I was tempted to call it off. I’d been between archives among pipes and cabinets all day. Whilst there was a refreshing, rhythmic order to letters divided up, it was so nice to be out, veins still dilated against my wrists. The cafés were both languorous and electric, all the colours of the evening streets with the heat falling off them gradually.

Maybe it was the thought of his peculiar glasses, or maybe I was missing the sea, the desire to be faced with something semi-crystalline. But I ran.

I cut sandal portraits into my feet. Buildings oscillated and the dress twisted into unprecedented shapes.

“Pre-Raphaelites”, he texted.

Art student. 6ft 2. Lover of colour and wanders. Lover. 

There were lots of art students in the Pre-Raphaelites. I looked around, remembering the eyes. What a prat I’d make of myself if I marched over and tapped the wrong one.

As it happens, he was easy to recognise. He had a penchant for tweed: it crept into most of his photos, and now he was thoroughly tweeded, even his eyes in that light seemed to have a bit of tweed about them. Perhaps he painted this way alone in his studio flat, fully suited.

I didn’t shake his hand. He only half-turned from Sibylla Delphica.

“You know, Burne-Jones has a monopoly on orange” he said, “you can’t quite look away.”

I looked. The priestess did not look back. One eye was focused in space, like it wanted to swivel round her head, fixing something back.

“Well     that’s     nice. I like the          colours.”

I braced for him to laugh at my glaring lack of knowledge, or the inability to talk about it as if I knew.

Instead, he said “I know this might seem weird since I hardly know you—”

Here was the proposition…

“—I wondered if I could photograph you?”

“What?”

“I’m doing a project about digitisation. It shows how art crosses into reality and is filtered back out in subsequent eras. So, in Burne-Jones’ Sibylla, look at the laurel, what is she seeing?”

“Well”, I started, ready to debate the positing of what was real and what wasn’t—

“It’s prophecy, but also her reflection. I could put you here, holding your phone. People won’t know if you’re taking a selfie or a picture of me photographing you. Meta! Also, you’re wearing orange. And you’re pretty, that’s why I swiped right.” Still fiddling with the camera. “Oh, and I’ll write ‘Flame’ on you.”

“I don’t know much about art… but it seems that there’s a lot you could exploit to do with gender. Have you read Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema? She follows Springer’s idea that ‘violence substitutes for sexual release’, epistemically for detached viewers and physically for the characters.”

Still flicking. “Yeah, I guess. Not really the aim of my project though. Will you do it?”

*

I was covered in Flame. I felt him writing it. The heat of the evening framed behind me. The heat of Flame in my eyes. Flash was not supposed to be used.

People were watching. I took picture after picture and he took picture after picture and I felt excited and then angry at myself and then angry at myself for being angry. All the time was Flame in capitals and orange.

“This is fantastic.” He looked up. He really was incredibly beautiful. Sculpted.

“Do you fancy going for a drink? Or, you could come back to mine. I could show you more of my portfolio.”

I felt he’d already used me up, but not in the way I’d expected (planned? wanted?) Rather than highlight the levels of representational violence, the way he’d present the selfie would perpetuate it. People with the proclivity to judge would comment…

It was then I noticed a small plaque commemorating the Suffragettes who, in 1913, had smashed the painting, to protest objectification. Someone in a hat and leather gloves stared at me, dressed for court. The caption read:

Annie Briggs. Lillian Forrester. Evelyn Manesta.

He was still wittering, but his face shifted. I was already running back, room after room, thinking of the poem.

Since she was brought here

Sibylla looks back more often than forwards

watching Apollo through the laurel—

Daphne’s skin snags, a peeling mesh of nerves,

muscles become bone-tight, spittle

sticks the lips into another line by which to tell her age—

Sibylla is called back by hammers

that puncture the womb.  Doubling

up, she catches Annie, whose eyes englobe

                  I only meant to smash the glass…

She sees her wooden, photographed

forcibly entered—

Through the crack, Sibylla, much dispersed

sheds laurel into flame

The night guard swears he saw

her eyes lock his, the lip twitch