Short Story Competition 2025 Winner: ‘The Unfinished Portrait’ by Brandy Fournier

words Brandy Fournier

The sea had swallowed her sister’s bones, but the house had kept her face – watching, waiting, unwilling to fade.

Maeve paused on the threshold of the crumbling coastal manor, her suitcase catching on the splintered floorboards. The air inside still smelled faintly of salt and linseed oil. A gull shrieked somewhere beyond the stained-glass windows, and the waves, as always, whispered secrets the cliffs refused to forget. Fifty years. Half a century since the storm. Since Nessa disappeared. And yet the easel still stood in the parlour like a gravestone. Unfinished. Quiet. Still. The portrait hadn’t moved but it hadn’t faded either.

Maeve’s fingers trembled across the cracked frame. A woman’s shape bloomed in brushstrokes. Nessa’s copper hair, her neckline, her pale clavicle where their mother’s necklace used to hang. Her face had never been completed. The day of the storm, Maeve had flung down her brushes and ran barefoot through the rain, screaming her sister’s name. She never lifted a paintbrush again. Until now.

She had come back to the cottage to die. She wasn’t foolish enough to romanticise it: the city hospitals reeked of bleach and pity. Here, at least, she could go quietly. Peacefully. With some dignity and self-respect. Maybe even finishing the portrait before the cancer finished her. That was an unexpected bonus she hadn’t even thought of until seeing it standing there after all these years.

The first night, she slept on the old sofa wrapped in a moth-eaten quilt, the crash of the ocean folding into her dreams like breath. The fireplace was cold, but the air was thick with the scent of turpentine and time. Floorboards creaked in places she wasn’t walking, and shadows stretched too long across the walls. That night, she had heard Nessa whispering to her, soft as salt spray: ‘Finish it, Maeve.’ Had she been dreaming? It hadn’t felt like it.

The second day, she had fresh paints and new brushes delivered to her doorstep. She experimented mixing the colours and re-familiarising herself with the feel of the brush. But when she returned to the canvas, she froze. There were already new strokes on the painting. Subtle, just a cheekbone, a ghost of a smile, but they hadn’t been there yesterday. And the brush, her old sable one, she found resting in the turpentine cup, damp. ‘Ridiculous,’ she muttered. Was the cancer already stealing her memory? She turned away, shook, without ever touching the canvas. Not yet. It didn’t feel right yet.

On the third day, she had been startled as she entered the parlour. She could have sworn the radio in the kitchen had turned on by itself.
A weather report forecasting an impending storm could be heard, then soft static, melting into music. Debussy, the same piece Nessa used to hum as Maeve had brushed and braided her hair. Maeve sat in the parlour listening to the haunting tune and to the wind warble through the loose windowpanes. Eventually her breath calmed, and her nerves eased. ‘Are you haunting me?’ she whispered to nothing, to everything. No reply. Just the rhythm of the waves and the creak of the cottage settling. That night she dreamed again. Nessa, in her blue dress, standing ankle-deep in the tide. ‘Why didn’t you finish me?’ Nessa asked.

On the fourth day, Maeve gave in. It felt like it was time. Her fingers trembled as she lifted the brush, one highlight on the collarbone, one shadow near the temple. The paint flowed like it had never left her. The act, the grief, was painful, like re-breaking a bone to finally set it right after so many years. She worked for hours, she wept, then slept. When she awoke, more of the face was there. But not hers, not Nessa’s. The jaw was sharper, the lips wrong, painted fuller. The eyes were green, but not Nessa’s stormy moss green. These glinted like sea glass. Observing. Judging. Knowing. Maeve slowly backed away from the canvas. She opened the windows. Let in the salty air. Spoke aloud to the empty room. ‘You aren’t her. I know that now.’ The portrait said nothing, but she felt it watching her.

On the fifth day, she tried to paint over it. She mixed titanium white and dabbed it over the cheek, the eyes. The paint bubbled and cracked as if repelled. When she returned after boiling water for tea, the white had flaked away. The bright green eyes stared back, still judging, clearer than ever. And where the collarbone had been bare the day before, the necklace was back. A delicate gold chain with a tiny sun pendant. The one Maeve had meant to bury with their mother. But Nessa had refused. Removing it from around their mother’s neck as she lay within the casket, before fastening it around her own neck. Nessa was still wearing it the day she disappeared.

Maeve dropped the teacup. It shattered. She screamed. To the portrait. To the sea. To the memory of what she saw. The memory of what she had chosen not to tell the police. They had argued loud enough for the sea to hear. The necklace caught between them. Her mother’s chain was clutched in both hands. Maeve had pulled: Nessa had stumbled. Not pushed, never pushed. But Maeve never told the police either. Not about the screaming, not about the fight, certainly not about the fall. Nessa was still screaming terrible things when the wind took her straight over the cliff, before Maeve could react. She reached out, too late. The storm had swallowed everything, her sister, the necklace, her guilt.

On the sixth day, she found the footprints. Bare, wet, bits of seaweed remained. Leading from the edge of the cliff to the house. Right into the parlour, to face the portrait. Maeve sat by the fireless hearth, wrapped in the old quilt. ‘I tried to forget,’ she whispered. ‘But you wouldn’t let me, would you?’ The portrait’s face was nearly whole now. The lips had curled into a faint smile. Not cruel. Not kind. Knowing. Maeve reached out and traced the cheek with her thumb. ‘Then finish me,’ Maeve whispered… ‘Let it be done.’ That night the storm returned. Wind howled through the broken shutters, and the waves struck the cliffs like they had fifty years before. The radio flickered on again, static, then the same old weather report, followed by Debussy’s ghostly melody. Maeve wrapped herself in the moth-eaten quilt and sat before the portrait, brush resting in her lap, unfinished once more. ‘You always knew how this would end,’ she whispered to the face on the canvas, nearly whole, nearly her own.

On the seventh day, she didn’t wake. A delivery man found her curled on the parlour floor, body still warm, eyes closed like she’d fallen asleep mid-sentence. No signs of pain. No struggle. Just the faintest smile. And around her neck: a delicate gold chain with a tiny sun pendant, glinting in the grey light. The painting too was finished. Not of Nessa. But of Maeve. Every line, every freckle. Her tired eyes. Her quiet, final smile. The woman in the portrait was not young, not radiant, but complete. As if, at last, the artist had forgiven herself. No one could explain it.

The locals left the painting where it was. Let the house crumble around it. Let the sea claim the walls, the beams, the floors. They say if you visit on a stormy night, the portrait changes. That some days, it’s Nessa’s face. Some days, Maeve’s.

And some days, you see yourself. 

Brandy Fournier
A US-based writer and nurse of over two decades, Brandy Fournier is a mother of two grown children, and a grandmother. After years on the frontlines of healthcare, she brings a deep awareness of human resilience, strength, grief and quiet courage into her fiction. When she isn’t writing, she enjoys spending time with the love of her life, her family and her dog, Remington (Remi), who believes all writing breaks should involve snacks. She is drawn to stories that are intimate, slightly strange and hard to forget.