Modern retelling of Oscar Wilde’s: The Picture of Dorian Gray
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Chapter One: A Study in Smoke and Violet
The scent of lilac incense curled through the dormitory like a sigh too tired to linger. Bass Hallward sat cross-legged on the floor, ink-stained hands resting in her lap, a needle gun sleeping like a serpent on the tray beside her. She was dressed in old jeans streaked with paint and a tank top that bared the elegant outline of a moth tattoo on her shoulder blade. The moth was recent, a thing she had drawn after a dream about falling, wings folded like secrets.
Across the room, Henry Wotton reclined in his wheelchair, the corners of his mouth curled in a perpetual half-smile that suggested he had heard the joke of the world and was still waiting for someone else to catch up.
“You smell like regret,” he said, letting his pale fingers trace the frayed hem of the shawl draped around his shoulders. It was out of fashion by at least three centuries.
“No, Henry,” Bass said without looking at him, focused instead on the sketchpad on her lap. “I smell like sandalwood and freedom.”
Henry coughed softly into a black silk handkerchief—always black, always silk—and leaned forward with eyes the color of bruised violets. “Freedom? That elusive mistress you’ve traded NYAI for? Tattooing skin in alleyway shops with neon signs and regretful lovers?”
Bass turned her head, one dark brow arched in elegant defiance. “You think the canvas makes the artist, Henry? I’d rather ink my art onto something alive. Something that bleeds.”
Henry laughed, and it sounded like a knife dragging across velvet. “How poetically grotesque. You’re wasting your brilliance, Bass. You could’ve had studios in Manhattan, gallery openings, critics with monocles writing verses about your line work.”
She shrugged, flipping a page. “I don’t want their praise. I want to draw the things that matter. People. Pain. Love. Death.”
“Ah,” Henry said, reclining again like a discontented prince. “Then you’ll like her.”
Bass paused mid-sketch. “Who?”
Henry’s eyes gleamed. “Dorian Gray.”
The name fell between them like a dropped glass. It didn’t shatter, but it echoed.
“She’s a freshman,” Henry continued, fingers playing with the silver rings on his hands. “Moved in yesterday. No photos on social media. No gossip trail. No tragic ex or viral poetry. Just… arrived. Like Venus from the foam.”
Bass chuckled, setting her sketchpad down. “You’re obsessed already.”
“Infatuated,” Henry corrected. “Which is less dangerous but infinitely more aesthetic.”
“What’s she like?”
He tilted his head back and closed his eyes, letting the violet dusk bleed through the cracked dorm window. “She has a face like a lie you want to believe. Hair like stormwater and skin so pale it insults the moon. And her eyes—God, Bass—her eyes are mirrors. But not the kind that show your reflection. The kind that show what you’re afraid of becoming.”
A silence settled. Bass watched Henry, his bones too delicate for his intellect, his spirit too large for the decaying husk that held it. In that moment, she loved him—not romantically, but in the way you love a fire that won’t warm you but you still sit near for light.
“I want to draw her,” Bass said quietly. “Not for a tattoo. Not even for a gallery. Just… to see if I can catch it. That moment between innocence and knowing.”
Henry smiled. “Then we are doomed, both of us. You’ll try to capture her. I’ll try to write her. And she—”
“She’ll ruin us,” Bass finished for him.
Henry reached for the incense burner, tipping it toward him as though divining something from the smoke. “Only if we’re lucky.”
Outside, the dinner bell rang, muffled by stone and history. Bass stood and stretched, muscles coiling under inked skin. Henry didn’t move, except to adjust his shawl.
“I’ll meet her,” she said, slipping her sketchpad into her bag.
“You won’t forget her,” Henry replied. “None of us will.”
And with that, the moth on her shoulder seemed to flutter as she walked out into the corridor, where beauty waited like a blade behind a smile.
agantz art 