The Artist's Maid

Written for the Daily Flash Fiction Challenge with a word limit of 300.

The prompts: This story must contain the words hourglass, statue, featherduster

The Artist's Maid

The squat, muscular woman surveyed the room with her hands on her ample hips. Dominica found herself wishing she had chosen another profession. She could have been a dancer, but alas, those days had passed with the loss of her youthful figure some thirty years ago. Now, with a rolling of her eyes, she got to work; the master would be back before long and the room needed to be prepared.

The high level cleaning completed, she stuck the feather duster’s handle deep into her bunned-up pile of still dark hair where it dangled unnoticed. Damp rags hung swinging from her shoulders as she leaned into the mop. How this man could make such a mess was beyond her. There was paint everywhere, the walls, the ceiling and in some instances on paintings that he had already finished but was starting to paint over anew.

Every time she came by there seemed to be something else added to the mess. Lately, huge blocks of stone and marble had begun to show up. Once, when he caught her trying to shove a block out of the way to clean he had scolded her with, “Be careful! There is a statue in there waiting for me to dig it out!”

He considered himself an artist of sorts. She had her own ideas about that.

She finished just in time. The “Master” had just arrived home with a model he had hired to pose for him. As she was leaving she looked back and saw the model pull out an hour glass and set it upright, the sand running down slowly to the lower container.

“Mike, I can only stay for an hour today,” said the model assuming his pose.

The man shook his head saying, “I told you, it’s not Mike, it's Michelangelo.”

Word count 300