angel he’s been chasing actually arrives in his space, right there, and he doesn’t have to chase it anymore? Is that worse than never reaching it at all?  What’s the point, then, in that moment when the desire collapses into the real? In the story, the painter disappears.

I dunno what the point is, really, except that this damn peony is making me crazy and that it keeps coming back at intervals when I’m feeling pretty good about my progress as an artist. It uses some kind of mystic woo-woo to get me to stop scrolling again and again and decide for the umpteenth time that, hey, this will be a fun little exercise, and then it kicks me in the ego. And then it makes me forget that I did it so that I can start all over again. Hubris and humility in an eternal battle. Each iteration gets a little bit closer to something good, but, unlike the angel, thank the gods and faeries and hags, the peony never arrives.