It’ll Never Be Done (short story) 🐍 ✂️ 🕳️ ♾️
It’ll Never Be Done (short story) by Larissa Thomas, 2026
She was close.
Months past the original deadline, Courtney’s art installation was almost complete. A year in the making, and her grandest work to date. A giant cosmic gash. Intended to evoke the desire to crawl back into the mother’s womb.
According to Courtney’s artist statement:
Fetal Position Cortisol Syndrome in the Future-is-Here Doom Tomb Womb is about choosing short-term comfort over the pain of sticking it out with no immediate gratification and no guarantee of long-term pay-off.
Media of choice: copper wire, various metals, silk, cotton, linen, resin, acrylic paint and distilled menstrual blood.
Courtney had created a cozy diorama of self-pacifying. A dissertation on suck-and-soothe, arrested development, leftover cereal milk mucosal nostalgia culture. Standing almost ten feet tall and eight feet wide, the piece was the official mascot of her undoing and the eyesore of her live/work studio. Pubes sculpted from copper wire. Membranes made of flesh-toned silks. Hardened resin depicting droplets of moisture. Large serrated steel rows of teeth and thick chains draped like discharge cobwebs awaiting those who dared to penetrate the cavern and get comfortable inside.
She just had to make a few more snips—
Snip.
Snip…
Snip.
Sighing with relief and stepping back as the final strand of copper fell to the floor, she crossed her sweltering studio and pulled out the cold champagne she’d been saving for this triumphant moment.
“I can’t believe I’m done.”
This was Courtney’s tribute to the dopamine vampires who had next to no muscle mass (physically or spiritually), masquerading as aspirational and politically relatable while taking four hours to do ten minutes of work from bed.
Courtney, obviously, was not like those people. She considered herself a professional artist; ambitious and self-aware. Although for five months straight, she’d been living off “food” activated by hot water, rewearing dirties (yes, even underwear) and often woke up on the floor of her studio. She rationalized that she’d simply delouse and detox in a purge week and it would work itself out. It was a methodical submersion into her practice. Courtney was also an optimist.
A long, wayward strand of metal sticking out of one of the sculpture’s folds glinted under the light. Thick and distracting. Wirecutters still nearby, a simple severing and the problem was solved.
”Now I’m done!”
It was over. Then came the gallery. The viewing. The applause.
The criticism.
Luckily she had the antidote for criticism.
She unsealed the forest green bottle, launching the cork into the air. As she licked the overpriced foam off the glass lip, the projectile plug rebounded off a steel beam on the ceiling, hurtling towards the sculpture and embedding itself somewhere inside.
Jostled wires fell deep within the piece.
Courtney held her breath, tentatively stepping closer to her avant garde oversized metal abscess, waiting for it to collapse entirely.
It didn’t.
The cork rolled out, and stopped at the tip of her black leather Blundstone.
She waited for a few moments before laughing. Leftover delirium. One last clown honk at the carnival.
After pouring herself a glass of champagne, she pulled up a paint-streaked stool and perched in front of the sculpture. “To you, you almost killed me.”
Courtney felt the relief and emptiness of giving birth to her creation. She could finally get caught up on reading, file her taxes, respond to the six hundred emails she’d ignored, resume dating - was Josh still interested? Maybe too many months had passed since she promised to get back to him “next week.” Didn’t her grandmother die? Had she missed the — seam on a piece of the silk was raggedy.
The thin vermilion thread screamed with imperfection. How could she miss that? It must’ve been when she was hungover or rushing. She examined the stitching and paint: It would require dismantling, high risk of tearing, re-stitching, gluing, painting. Hours more work.
It was Rob’s fault. The pseudo-famous, nepo-baby “artist” of her social circle. He’d set her back a month when he told her Doom Womb looked juvenile and anatomically grotesque. Because she modeled it off her own vagina, it sent her into a lengthy pussy aesthetics tailspin on various subreddits. She then spent another month trying to ween herself off the Adderall-Wellbutrin-coffee cocktail she’d become addicted to while trying to make her piece appear more mature and elegant.
To focus on some raggedy seams now was out of the question. There was no time. It was the imperfection that made it human, she rationalized. This cursed piece was done. It had to be.
Solidifying the completion, she texted the news to Jean, her gallerist and middle-aged crowquill dipped in the venom of every failed-artist-cum-art-critic. Jean struck terror with her baby bangs, and owned rooms with ancient skin that looked as if she slept inside a hyperbaric chilled cucumber. Courtney had endured a constant, low-grade anxiety anticipating the day Jean would realize she was untalented since she began working with the woman.
Courtney texted some of the photos to Jean. This was the process. Jean would either send feedback, send someone over, or come herself. Once Jean approved, it would be out of Courtney’s hands - hopefully forever. And a fat little paycheque would arrive in her bank account, at some point, making the agony worth it.
As she waited for a response from Jean, she sipped the champagne, walking back and forth assessing; The shapes weren’t right. The texture was wrong. The colours - oh god. Pubes? A giant vag? What the fuck was she thinking?
Courtney stifled a bowel-deep wail and rushed to the bathroom, splashing her face with cold water that smelled of old pipes.
After the revisions, the weight loss, weight gain, hair loss, whiskers appearing in random spots, sciatia, knotted muscles, hallucinating for three days straight that the fluorescent lights were sending her secret erotic messages - it was all about to be worth it. She was moments away from her sculpture being done.
It wasn’t time to buckle. No time to second guess.
There would be no fainting couch to catch her.
“Dissociate,” she whispered. “Be in the future.”
She could finally start something new. She could shower! Tidy the place up a bit! Breathe! She took another swig of champagne.
She looked at her phone; nothing from Jean.
Was she disappointed? Was it too late to get the piece to the gallery for the big show on the weekend? Had Courtney been replaced by yet another “abstract artist”?
It would be fine.
Fine.
Fine…
Fine.
Jean told her today was the last day to submit. Unless she got the date wrong.
Panicked, Courtney called. Straight to voicemail.
“Jean, it’s done! It’s fucking done. I just need help getting it over to the gallery. It’s bigger than when you last saw it, but it’s a true evolution of my body of work. I’ll be here for the next few hours. I have expensive champagne.”
Day-drinking was Jean’s love language, if Jean was capable of love.
After Courtney hung up, she gaped at her post-traumatic tresses and hollow, greasy face. She was in no shape to debut work. The post-partum hit.
“Wow,” Jean texted back.
Courtney waited for a follow-up. Surely it was a positive “wow.” She poured herself another glass of bubbly, took it into the shower and cried. Her loofah hadn’t been used in so long it was calcified. An ancient artefact of fun, frivolity, freedom. She eroded sediment with a bar of Dove in crevices she was ashamed to discover had almost closed over due to lack of hygiene. Months worth of leg hair almost clogged the drain. Once dry enough to put on clothes (but not long enough to pick up much of the moldy towel smell), she dressed in the only passable t-shirt and jeans she could find and manically snapped a few more photos.
Courtney would be asked questions. Questions by serious buyers and “buyers” alike. Miffed, envious peers. Social climbers. A couple of art students who’d want to sleep with her just for the lore.
Jean had fed her some deflection ideas a while ago: “It’s the cave of the unconscious mind. Which do you personally relate to more - the needy child or the violated mother?”, “Just because I show you something, doesn’t mean I tell you what to see.”, “What is your relationship to your mother’s vagina?” and, “Why is this so disturbing to you? Intimidated by anatomy you’ve failed to comprehend?”
She screamed into her hands.
“It’s good. It’s great!” She stomped around in her crispy studio socks with bottoms like fly tape.
It was splendid — a cluster of long foreign fibres were growing in front of Courtney’s eyes, out the center of the acrylic clitoris.
“Leave it, Courtney.”
She looked away.
She looked back.
The fibres were dense and synthetic; a wound giving way to a new organism.
“I know you weren’t there a second ago!”
She palmed her eyes, unsure if she was losing it from lack of sleep, nutrition or inhaling too much epoxy. Maybe it was all in her mind. Nothing more than a hallucination.
Yet… She couldn’t help herself.
Just one more cut. She pulled the foreign matter taut and snipped. Not perfect but not that visible.
“Now I’m done!”
Courtney circled the piece.
The more she looked, the more wires and fibres unfurled and colonized. The sculpture was building itself, becoming something entirely divorced from its original concept.
“Stop it!” Courtney feverishly clipped. “Stop! I’m done! I’m done!”
The wires expanded at a frenzied pace. “No! Finished!” She hacked her way through the fibres, scratching and cutting her skin, as she searched for the source of the growth to destroy it.
“What is happening?!” She couldn’t help but think this was the doing of that fucking nepobaby, Rob, who had all kinds of unhinged tech wizard friends. Or maybe someone had laced her champagne with a hallucinogen. Surely, it was a hallucination.
She raced to the nearest viscera-flecked mirror and stared at herself. Pupils normal. Nothing else out of the ordinary.
“I won’t let you do this!” She grabbed her wirecutters and stepped inside the serrated canal. Sifting through overgrowths, searching for the source of this new structure colonizing her masterpiece. She chopped as the piece wrapped itself around her, a caterpillar being slowly encased by a mechanical cocoon.
Snip.
“Almost there,” pinged a text from Jean.
Snip. Snip. Snip.
Snip.
Snip…
“I assume a shipping crate is ready.”
Snip.
Snip.
Snip.
Snip.
Snip.
Snip…
Snip.
…
Jean entered the studio without knocking. The first thing she noticed was that Courtney’s sculpture was a messy mass of strands and tendrils and didn’t appear to be anywhere near complete. She surveyed the various spills, rotting food, empties and terrible odors.
“Courtney?” Jean queried in an unimpressed tone.
Jean appraised the freestanding, metal genitalia. “Unsubtle.”
She poured herself some champagne with a “clean” glass. Letting the aroma reach her nose before she hesitantly took a sip. She spit it back into the glass and discarded it on the table, muttering, “I need to stop taking chances on artists with bad backgrounds. I should’ve seen this coming. My standards are becoming too lax.”
Snip.
Courtney’s muffled voice resonated somewhere beyond the sealing over monstrosity.
“Are you hiding?” Jean impatiently scrolled her phone for missed messages. “I don’t have time for this.”
Snip.
Snip.
Sighing, Jean turned on her heel for the door. “I knew she wasn’t ready.”
Snip.