Maiden In Despair

Prompt: You are to write a story based on "Girl with a Pearl Earring". Your story must include the following vocabulary: egress, triumphant, ambivalent, paradox, estranged, arcane, recondite, distorted, resilient, vex, pellucent, fiend, flamboyant, desiccated, onerous, derelict, adamant, distraught, grueling, somber.

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

Nothing would appease the longing, longing she felt for the world she did not know. The world she could not reach. She longed to egress from her painted tarp, triumphant in her escape.

Trapped in her cage of a painter's frame she looked out at the ambivalent creatures of the gallery who knew not to look her way or pass her by. She looked out at the world who in turn looked back at her. Who was this girl? Where was she from? What was her name? All questions she knew as well as them, a paradox, for she was within herself estranged from the truth. Anything, everything, about her was as arcane and recondite as time itself. She knew of nothing but her face, though details were distorted in her mind. Her cloth wrapped head, a single pearl earring. A clue? She did not know. She could not check, could not see past the resilient glass of her prison that fiend Vermeer had placed on her, and how greatly it did vex her. Pellucent as it was, it was still there, taunting her with whispers that she would forever be held captive behind it. 

She was caught like a flamboyant bird who only sang of dreams of freedom, its soul left desiccated in the waste of capture. Its onerous journey was deemed better than the prison wherein it now lay, that she was sure of. Anything would be better than to be left derelict at heart in this exhibition.

Patiently waiting she sat. Patiently waiting for something, anything, to free her. Adamant that one day, the crowd would realize she was there, captured and distraught, and learn of her longing. Longing. Deep, grueling longing to learn of who she was. 

Though none of it shone through to the crowd. Her eyes were calm and somber, her posture held through years and years. Time deemed her nothing more than a painting. Nothing more than a mystery that would not be solved. Time deemed her nothing.

Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer