The Last Human Artists

1.

Before he stole everything from her, the warning signs were there. She simply mistook them for ordinary life.

Elena’s spine screams, her fifth coffee’s gone cold, and she still can’t make the damned sentences work. Maybe it’s not a true sentiment. Or maybe it’s too true. Mouth turning down, she leans away from the computer, the creaky swivel chair wheezing like a smoker.

Her phone buzzes against the desk, face-down. Probably another one of those weird emails arriving at precisely nine o’clock for the past two days. She ignores it, willing herself back into the sentence she’s wrestling. Three times she’s rewritten the final chapter. She’s close. She can feel it at the back of her throat, the way one senses a storm before the sky darkens.

Another notification sound, this time a tinkling bell signalling a text message. Grinding her teeth, she gives in to the interruption and picks up her phone.

Tobias: Come swim. The lake calls. Don’t be like a tragic indoor poet. Bring wine.

She huffs out a breath, half a laugh. He knows exactly how to bait her. Cold water, bare trees, old jokes. A superstition, really, ever since they were little – if they swim on the cusp, the coming season will turn out well. And she needs it to turn out well.

Her gaze flicks to Tobias’s painting hanging on the wall beside her desk. He gave it to her for her nineteenth birthday, just before she moved into Berlin to attend university. It’s a woman, blurred at the edges, half-facing away. Outlined around her are Plattenbau apartments, windows like data grids, repeating. It always unsettles visitors. They assume it’s about erasure. But Elena knows better. It’s about refusal. About pushing outward.

Outside her fourth-floor window, Berlin, at the tail end of summer, rejects the idea it’s fading into something colder. Everything’s still technicolour – ice cream dripping down children’s wrists, lovers touching like the weather won’t betray them tomorrow – but the grey is coming. Her mouth sours at the token remains of the Wall on the opposite river bank. East Side Gallery. Those slabs once split her parents’ lives in two — them on that side, Oma on this one. Now the concrete’s glossed over with hyper-pigmented murals. Nostalgia tourism repackaging trauma as Instagram backdrop. Resistance flattened into art.

It’s unfathomable how she chooses to torture herself with this view. If she turns the desk side-on, she’d have a clear shot upriver to Oberbaumbrücke. She snorts. That’s hardly better. The bridge’s red brick twin towers are all pomp and fairy-tale arches, like a set piece for a reunification musical no one asked for. And it’s always crawling with linen-clad tourists holding up spritzes to catch the last light, oblivious to the bones under the pavement.

She turns back to her computer. One chapter to fix. One. She should stay. By tomorrow it will be done, emailed to Suzanne for final editing. Then they can swim. One day won’t make a difference. She reaches for her phone to type a reply.

A sharp knock on the door. She jumps. Whoever it is hasn’t buzzed from downstairs. A neighbour then. Frau Miedbrodt from next door perhaps, wanting to borrow some obscure spice Elena never keeps. Elena suspects she’s checking in on her, like she used to check in on Oma. Well-meaning, but she can do without the disruption.

She crosses the room to peer through the peephole. A flash of red paisley and dark hair. Jesus, it’s Liv, shifting from foot to foot, balancing a basket on one hip. Elena hadn’t considered her an option at this hour.

She undoes the locks and pulls open the door. ‘It’s morning.’ She steps back to let her in. Liv is all perfectly winged eyeliner, artfully knotted vintage scarf, and layers of chiffon seduction. ‘You’re not supposed to exist at this hour.’ And certainly not looking like a Vogue cover. God knows how Liv does it. Elena catches her own reflection in the dark glass of the door – yesterday’s T-shirt, hair in a knot that says deadline, not boho chic. She doesn’t belong in the same frame.

‘I know. I’ve breached my natural habitat. But you haven’t texted in a week, and that is never a good sign. You look like you’ve been locked in here since the turn of the century.’ She breezes past and down the hall.

Elena closes the door, following her into the living room.

Liv fixes her with the look that has undone her since they were twenty and passing notes in Professor Erpenbeck’s creative writing class – part affection, part delicious bossiness. ‘I come armed with croissants, nectarines, wine, and moral superiority.’

Elena folds her arms. ‘I’m a chapter off finishing the final edit.’ She chews her bottom lip. ‘There is just a minor technicality in getting it to cooperate.’

‘Aha! I knew you needed me. Your brain will work better after a break.’ She pulls out a croissant and waves it like a warning. ‘Neurological fact. You can Google it. You’ll solve it when you stop trying so hard.’ She takes a bite. ‘Sorry, I’m famished. Get ready, you’re coming with me. Picnic.’

Elena glances at her phone, Tobias’s message still blinking like a small, guilt-inducing light. The weight of the unfinished chapter, of her own expectations, presses at her. Six months ago, after marking it up for editing and emailing it back to Elena, Suzanne had said, It will be even better than your first. This one is the voice of the times. Right before adding, Don’t let me down. That kind of pressure can rot you from the inside if you don’t transmute it.

So Liv is right. Fresh air and stimulating conversation are probably exactly what she needs to sharpen the brain cells. And who’s she kidding? Tradition matters. If she must be pulled from the work—

‘Fine,’ she sighs. ‘But if I’m taking a break, you’re swimming. Tobias is expecting me in Senzig. At the lake. I’m sure he won’t mind if you come too.’ There’s a faint flicker in her belly as she says this, but she smiles against it. ‘You can borrow a bikini.’

‘Yay!’ Liv claps her hands like an overexcited child. ‘But only if it’s the gold sparkly one I gave you that you never wear. It’s criminal to keep that hidden. And the public deserves a little joy.’

That bikini is the exact opposite of how Elena moves through the world. Liv knows that. Elena knows she knows that. It’s the kind of thing Liv wears without a second thought – hips out, chin high. The thought of sunlight catching on every sequin makes Elena’s scalp prickle.

Liv narrows her eyes with a sly smile. ‘I can’t believe you’re finally inviting me to your annual tête-à-tête with your mysteriously reclusive friend. It’s only taken you fifteen years.’

Neither can Elena. But it feels rude to fob her off, not when Liv has already arrived armed with good intentions and pastry. At least she’s a fiction writer. Some conversations you can’t have with civilians. A flickering thought: Liv has orchestrated this whole morning ambush – basket, croissants, charm offensive. Elena curls her fingers into her palm. For years she’s been angling to meet Tobias, to go to Senzig.

No. She let’s her fingers relax. Liv doesn’t always make everything about herself. Elena is sure her intentions are exactly what she said. It wouldn’t be the first time Liv has engineered a rescue without calling it one.

2.

To Nico, morning light is a liar.

Damn stuff sharpens everything to a false edge, thinning colours into something brittle. Under it, nothing breathes. Shadows are too clean. Flesh turns to paper. Late light is so much better for painting. The sun goldens and thickens the air, the colours melt into one another, shadows pooling like old blood. That’s when the art really speaks. Not this.

The radiator clangs fitfully, and he only now remembers the coffee on his work bench. Bla! It’s long cold and ringed with scum. He really must get a water filter.

He stands back from the canvas, rubbing a streak of ochre across his thumb, then smears it absently down his jeans. The figure still won’t resolve. A woman half-there. He’s repainted her shoulders three times, scraped them back four. The bones refuse to sing. Or scream.

‘Fucking hell.’

Babou, ears flicking, watches from the battered armchair by the floor-to-ceiling window. The cat’s mouth is suspiciously red, and Nico’s belly flips. It’s blood. The stupid animal has cut himself. The cat’s already chewed through a tube of viridian green this week, and the studio smells of turpentine from the clean-up. Nico scans the floor. There – the bastard’s gnawed at a fresh one! Lake Red this time. Christ, are there such things as cat therapists? Maybe it’s some mineral in the paint he’s lacking and he should take Babou to the vet and get him checked out.

Nico goes over and scoops him up, paint-stained fingers stroking through the ginger fur. The colour blends nicely. Babou purrs like a machine built for better days.

The VantaCorp piece glares from the other side of the room, three blank panels and the one he’s struggling with, an expanse of nothingness. His agent thinks it’ll be a triumph, though how Silja knows this when he’s barely started is a mystery. He screws his lips tight. It’s a mausoleum waiting to happen. He hears the client notes from the commission brief; speak to the times but make it inviting whilst at the same time challenging the viewer. Corporate morons.

But he needs this one to land. If he blows it, he knows exactly what’ll happen – the collectors dry up, the rent eats him alive, and he’s stuck teaching beginners’ oil classes to tourists who think painter means quaint. He’d rather eat rats for dinner or move in with his parents at the embarrassing age of thirty-five. You’d think once you’d technically ‘made it’ in the art world you wouldn’t have these kinds of problems anymore. It pisses him off more than he wants to admit. Art shouldn’t be encumbered by financial considerations.

He runs a hand through his hair. Six months since the last one left. J— with her impossible skin and her even more impossible demands. She said he used her up and called it art. Maybe she wasn’t wrong. But the work was better when she was here. Same with the one before her, and the one before her.

Now it’s just him, a cat with a paint addiction, and a studio that smells of impending doom if he doesn’t get his shit together.

His phone buzzes on the workbench. He ignores it. Another buzz.

He picks it up.

Felix: Big event tonight. I need you there. No excuses.

Of course. Felix and his infinite calendar of urgent culture. Book launches, openings, salons. Anything that might feed his algorithmic BookTok followers.

Nico snorts, wipes his hands on a rag and gazes at the woman on the canvas. The face is wrong.

The eyes won’t hold. He thumbs out a reply to Felix: What’s the event?

Felix: Book launch for one of our new authors. Big one. Probably find your next muse there… Jokes. This is me on my knees before you, grovelling like a pathetic peasant. Just say yes.

Nico exhales through his teeth. A book launch. Hellfire and dried-out paint tubes! Rooms full of people, half of them trying to be clever, the other half trying to be seen. Every time he walks into one, the skin between his shoulder blades tightens. He stopped pretending to enjoy literary events somewhere around the time someone called him a visual poet for the third time. Like it’s a compliment.

Visual poet. Christ. He’d rather eat a still-wet canvas. Every time someone says it, with that smug, reverent little nod like they’ve decoded something profound, it makes his skin crawl. As if what he does can be reduced to metaphors and mood boards. As if his work is some wistful sonnet in oil. He picks up a short palette knife, and stabs it into a crack in the work bench where it twangs back-and-forth. They don’t see the rage in his brushwork, the violence in the layers, don’t smell the turpentine, the sweat, the months of scraped-back nothing before the image finally gives in. He doesn’t compose his paintings like stanzas. He drags them out, kicking.

If they want poetry, they can go sniff someone’s watercolours. He’s not a visual poet. He’s a fucking riot in a frame. And Felix knows this. Knows exactly which bruises to poke.

He slams a fist onto the bench because he won’t say no to the damned launch. Has owed Felix since they were kids, since the one time Felix really shouldn’t have had his back, and did. Since that night they never talk about. The one that carved a line through all three of them, and left only two.

Felix never cashed in on it. Never once said the words, you owe me. He didn’t have to. It’s there. In the space between their silences. In the way Nico lets himself be hauled out of the studio for these things, even when it’s damned inconvenient and loathsome.

He rubs a palm down his face. Stares at the blank space where the woman’s mouth should be. His phone buzzes again.

Felix: Don’t flake. Wear something black. It’s all very noir tonight. 8 pm.

Black. Just like Nico’s mood. He shakes his head. Picks up the tube of Lake Red Babou hasn’t quite killed. Might as well give the woman on the canvas a mouth, even if it’s the wrong one.

And after that – fuck it. He’ll go.

3.

They catch the S-Bahn south, Liv swinging her picnic basket like it’s a party trick, Elena’s bag sagging with towels, swimwear, and the vague hope that immersion in cold water might shock something loose—her spine, her plot, her sense of self.

The train presses them into the rhythm of movement. Forest blurs past the window, thick, indifferent, dark at the roots. Elena tries to lose herself in it.

Liv, in the window seat, doesn’t let her. ‘Did you and Tobias ever have a thing?’

Elena jerks her chin down, neck tight. ‘Liv. Not every man is a potential sex toy. Some of them are—radical concept—just friends.’ But even as she says it, she hears the edge in her voice, the protest in it. How defensive it sounds when you’re not entirely sure yourself.

Liv humphs, dragging her gaze back from the trees. ‘Doubt it. He carries a torch, obviously. You should take advantage. I mean, you haven’t had sex in—what—ten years? That’s probably why you can’t finish the novel. All that repression clogging your narrative arc.’

Elena opens her mouth to retaliate, but nothing elegant arrives. Her face burns. It’s not the sex comment. It’s the novel. The reminder of how stuck she is. How empty her sentences feel lately—like chewing paper. And just when she’s reached the final chapter. The timinmg couldn’t be worse.

She stares at her reflection in the window—blurred by motion, ghosted over forest. A face she almost recognises. A woman with a bag full of towels and no ending. And Liv’s wrong. Tobias doesn’t carry a torch for her. Not that kind. What he offers is loyalty, ballast, the kind of quiet companionship that asks for nothing and notices everything. After what happened with that psychotic idiot last year—God, even thinking his name feels like stepping on broken glass—a relationship is the last thing she needs. Affection, sure. Friendship, yes. But anything more? She’s still peeling that wreckage out of her.

Thankfully, the train rattles into Königs Wusterhausen station. It’s all faded signage, greige concrete and a platform clock that’s never wrong, even when it’s wrong. The kind of station that exists in defiance of time, refusing to modernise out of sheer East German spite. They haul their bags past a clutch of taxi drivers, through the sour-smelling underpass slick with damp, and up into the gravel-scarred carpark.

Tobias pulls up in the ancient Trabant his father rebuilt, faded aqua blue, rust biting the wheel arches, the engine emitting its familiar pfut-pfut-pfut like a two-stroke cough. It smells of oil and tired rubber and old, proud stubbornness.

Liv raises an eyebrow. ‘Seriously? This is our chariot?’

Elena shrugs. ‘My parents had one too. They run like a tank.’ A smile flickers at the corners of her mouth—reflexive, unguarded. Some people arrive and your body simply knows you’re safe.

Tobias climbs out, threadbare grey jumper, sleeves pushed up, faded jeans, boots dusted with pine needles. Her smile fades. What the hell has he been doing to himself? His face is thinner than a few months ago when she last saw him. The hollows under his eyes look like they’ve been carved in.

Liv steps forward in a whirl of scent and swish, hair in an artfully messy updo, oversized sunglasses despite the clouded sky, today’s version of effortless chaos. She grins at the Trabant, at Tobias, like they’re both exotic props. ‘Hi. I’m Liv.’

He sticks out a hand, deadpan polite. ‘I’m Tobias. I’ve heard a lot about you.’

Elena’s pulse edges faster at their handshake. Tobias’s voice is smooth, but there’s a flicker behind his eyes, calculation, defence. He’s braced, already taken Liv’s measure.

And Liv, so bright, so charming, so oblivious, leans in with that little tilt of the head she uses when she smells intrigue. ‘All good things, I hope.’ Her tone lands somewhere between flirt and test.