The machine had taken my last quarter. It was a Canadian quarter, but I thought I could trick it into giving up E5’s snack pack crackers sandwiched with cheese product. The machine was smarter.

It was only when I began to beat on the thing, slapping its sides, jostling it, and kicking at it with a muddy boot that I heard chuckling behind me.

“You hungry?”

And that was how it started.

She led me to her studio, which was large and industrial and what I imagined a successful artist’s studio would look like, and she fed me baked brie cut into wedges and drizzled with honey. Candied walnuts. Grapes that popped between my teeth. Spoonfuls of marmalade with freshly baked sourdough. Red wine thick as ichor.

The proposition was straightforward. It seemed easy, a good deal.

She laid me out on a chaise heaped with velvet throw pillows and faux furs, bared me to the world, and explained, “My aim is to portray women in their most satisfied state.”

I wasn’t accustomed to lying still for so long. I got a cramp, and when I grimaced and wriggled, she told me softly to stay unmoving if I could. She would be done soon.

She wasn’t.

“I want you to taste your fingers. Try to get the last of the honey.”

They only tasted like fingers, but I held my arms aloft, hand relaxed against my mouth, which opened to it. After some time, I began to shake.

She slapped her brush down and poked her face out from behind the easel and smiled.

“Can you come back tomorrow? I’m making lasagna.”

I could indeed. I had to work, but from the number she volleyed at me earlier, this gig paid better.

Before I left, dressed again, and stretching out the soreness, she made one more request.

“Spit for me?” She held out her palette, swirled with a dozen hues in various stages of drying. Hues that, in part, were recreating my form.

I stuttered, the whats and whys of shock coming to my mouth.

“It aids the process,” she explained.

I shrugged and asked for twenty dollars, and without pause, she pulled it from her pocket with a paint-splattered hand and gave it over easily.

I gathered all the moisture from my cheeks into a wad on my tongue and hocked it down onto the center of the palette. Little bubbles popped across the surface, the slime of the saliva sliding across to meet the oil of the paint.

She gazed at me like I had just given her a bouquet of a dozen red roses.

#

I searched The Painter that night.

She had been featured in galleries in Berlin, Miami, Prague, Mexico City, and Chicago. She was profiled in one of those “30 Under 30” lists. Critics labeled her work “genius,” “ground-breaking,” and “reverential.”

I couldn’t speak for her work, but I found the woman herself to be a bit odd, a dedicated worker, and a decent cook. Maybe being the centerpiece of her current series would increase my reverence.

The cash she had given me was spread out across my bed, and I counted it for the third time that night. Despite the nudity, it was still a better job than retail.

#

The next session, I was not lying down. I was slumped cross-legged on the chaise with my belly full on two fist-sized corner pieces of lasagna. The smell of Italian sausage and tomato sauce burbled to my lips in intermittent silent burps.

She made it with béchamel sauce and about thirty layers. All from scratch, she had assured me. Her own recipe.

It would have been worse to sit crisscross applesauce in my birthday suit had it not been so pleasantly warm in the studio and had I not been so full that I was in danger of napping on the job.

The Painter played Björk and then Kate Bush and then Swiss synth-yodeling from a Bluetooth speaker that sat on a rickety stool beside her easel. She worked without breaks for many hours, absorbed by the canvas before her, daubing her brush, mixing a shade, glancing at me and then going back to the canvas. Occasionally, she would give instructions.

“Give over to the slouching.”

“Let your belly extend to its limits.”

“Let your breasts rest atop your stomach. You are full. You are satisfied.”

“Relax your face. No more pinched brow.”

Several hours later, I had a crick in my back and needed desperately to use the restroom.

My bladder had also been extended to its limits. Relieved, I dressed while she cleaned her brushes.

I asked to see the progress, but she smiled and shook her head.

“Not until I’ve finished the series. It won’t make sense to you right now.”

When I made to leave, she folded a wad of bills into my hand.

“Tomorrow,” she said, searching my face for some answer to a question she hadn’t asked.

“I will make a summer salad with berries and sunflower seeds, and you will have braised duck.”

And so, it went.

She needed me nearly every day. The retail job was a wisp of smoke in my memory. I missed a few classes, got surly emails from professors and then the registrar’s office, to which I did not reply. Texts and calls from friends, I returned in spurts. It’s hard to be available as a living statue.

The Painter made me coq au vin, brandy-soaked pears, focaccia embedded with rosemary and cranberries, cedar plank salmon steaks with caper pesto, bibimbap with fried tofu, roasted potatoes seasoned with fresh thyme and sage, crêpes suzette with oranges caramelized until crystalline, stuffed grape leaves, pot roast with carrots and winter squash, omelets with bell peppers and onions, pork posole and jalapeño cornbread, sandwiches, pastas and pizzas, casserole and curry. The range of her cooking was endless.

She would serve me massive portions, heaped into bowls or onto plates. I wondered at her energy, how she managed the time to cook all for me and then paint into the night. I never saw her eat, and I ate all she gave me.

I posed lying down with my legs straight or bent. I posed sitting up, feet on the floor or knees up against my face. Arms akimbo or crossed over me. Sometimes I would stand in a wide stance, bent over with my palms flat on the chaise. Posed as such, my stomach would distend toward the floor, and my breasts hung like the udders on a prize heifer. The Painter liked that pose especially.

I would try to imagine what she painted, looking sideways towards her at the easel. I could almost feel the brushstrokes as they climbed up my limbs, across the crests of my torso, toward the apex of my legs. Imagining it felt like a caress and in giving over to the imagining of it, the echoes of my own thoughts, my ego, fell away until I could barely feel what it was to be standing in the room. Sometimes, I didn’t mind.

And she asked little favors of me. A few drops of spit, a prick of my finger for a bead of blood, or some such request. One day, she held up a cup when I started to shift from foot to foot after two Hugo Spritzes. I filled it. It didn’t, after all, feel like too much to give in exchange for what she did for me.

I was able to put a dent in my student loans, got an electric scooter I could ride to the studio, and purchased a weighted blanket that I used with growing frequency. Things were looking up, and we had our routine.

#

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that.” Her laugh was a windchime. “You’re my muse. When the series is finished, you’ll have no trouble at all.”

This was her response to me after asking what I would do when she concluded our sessions. The hints of a finale had been coming for a couple of weeks, but her assurances put me at ease. She was The Painter, and my connection to her would prove helpful, and anyway, I’d be immortalized in her works.

On that day, I was standing with one leg on the ground and one on the chaise. My torso lay across my thigh and my arms hung down loose and floppy. My head dropped over my knee, so the room came to me at a tilt. I shivered.

“None of that now,” she hummed.

I told her I couldn’t keep warm lately.

“Well, we can’t have that. Maybe I should have given you some more red meat.”

She stopped painting for a moment to hike up the thermostat.

“There. Now be still. You don’t want for anything. You are satisfied.”

I blinked and stopped shivering. The air kicked on and warmth whistled from one ear through to the other.

“I’m almost finished.”

#

There was sleep, and there was the studio. When I would wake, I would drum at my stomach to hear its hollowness. Every day, the breadth of space inside me grew. I need not worry. She would fill me.

“Today’s your last day,” she rang out merrily as I entered her studio.

I dropped my bag and my clothes and couldn’t believe it.

“I can’t wait for you to see.”

She had me pose in the same way I had the first day. I was lying down with my hand pressed to my mouth, searching for the taste of honey before I realized she hadn’t fed me.

“You don’t need anymore.”

That was the end. My thoughts faded until I was only the pose. I had the vague notion of time passing, the light changing and deepening, and eventually, of course eventually, she said, “Done. Come look.”

I rose, my legs feeling unsteady beneath my weight, unsteady with the act of moving and went around to the easel.

There I was. Except I was more than I was. The Painter had made me with a million strokes into a glowing creature of soft folds and serene expression. There was no chaise and no studio, and no velvet throw pillows. There was only an immortal creature in a void who would never feel hunger nor fatigue nor ennui. No more needs. A being that had taken in all the richness of the world and had been made to glisten with it.

I stood in awe.

“You’ve been a pleasure to work with.”

She turned to me and poked her paintbrush right through my eye. The shell of my skull crumbled around the bristles.

“There you go.” And she dropped the brush, took her hands to my shoulders, and crunched away at the dried paint flakes that now made my material being.

I fell away, collapsing to the floor in a splay of colors, and all I felt:

Satisfaction.