THE LAST MASTERPIECE

The tavern breathed like an old beast—thick air, warm with the ghosts of a hundred dead conversations, the low murmur of men who had given up on everything except drinking. The candlelight barely touched the dark corners, flickering, weak, as if afraid of what it might reveal.

Two men sat at a corner table, their glasses nearly empty, the weight of the night settling over them like damp wool.

One of them, Nikolai, traced the rim of his glass, the other, Andrei, exhaled smoke from a cigarette he barely tasted.

They had spoken of many things already—of debts, of women, of the quiet horror of waking up and realizing the best parts of life had already passed them by. And then, Nikolai leaned forward, eyes shadowed beneath his brow.

“You ever hear about the artist who lost everything?”

Andrei smirked. “Sounds like every artist.”

Nikolai shook his head. “No. This one… this one really lost it all.”

Andrei swirled the liquid in his glass, watching it catch the light. “Alright. I’m listening.”

---

He was a painter once. The kind who thought his hands could carve something holy out of nothing. Who believed he was destined for greatness. The fools always do.

And for a while, he had everything. A wife. A home. A name that, if not well-known, at least carried whispers in the right circles.

But art is a cruel god. It demands everything and gives nothing back. The world did not love him the way he thought it should. The galleries were indifferent, the critics cold, and slowly, the cracks began to form. First, the debts. Then the disappointment. Then the doubt.

And, as always, then came the ruin.

The wife was the first to go, in the way that women always leave before they actually walk out the door. She lingered, out of duty, out of nostalgia, out of habit. But love, real love, had long since rotted between them.

She found comfort elsewhere. In a man who came in the quiet hours, who whispered things in the dark, who left before the sun could name him.

A man who, every time he was inside her, looked at the paintings on the walls.

“I knew him,” Nikolai said, his voice low, unreadable. “Not personally. But I knew his work. Every brushstroke, every violent, desperate smear of color.”

Andrei tilted his head, intrigued. “How?”

Nikolai exhaled through his nose, a faint smirk curving his lips.

“Because I spent years fucking his wife in front of them.”

Andrei let out a short, breathless laugh, the kind that wasn’t really laughter at all. “Jesus, man.”

Nikolai leaned back, taking a slow sip of his drink.

“She wasn’t faithful. Neither was I. But those paintings… they were something else. Every time I was with her, I’d look at them. I could see it—the madness, the obsession, the way he was clawing at something just beyond his reach. The last bits of his soul, bleeding onto canvas. He didn’t paint pictures. He painted his own slow death.”

Andrei shook his head. “You ever meet him?”

“No.” Nikolai set his glass down. “Only saw him once. The morning after. He was in the kitchen, drinking coffee like a man who had long since stopped tasting it. His hands shook. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a decade.”

Andrei exhaled smoke. “Did he know?”

“Of course.”

There was a silence then, thick and heavy, stretching between them like a noose.

Andrei broke it first. “What happened to him?”

Nikolai’s fingers tapped against the glass, slow, methodical. “He lost the fight.”

“Suicide?”

“Worse.”

---

The artist did not kill himself. No. That would have been too easy.

Instead, he kept painting. Even as his body failed, even as his hands trembled, even as his mind turned against him. He painted like a man clawing at the walls of his own grave.

And the sickness grew. Not one the doctors could name, but something deeper, older. He aged in fast-forward, like he had been cursed. In five years, he became an old man. His wife was gone, the debts swallowed him whole, and even his art—the only thing that had ever made him feel real—became meaningless.

And then, one day, he stopped.

Not just painting.

Living.

He vanished. Some said he fled the city. Some said he withered away in his studio, forgotten before he was even dead.

But Nikolai… Nikolai knew the truth.

Because months later, a package arrived at his door. No sender. No note.

Just a painting.

A masterpiece. The last one.

And in it, Nikolai saw something that made his stomach turn to ice.

It was a painting of himself.

Him and the artist’s wife, frozen in a moment of pleasure, of betrayal, of something primal and raw.

But the face in the painting… it was twisted. Wrong. As if something had looked through Nikolai’s skin and painted what it saw underneath.

Andrei stared at him, silent. Then, finally, he spoke. “You still have it?”