Laura's Skull

Laura’s Skull is an illustration for a story I intend to write...someday.  The skull is visible as the center of interest in this painting.  Someone asks, “Should you put the center of interest in the CENTER of a composition?”  Excuse me?  Why not put the center of interest in the center of a picture.  I mean, after all, it is called the CENTER of interest.  What does the word “center” mean?

 Laura’s Skull is a true story which happened to someone who is still working in the field of forensics.  The murder case is closed and the murderer has been convicted, but all participants must remain anonymous; there are such things as appeals and retrials. How to approach the story is a real problem.

 A young forensic artist is given the task of doing a skull reconstruction with a very short deadline.   Identification of the victim is tantamount to identifying the killer.  The immediate problem is to clean the skull sufficiently to be able to work with it and expect plastic modeling clay to adhere and stay attached to the skull.  Laura doesn’t have time to let the maggots in the Crime Lab work on the skull, so she tries an ant bed, but the ants are more interested in some sugar source a few yards away. 

 Laura then tries to sun dry it on her garage roof, but cats try to drag it away.  The idea of baking it in her oven or on her barbeque pit evokes an outcry from relatives who vow never to eat at her house again if this happens.  This could be quite a humorous short story, although somewhat dark.

 Then there’s the story of the young girl in Mexico who wants to come to the United States to better her condition and the circumstances leading to her being tied to a mesquite tree between the Mexican Border and a prominent American City. 

 When the body was found by hunters, most of the flesh was gone; the hair was still in place; a lot of very darkened tissue was still clinging to the skull and of course there was a large amount of tissue still in the sinus and brain cavities.

 Somewhere there was a young Mexican man known as a “coyote” walking around who knew all about how Leticia had died.  There will be no humor in this part of the story.

 The skull sits in the middle of the composition.  The style of the painting is abstract, much like the abstract the human mind takes on in trauma and it would be my guess that finding a human body tied to a tree in this state of deterioration would be traumatic indeed.

 Who knows how this will play out?  Watch for it!  Video at Ten!

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