Circe in Green, 1968 (Oil on Canvas)

Olivia did not intend to fall in love with the painting, certainly not after all the men it killed. But as a criminally underpaid graduate student enrolled in New York City’s finest art conservator program, she could not deny the attraction of an appreciable paycheck and a portfolio boost that left her peers salivating. After all, nothing would solidify her future prospects like being the conservator of the fabled Circe in Green.

Coveted by the art world, the 60x30-inch portrait of the alluring enchantress—whose silken hair shone like fire against her marble skin and whose golden irises swirled toward her pupils like the whirlpool of Charybdis—had yet to see a showroom. In all its years, it hadn’t even touched the velvet lining of its engraved bronze frame. Due to the succession of bodies left in its wake, Circe in Green created a mythology all its own as it sat, decade after decade, awaiting its debut.

Some believe Circe herself created the painting as a means of turning men into swine for centuries to come, but Olivia knew better. She spent countless nights poring over every scrap of documentation on the piece, including X-ray examinations and paint analyses conducted to verify the painter’s 1968 designation scrawled on the canvas’s wooden stretcher bar—a far cry from the Bronze Age of Homer’s The Odyssey.

While her intent was to impress Rodger, the gala’s curator, through demystification, Olivia was startled to learn from her research that the lore of devastated men associated with the portrait was far from mythical. She read that the painter—identity unknown but whose brushwork and palette choice birthed theories involving some of the world’s most distinguished modern artists—habitually wrote a friend describing the tireless efforts surrounding his self-proclaimed magnum opus. When weeks went by between letters, the friend visited the painter’s apartment only to find Caravaggio’s Narcissus actualized. Slumped against the portrait, withered to the bone and decaying against the still-tacky paint, the painter’s vacant eyes remained transfixed on the perfection he created.

Though devastated as the friend was by this discovery, he could not let the painter’s dying work perish with him. He offered the piece to a museum in France on the condition that its conservators restore the damage incurred by decomposition. And so, the trail of dead conservators and curators began, the painting bouncing between countries and states until, at last, Circe in Green arrived in New York City.

Olivia couldn’t help staring at Circe’s supple cheeks and pursed lips as she dabbed paint onto her paintbrush—standing before the famed painting was like standing before the actual goddess. The luxurious evergreen robe draped across Circe’s perfect form was a thing of envy, and Circe herself possessed a quality so captivating, it was impossible to look away. Mere centimeters from the enchantress, her round face nearly double the size of Olivia’s, the young conservator understood why the legend was born. When given the choice between taking responsibility for his actions or blaming a woman for her looks, what man wouldn’t opt for the latter?

Her gaze trailed from Circe’s honey eyes to her porcelain neck, where a hideous, mottled scar ripped across her flesh and tore into her flowing, emerald robe. At the job offer meeting, Rodger informed her that the last owners of Circe in Green, Mr. and Mrs. Cavendish of New Hampshire, were to blame for the bubbling, charred disfigurement that ate away the middle third of the portrait.

By Mrs. Cavendish’s sister’s account, the night before the incident, Mrs. Cavendish finally had enough of her husband’s obsession with the painting. Purchased for forty million dollars, the artwork was to be displayed in their gala later that month, but Mr. Cavendish suddenly refused. He would stand before the painting for hours on end, declining to showcase it and neglecting his work in the process. Mrs. Cavendish told her sister she’d rather torch forty million than lose another penny on Mr. Cavendish’s lunacy. Just as threatened, she went to the studio housing Circe in Green, a single matchstick in hand, and lit the painting on fire before her husband’s eyes.

His first priority was to save the painting—which he accomplished by smothering the flames with his suit jacket. His second priority was to kill his wife—which he accomplished with his hands while his jacket still smoldered on the floor.

When Rodger finished relaying the tragedy to Olivia, she had only two questions: Why did he want this painting, and why did he want her, out of all the skilled hands in New York, to restore it?

His answers were simple. The painting’s notoriety skyrocketed with the latest misfortune—profits from something like that were more than enough incentive to purchase it. However, a painting this prepossessing couldn’t be left marred with such an ugly blemish; it needed another restoration, and an expedient one at that, lest ticket buyers lose interest and media outlets swarm to new calamities. Considering every man who’d laid eyes on it was driven mad, Rodger figured it was time a woman got her hands on the painting instead.

Olivia, nose nearly brushing the collar of Circe’s robe for the better part of three days, could not have agreed more. She wanted her hands on this painting more than her lungs wanted oxygen. The closer she stood, the closer she felt to the goddess, who—at times during their late nights together—Olivia swore whispered out from the painting, her voice as delicious as lotus fruits and as mesmerizing as siren songs. When Olivia breathed in, it wasn’t oil paint she smelled, but the sappy trees and sandy beaches of Aeaea. Each brush stroke on the canvas was like a love letter shared in the dark, the quiet studio space of the empty gala the keeper of their secrets.

As midnight bled into one, two, then three on the final night of her restoration, Olivia wondered how much of the portrait was original and how much was the work of conservators before her. Circe in Green had traded lovers over two dozen times since its creation, each romance ending in turmoil for the living and a new deformity for the painting. With so many blemishes rectified, at what point did the painting become a recreation of itself? Was it like the ship of Theseus, somehow entirely itself without retaining a single remnant of its origins?

With so much time passed, and with Olivia’s zealous hands healing the goddess one brush stroke at a time, correcting—no, enhancing—her beauty, did Circe in Green ever truly belong to the painter? To the curators? To Rodger? Or did it always belong to Olivia, who stripped away the old pieces to make something new?

Despite all the work Olivia did to Circe in Green—despite all the elegance Olivia returned to her skin and garments—the crowd would not care. The crowd would shove its grimy money through the ticket window, not to bask in the glory of Circe’s celestial eyes and wildfire hair, not to love her the way she deserved, but to gawk at her like a caged animal and gossip about the horrors that transpired at her hands. So-called patrons would never understand the unparalleled divinity in Circe’s sumptuous robe or rosy cheeks; they would only see a legend of death and destruction.

It would have been a despicable act for Olivia to know this and still let the masses descend on Circe in Green—for her to allow Circe’s magnificence to spoil amidst greed and shock value. She pondered this as she finished the final brushstroke and placed her paintbrush down. She touched a stray paint smear on her cheek as if dancing her fingers over a freshly planted kiss, then checked the time—7:43 a.m.

In just under an hour, the gala would fill with filthy swine all craning their necks to glimpse a painting they didn’t deserve. Olivia—who worked sleeplessly for three days to meet Rodger’s piggish deadline, who stared Circe in the eyes night after night, falling into their depths and hearing the cries for justice and freedom within—was the only one worthy. Olivia was the only one who loved the portrait enough to appreciate it; she knew that with every fiber of her being.

Grabbing a rolling cart and cloth tarp from the studio’s supply closet, Olivia carefully removed the painting from its easel and laid it on the cart. Cautious of the still-tacky paint, she draped the cloth over the portrait as if tucking a loved one into bed.

She rolled the cart out of the studio and into the glistening, white hallway. As she made her way to the foyer, she found Rodger standing at its center, directing two men in coveralls on how best to position the bronze frame of Circe in Green. Olivia’s throat tightened, sweat prickled against the nape of her neck, and her heart thrashed in her chest.

Rodger glanced her way, then did a double-take. His wide mouth eased into a greasy grin, hungry eyes abandoning her face for the cloth-covered canvas. She knew he expected her to give the men the painting. She knew she was being paid to offer up the portrait to men who would imprison Circe behind thick glass for the world to ogle.

She knew she couldn’t let that happen.

Knuckles white from her vice-like grip on the cart, Olivia sprinted for the foyer’s frosted glass doors. Rodger roared something from behind, but she didn’t stop to make sense of it. Instead, she grit her teeth and dropped her head to her chest, closing the space between her and the exit. Inches before the cart’s front collided with the glass, the thick doors opened with an automated whoosh.

She—they—were free.

Rodger’s footfalls were thunderous behind her, his breaths villainous like a snorting boar preparing to stampede, and though her lungs were ready to explode, Olivia refused to stop.

She dashed down the sidewalk, narrowly missing a hotdog stand, and threw herself into the street amidst the honks of car horns and screeching of tires. People shrieked and yelled obscenities after her as she drove them aside, but they were nothing to her. Her only concern was Circe in Green. Getting the portrait away from Rodger, away from the swine piling up outside the gala, away from the undeserving—

In a streak of yellow, silver, and crimson, a speeding taxi crumpled the metal cart and threw Olivia headlong into the intersection. She shattered against the asphalt like a painted amphora, though she never felt the crunch of her bones or the split of her skin.

At least, that’s what people say when you ask about the last conservator tasked with restoring Circe in Green. No one’s entirely sure what the sleep-deprived grad student hell-bent on stealing the mythical portrait felt, or didn’t feel, in her last moments. The concern that day was never for her but for the priceless painting ensnared in the mangled cart. It took a skilled blacksmith seven hours to unwind the warped metal without puncturing the canvas, but that didn’t remove the unsightly tire mark stretching across Circe’s forehead and hair like an oil spill.

For days, newspapers circulated speculations about the state of the painting and whether damage that severe could ever be fixed. Reporters followed Circe in Green across the country after it was sold and flown to San Francisco, where curators began the meticulous process of replacing the painting’s cracked, wooden stretcher bars.

It was these same San Francisco curators who flew Jean Claude from London just yesterday to begin restoration efforts on the painting. His deadline was stringent—the curators knew a faster turnaround meant more money following the tragedy in New York—but he was not concerned. After all, Jean Claude was the best conservator in the city of London, and he’d undoubtedly restored worse. As he entered the American city’s spacious studio, he was not worried about the work at hand. It wasn’t until he laid eyes on Circe in Green for the first time that he realized he might be in trouble.