Every Week at Rainbow Snippets https://www.facebook.com/groups/963484217054974 participants post six lines of a work of theirs, a work-in-progress or a work by someone else that has LGBT characters.

To begin the Holidays, here’s my annual Christmastime Treat: A few snippets from Oscar Wilde. No openly LGBT characters here but the writer IS Oscar Wilde. Here, from “The Picture Of Dorian Grey,” Dorian realizes that his idle wish that his portrait should age instead of him may just have been granted. But it not only displays age but what kind of man he is…

It’s not a pretty picture…

As he was passing through the library towards the door of his bedroom, his eye fell upon the portrait Basil Hallward had painted of him. He started back in surprise, and then went over to it and examined it. In the dim arrested light that struggled through the cream-colored silk blinds, the face seemed to him to be a little changed. The expression looked different. One would have said that there was a touch of cruelty in the mouth. It was certainly curious.

Here’s another lengthy snippet

He threw himself into a chair, and began to think. Suddenly there flashed across his mind what he had said in Basil Hallward’s studio the day the picture had been finished. Yes, he remembered it perfectly. He had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain young, and the portrait grow old; that his own beauty might be untarnished, and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins; that the painted image might be seared with the lines of suffering and thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness of his then just conscious boyhood. Surely his prayer had not been answered? Such things were impossible. It seemed monstrous even to think of them. And, yet, there was the picture before him, with the touch of cruelty in the mouth.

Plenty of places to find this fine novel https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/489732.The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray if you want a spooky Christmas read.

And with that I wish you all the best for whatever season you find yourselves in.

—-jeff