—Lizzie Siddal posing for John Everett Millais’s Ophelia, Gower Street, London, 1852 When the heating lamp below the tub snuffs out, I float in my swollen dress like I have each afternoon for months. The painter keeps at his brushwork: fan of my red-gold hair, the silver embroidery of flowers. For a long time, there is only heat’s emptying—like the bruised retreat of evening light on my walk home. Even as the cold turns sharp blade against my ankles, teeth, and skull, I stay. I am not Ophelia, not a creature native and indued unto that element, not one incapable of her own distress, but I keep my mouth in place so the painter sees: on a mossy current, a girl drifting to suicide, lips parted in mad-song. The bathwater roars in and out of my ear. Ophelia told Claudius we know what we are, but I know what I may be, the fibers of my costume growing heavy. I have an artist’s singleness of vision, and I choose a copper coin and my face on this corpse painting. I choose more than millinery shop days. When the painter hears the bathwater shivering against the tub, he drops his brush. I let him fish me out, my fingers burning bright as bee stings.
