Weldon’s friends said, “Weldon, you got the best job. Walk around that museum all night. Watch for trouble. But you got no trouble. No nuthin’. All night.”

Weldon listened, smiled. He didn’t tell them he hated his boring-ass job. For the same reason they thought it great: Eight hours of nothing. He could be doing something.

Weldon stepped from the dressing room into the museum’s rear hallway, grabbed his belt between the loops and pulled upward. His abdomen would have none of it. Making sure people weren’t breaking in and stealing all the masterpieces, that didn’t keep the weight off.

Weldon turned right, into the 110 gallery, Abstract Expressionists on the walls and four modest sculptures on marble plinths down the middle.

All seemed in order, but he stopped, as he always did, to study the Dellacourt. Looked like a dance party for ghosts. Vaguely human shapes without features.

Since when was it OK for art to deny its subjects their essential humanity? No lips. No noses. No eyes. Weldon looked left, then right, and of course, saw no one. His hand removed the black felt-tip marker from his pocket and he reached up and very gently applied two small dots inside what the artist surely intended viewers to consider a head.

Now there was no doubt.

Now old Dellacourt’s people had eyes, not just some blank white empty heads.

Now they could look back at the people who looked all day at them.

In the 109 gallery, he found himself in what he called the “bad dream room.” Eyeballs coming out of forks. Trains powering through blood vessels. Clocks made of melting chocolate.

He loved chocolate. He had some in his pocket. Reese’s. Da bomb!

He peeled the wrapper off and popped the sweet peanut pudding cupcake into his mouth. As he chewed, he stared at the melting clock. It was like this guy—he leaned in close to the tag; Vice Royale, he calls himself—it was like he didn’t finish things.

Things need labels. People need to know what they’re looking at.

Weldon slipped the tiny tube of super glue from his pocket, removed the cap, pressed a small translucent daub of adhesive to the back of the Reese’s wrapper. Coast clear, he pressed the wrapper onto the painting, right where chocolate time started to puddle into the shape of a lovely woman.

So it went for the rest of the night. Attending and amending, nothing garish, nothing really even obvious to the casual observer. A dot here. An extra, tiny line there. Final touches everywhere. He was responsible for securing what some people called the “greatest collection of art in the Americas.” Now it was his greatest collection.

Filled with pride, he brought the wife and kids back, and pointed out what he had added to the masterpieces.

“See anything?” he asked his son, Berto, and leaned close to Stan Fante’s Romanticist celebration of the great Aztec killer Hernán Cortés.

The boy looked, then shook his head.

“Right there,” Weldon said. “That speck. On the conquistador’s fingernail? Looks like blood, right? Sharpie. By me.”

The kid went wide-eyed.

“You jess like the dawg,” he said.

“The dog? What you talkin’?”

“You know. Goin’ roun’, pissin’ on stuff ’n’ shit. You THE dawg!”

Overheard and confirmed via closed-circuit cameras, Weldon was exposed and dismissed. In an act of contrition, the museum put its defaced Fante up for auction.

It sold for five times its purchase price.

It may have been boring and unfinished before Weldon added his finishing touches, but now it was “the next chapter in a saga of artifice at the heart of art.”

Somehow, Weldon’s number found the fingers of various, anonymous, discreet and motivated curators. Back-channel buzz ascribed to Weldon an unparalleled ability to spy flaws where even the genius creators could not.

“It’s time for a renaissance on Renaissance art,” one curator said, speaking off the record. “I mean, everything needs an upgrade, right? If it’s five-hundred years old and nothing’s changed, why bother—we’ve seen it all, already. Sheesh.”

Eager to liquidate dusty elements of their own collections, hungry museums offered Weldon attractive compensation to proactively deface tired treasures. Millions poured in, from acquisitions managers eager to stock galleries with the best of the emerging Vandalism Movement.

Weldon took a good offer, moved his family to Houston, and started sniffing around the art inside the smoker-shaped Q’seum, hunting for value-added opportunities. “The Dawg” would know deficient art when he saw it. He would know when to lift his leg. He would know where to aim.

Stuart Watson

worked at newspapers in Anchorage, Seattle, and Portland. Second-place honoree in the 2025 Cambridge Short Story Prize, Watson has literary work in Barzakh, Bending Genres (Best Microfiction nominee), The Broadkill Review, BULL, Does It Have Pockets?, MacQueen’s Quinterly, The Muleskinner Journal, Rattle, Reckon Review, Sensitive Skin, Stanchion, and The Writing Disorder, among others. He lives in Oregon.

Author’s digital self resides at: https://chiselchips.com/