The Girl on the Wall by Ashley Zhang

She was a princess, but when she returned from Florence, she didn’t quite feel like one. The portrait her father had commissioned before she left the Vatican still hung in the great room, filling the halls with her presence when she couldn’t be there, but these days, it seemed more like fantasy than reality. That was not to insult the artist’s skill. He was the best painter in all of Italy, and he painted her visage with wide, arcing strokes of fair gold, petal pink, and deep blue. The likeness was uncanny. Yet Lucrezia Borgia was no longer the same girl as the one captured within the gilded frame.

Looking at the painting was like seeing her reflection in a pond: a mirror image, yet distorted in some indescribable way that made her unrecognizable. The golden curls of hair, the rosebud of a mouth, and the clear blue eyes were all the same, yet it was like looking at a stranger.

She ran her slim fingers along the stroke of her smile, and remembered a simpler time, when vanity was the greatest extent of her problems. How trivial it all seemed now. Part of her ached to return to the days when she pouted about the flowers that didn’t quite match her dress, but another part wouldn’t give up the defenses she’d acquired for anything.

Marriage — or more specifically, the marriage bed and her brute of a husband — had changed her. It had beaten her down, left her desolate, but it could not chain her. For from the abuse and loneliness, she rose, like a phoenix from the ashes. Sixteen years of kindness had gotten her coddled like a lamb or stepped on like an insignificant flower, because the world was not kind. Sweet, precious things were swallowed up by life’s bared fangs, and her father and brothers could not protect her forever, so she grew hard to protect herself. Still a flower, but now there were thorns underneath the blossom.

Jealousy could’ve become her, looking at the bright, hopeful innocence of the girl on the wall, but Lucrezia knew the next chapter, so instead she pitied her. She pitied the girl who expected the world never to hurt her, and was always so surprised when it did.

“Beautiful, isn’t it? The artist did a marvelous job. It looks just like you.” Her father walked in, his head tilted up to gaze upon the same portrait. His words were in good nature, but she felt the sting of an insult.

“Burn it.”

“Sorry?”

“I said burn it. I want you to burn it.” Her gaze was steel when she looked at her papa, and she saw his surprise, his realization that the daughter that’d been returned to him was not the same daughter who’d left. She pulled her hand from the frame and took a step back, scrutinizing the cherubic blush and hopeful smile for a moment before turning away.

“I’m not that girl anymore.” And she was proud of it. Before she was a princess, but now she was a queen.

 

 

 

 

Ashley Zhang is a writer with chronic writer’s block. She finds that inspiration strikes at the oddest of times and places, so she can often be found frantically typing ideas on her phone at four in the morning or in the middle of a concert. Besides writing, Ashley enjoys baking and trying to figure out her plans for the future. She cites Lady Gaga, JK Rowling, and Blair Waldorf as her role models, and she thanks them for inspiring her to do anything she puts her mind to.