I put the board on the easel. I painted the board with Gesso, and when the Gesso on the board was dry, I unscrewed the cap on the bottle of boiled linseed oil. I unscrewed the caps on the tubes of pigments, those pigs, the Sap Green. There was Ultramarine Blue and King’s Crown. There were crimson pigs, Vermillions and Alizarins, and there was ocher and black and yellow and Vandyke Brown.
I mixed them around on glass, the oil and the pigs. Each pig had its own little spot. I set the easel by the mirror and painted what I saw, me shirtless in the mirror, my face not nice, dark circles under my eyes. I was alone in the house while she, Miss Gorgeous, was off picking peaches with Sid, wonderful hot exploding peaches. I know about those peaches. Those peaches explode in your mouth when you bite into them.
I painted myself shirtless and sad, pathetic, ultra-skinny. It was a true rendition of what I looked like in the mirror, and I got the knife, the buck knife. I clutched the buck knife and stabbed the board. The blade stuck into my ribs, and I painted the gash with blood pigs. I painted the gash, the wound, painted the blade of the buck knife too.
Miss Gorgeous came home for cream, for fucking cream! Not so she could be with me for the rest of the day, but for cream, so that she and Sid could go to Sid’s house and eat their freshly picked hot peaches from a bowl of cream. I saw it all, the bowl, the clay bowl Sid made, the wonderful artist, the wonderful great artist, Sid. I saw the bowl on Sid’s futon between them, filled with fresh hot peaches drowned in cream. I saw them reaching their pretty fingers into the clay bowl at the same time. His fingers, you should see Sid’s fingers, the fingers of a great artist and musician. You should see Sid’s living room, Sid with his tall walls and cobwebs and musical instruments and paintings. When she saw my painting, of sad me with no shirt on, the buck knife stuck in my ribs, she said, “What’s that?”
”What’s it look like?”
”Like you’re trying to be a martyr.”
”It’s a voodoo painting.”
”I’m still waiting for you to grow up.”
Then she was gone, again. I was alone, again, alone in the house while she, Miss Gorgeous, was with Sid.
Miss Gorgeous did not come home that night. What happened that night is not hard to imagine. Imagine the woman you love on a futon, her legs, her ankles, her feet held aloft by the talented hands of Sid, who has already touched her face with his genius hands that know how to paint a painting. Sid’s talented hands have taken special delight in the shape of her clavicles. Now Sid’s hands hold her feet. Sid’s fingers are curled around her insteps. Sid’s stomach brushes her stomach. He was your best friend. You took him into your bosom and Miss Gorgeous took him into hers. In the woods one day, their palms stained with blackberry juice, they fell in love. You saw it, it!
A week later the painting stares over her boxes of packed things. She has ten or eleven boxes, maybe twelve boxes. All of her things are packed up in the boxes, her candles, dresses, her plates, silverware, her bone collection, her marbles, her record albums and sewing supplies and real bee earrings. She’ll be off in the morning, off to Sid. They can live happily ever after. Miss Gorgeous can really have at it forever with Sid.
”I painted the painting for you,” I say. “The painting is yours.”
She doesn’t want the painting. I sure don’t want the painting. Neither of us wants the painting. It isn’t what you hang on your wall, the painting. It isn’t the sort of thing you care to look at, the painting. I suggest she pull the buck knife out of the painting, use the unpainted side of the painting as a cutting board. The cutting board was a gift from her mother, after all. The board is hers. There is nothing wrong with the board. She can cut garlic on the board. She can sculpt clay on the board. She can sculpt a clay face of Sid on the motherfucking cutting board.
”Oh yes. Ha ha ha,” she says.
Which is how we come to put the painting in the trunk, Miss Gorgeous putting up with me one last time. It’s our last outing together. We must find a place to hang the painting, so I drive south, south for the woods. In the woods is where we picked blackberries with Sid that day. I can still see it, them, Miss Gorgeous and the genius artist, there they are, under the sun squashing up blackberries in their hands, staining their palms black and blue with drupelet juice.
Rage is what I’m choked up with as I drive us, a quiet rage, secret, the rage of grown-ups. Not a rage to share, this rage. It is a rage to keep inside, keep stuffed down. That night of the peaches, when she stayed with Sid, I ran myself headlong into a solid wall of bricks. It hurts when you run yourself headlong into a solid wall of bricks. I was choked up with rage then. I am choked up with rage now. As I drive, all choked up with rage, I feel the taste of the peaches on my tongue, the taste of the peaches all in my mouth.
Miss Gorgeous takes off her shoes. Miss Gorgeous takes off her shoes and she takes off her socks. There is her foot. There is her other foot, both feet, her feet that Sid has touched. She sticks her left foot up on the dash, her damp toes smudging the windshield glass, the light coming in flickering, oh.
Do I want to lose my mind? I don’t think anybody wants to lose their mind. I don’t think anybody wants to lose their mind ever, not ever, never ever in a million years.
I pull the car onto the shoulder of the road. I park the car on the shoulder of the road where the trees begin, where the blackberries grow. I take off my shoes. I take off my socks. Here we are, in the same place she and Sid made themselves have something in common that day. But it is just us today, the two of us, us with no shoes, us with no socks on our feet.
I pop the trunk.
I give her the nails.
I give her the hammer.
I pull the painting from the trunk.
We walk.
It has been sticky, a miserable, hot day, but the day changes quickly. Clouds slide in thickly under the sun, and are dark up there now, the clouds twisting around in mad bands.
We see a red turtle in the sand.
We leave the trail.
We walk down a hill through the trees and find a good tree to hammer the painting of me all sad into. I want the painting of me all sad hammered up high so that if somebody is walking through the woods and sees me, some rednecks maybe, they won’t be able to rip me down. Maybe the rednecks will blast me with a shotgun, a pistol, use me for target practice, which is fine by me.
I get this log and prop it against the tree, and I balance myself up there on the log, and she gives me the painting, the buck knife still stuck in my ribs. The oily pigs haven’t dried yet. The oily pigs rub off on my hands and arms and some gets on my face.
She gives me the nails. I put the nails in my mouth, tasting rust, and I notice the wind has picked up, it is really going, the wind. She gives me the hammer, and it is really blowing, the wind, so that my hair keeps flapping in my eyes. I hold the hammer back, and when I slam the hammer onto the nail, at the very instant of contact, metal on metal, the world flashes bright yellow and explodes, KABLAM! This flash, this bang, it about scares me off my log. A tree somewhere has cracked in half.
”Hurry,” she says.
I finish hammering quick. I hammer me in there good into the tree, and jump down from the log and we stand here, transfixed, looking up the hill at this violence that has erupted around us. The trees have gone crazy, are thrashing back and forth, waving their branches thick in the sky, and bending way down, their tubular trunks creaking, stressing. It starts raining. The rain comes down sparsely at first, in thick capsulate drops that are heavy and cold, and explode into many little droplets when the drops slam against us. We run up the hill through all of the blowing trees, and the twigs and branches and leaves falling down, and the rain that is falling down crazy now. All the way up the hill we run, up to Big Dismal.
At Big Dismal there is a deck, a newly erected observation deck made of wood, and we scramble down the rough slope of eroded earth, the roots curving out handy for manoeuvring, and duck below it where a lot of mud is. The mud under the deck is deep and hot. It’s like the ground has a heater in it. The mud sucks up around our ankles and shins, quicksandy, the mud, silty and sucky and warm, the mud.
In the mud, soaking wet, we hear another tree falling, hitting other branches as it falls. It is scary. The tree is falling close to us, a massive tree that will squash us and kill us to death if it lands on the observation deck and causes it to collapse. It is the sort of sound to make you want to grab the nearest person and hug her close. But we don’t hug. We are at odds, as they say, at odds. She is in love with Sid now. She doesn’t want to have anything to do with me now. She’s told me plenty, it is Sid she now loves. I am the poison, she’s told me. The pollutant. It is her duty to think highly enough of herself to rid herself of me.
The sound of the rain grows louder, slamming against the earth harder in the thunder, drubbing the earth as the rain pours in through the slats above us cold and dribbling, the rain, falling down in cold dribbling sheets of rain.
I shove the hammer-handle into my pocket, and reach out with both hands. I unbutton her shirt from the top down. I spread her shirt apart to see the russet freckles that I know so well, her breasts white and glowy and freckled. In the shadowy pulses of cloud-choked light, in the turbulence of impending death—for that is what it feels like, like our lives are in danger—I touch her, ever so lightly, my fingertips drops of rain, nothing more. That’s when she takes her shirt off the rest of the way off. She takes her shirt off and hangs it on a splinter in the boards above our wet heads.
Then I see pity. Through pity she has done this. Through pity she has let me touch her. Through pity, oh pitiable me. In pitying me she grabs my head and kisses my mouth. She takes off her skirt, tosses it onto a fern. Turning her back to me, she lowers her knees into the mud. She leans over the mud and puts her hands into the mud and sinks down into all that hot heated mud.
Watching her, my torture, looking down at the long wet stretch of her in the choked light, I pull the hammer from my pocket. You hear about this. Such thinking happens in the minds of men. But I don’t. I throw the hammer instead. The hammer falls down through the rain and hits the water of Big Dismal far below, breaking its surface. Down through the throat of the hole the hammer I threw rolls. I take off my shorts.
Her back and hips together form the shape of a guitar. She is a woman that is a guitar, her body warped by rain, her curved spine a wet fingerboard.
I say her name.
She stays like she is, waits there.
This is not the normal her way.
This is a new sort of her way, a way she’s picked up off Sid, the talented genius who knows how to paint a painting. Sid is all about spontaneity. Sid has given her this. She worships Sid. She belongs to Sid. I put my hands on Sid’s hips. In the rain coming down against our spines I play Sid’s guitar.
I’m not the sort to bawl or cry—I’m a holder-insider, a slam-my-head-against-the-waller—but I cry. The loveliness does it, the delicate wavering movements of her scapulas, those panels meant to guard what’s precious against the assaults of picks. Her neck reaches down from between her shoulders, her golden locks flowing like broken strings over the dark mud. It’s insane, so I push her forward. Her breasts press down into the mud. She pushes herself back up and the mud sucks at them. If the mud was chocolate, her boobs would be chocolate-dipped now in the way of Dairy Queen. She is a pale guitar with chocolate-dipped tits that are Sid’s.
The storm blows over. Sunlight falls down around us, and the leaves of the ferns sparkle. Everything sparkles. When she gets up out of the mud she sparkles. She is covered all over with mud, a mud woman—we both are mud-covered—but she sparkles, and her eyes of blue. She dives into the hole sparkling and I dive down after her. In the cold dark waters I see the blur that is her, and kick her way and grab her body. She struggles at first, trying to get away from the poison that is me, but I find her hand and she relents. She is mine. We are sinking, together, and I’m thinking of the hammer way down there at the bottom where electric eels live. I see the eels in the murk, swishing around this iron thing that has invaded their space, but she makes for the surface. Her leg, then her foot, slips through my fingers.
We climb out of the hole and put on our wet clothes.
Walking back to the car we do not speak. We see things in the woods, the fallen trees, and the ferns getting lighter, perkier as they drip. A silky mist wanders through the needles of the trees. We do not speak on the drive home.
But it isn’t home.
It is a rented apartment, an apartment we’ve rented for three years, the Christmas lights always on, our little home.
She does not wait for tomorrow to leave. She packs her boxes into her van. She drives off with her bone collection, with her sassafras incense and real bee earrings. As she passes by the window in her bright blue van, I hear her scream, “You stupid fuck!” That’s her screaming at herself. She is driving off to Sid, already spoiled. They can pick peaches all they like now. They can take their time.
About the author:
I am currently finishing a degree at Ole Miss. My fiction has appeared in about 30 journals, including American Short Fiction and Iron Horse Literary Review. I have stories forthcoming from The Literary Review, Cream City Review, Echo Ink Review and elsewhere. I am on the faculty in fiction at the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference.
Wow. And I mean that in the best possible way. My favorite bit, in case you’re interested: “I’m not the sort to bawl or cry—I’m a holder-insider, a slam-my-head-against-the-waller—but I cry. The loveliness does it, the delicate wavering movements of her scapulas, those panels meant to guard what’s precious against the assaults of picks.” Inspired.