#79 The Clinic

by Mirian Bethancourt

The room was filled with tables on which a variety of body parts were displayed.

A student sitting at one, was hard at work when the door opened and the bearded professor, Lopo, approached.

“Well, that does it,” he said. “Holes instead of eyes, Jerome? What happened to the eyeballs? Did you lose them in a bet?”

Lopo chuckled, while Jerome made a face, said nothing.

The old master continued through the room, pausing when his eye caught something of interest that a student was doing.

When he finally reached his last table for the day, he saw a young woman holding a skull, turning it and shaking her head.

“There’s no beauty in this. With all respect, sir, I would rather paint a flower, even a dead one,” she said.

“Of course. Clearly there is beauty in a flower.”

“To find beauty in the skull, you must look at it differently—not as it is, but the way it could be. That’s imagination.”

He then fiddled inside a deep pocket of his long white coat, brought out an eraser and rubbed off a top portion of the skull image the student had drawn.

In the hole that was left he drew the stem of a sunflower and an enormous blossom on top of it.

“There,” he said, taking a step back to admire his work.

“Welcome to Life Class, 101.”

1 comment:

Sam Knight said...

I really like what this is saying, but I had a hard time with what they were doing, especially at first. I thought forensics, maybe? By the end I was thinking Art, but I am still not positive.