Nude-Muse Magazine Magazine

It was a fine morning in Brisbane when the letter came, though Maddy would not have called it a letter at all. It was a card, heavy as a coin, pressed into her hand across a café counter by a woman who watched her with eyes that missed nothing. The woman's name was Alison Smith, and she photographed the world the way a surgeon reads a body, calmly, hungrily, and without a single wasted motion.

"You have a body that tells the truth," Alison said. "Most models I meet are lying in silk. You stand there and you simply are....more>

Cynthia was five feet four and built like a line drawing that had decided to be alive, lean through the waist, long in the limbs, with a dark mane of hair that fell past her shoulders and a face that painters would have called expressive, which is just a polite word for restless. She was twenty-two and stunning. She painted for a living and lived for the painting, and on this particular morning she sat astride an old push bike in the pale gold of early summer, pedaling down a lane where the hedges ran silver with heat, and she felt the whole world lean toward her like a window left open.

A friend had suggested it over coffee, casual as a passing cloud: There's that old house on the Harrow farm. Abandoned for decades. Go paint it...more>