beating. Flying.
Yes, every time he comes.
HER PARENTS
“My sons were the flighty ones. My daughter was always super down-to-earth,” says the father. “It was a surprise when she told us she wanted to be an artist. We tried to steer her toward something more practical. My wife suggested she take Home Ec. That’s where she learned to sew, so we feel that we’ve contributed. Indirectly.”
HER SILENCE
Words rise in her throat like gas. She swallows them back.
HER HANDS
look like gloves, or fake hands inside of which her real hands are hidden.
HER EXPERIENCE OF TIME
Read this sentence; repeat for six years.
THE OPENING
One day, someone turns up with a bucket of soapy water, a razor blade, and a squeegee, and scrapes the years off the window. A janitor climbs a ladder and replaces a bulb. The floor is washed, a folding table is covered with a paper cloth and plastic cups, and then the gallery owners sweep in with great tans and lots of friends and the gallery is full again. There are five nettle shirts hung on the wall, dry and spiky and brown. They look dangerous, though also a little sad. A sixth shirt, laid out on the table, is finished except for the left sleeve.
The performance artist, at the loom, where the material for the last sleeve is slowly growing, doesn’t look up.
A reporter leans over her with his pen poised over a notebook. “Tsk. Not until eight o’clock!” says the dealer, drawing him away.
When the minute hand snaps to twelve, an uncertain cheer goes up. It’s eight, but the performance artist hasn’t quite finished the last sleeve. But she gets right up. Her smile looks a little odd, but then, she hasn’t smiled for six years.
There’s a man looking at an empty hook on the wall. She hangs the last shirt there. “I thought it was you.”
“Of course it’s me.”
“I’m not going to ask where the others are.” She prods with a fingernail at a blister pillowing the tip of her baby finger. It looks like a drop of clear water.
“At happy hour, probably. Stop picking.” He puts his wing around her. “What do you expect? They have their happy ending.”
AFTERWARD
Your brothers are billing and cooing around you, nibbling their arms and puffing up their chests. One wing shudders, is stilled by a jeweled hand. The smell of burning meat hangs in the air; it is the king’s mother, your mother-in-law, cooked like a goose. No one is sorry, not even the king, so smile. Do you remember how to smile?
THE OPENING, CONTINUED
“Fabulous,” said a member of the Stepsisters’ Collective, beetles spilling from her mouth. “I love it!”
The performance artist catches sight of her reflection in the window. She should not have put on lipstick, she can never remember that she is wearing it. It looks as though she has been eating something bloody.
No, it is her dealer whose lipstick is smeared, and who is now weaving purposefully through the crowd, one hand clenched in the sleeve of the critic, her smile hard.
No, what happened is that her dealer kissed her; possibly she intended a European peck on the cheek, and it was the performance artist’s clumsiness that caused their mouths to meet. Or possibly that was the dealer’s intention in the first place, since her mouth clung longer than necessary. But was that because she actually desired the performance artist, or because she wanted others to think they were sleeping together? And if the latter, was that to raise herself up, or to lower the performance artist, or both, or to make the art critic jealous so that he attached himself more firmly to the performance artist — or perhaps to the dealer herself — or to drive him away, so that if the dealer could not have him, neither could the performance artist?
Maybe it is not lipstick at all but sweet-and-sour sauce from the six little drumsticks that she served herself from a waiter who looked like her father, the bones of which are still folded in her napkin; she was always an enthusiastic eater.
Or, she has been eating something bloody.
ALSO ON DISPLAY
A teacup full of sand.
Three poppies.
A ball of yarn.
MAGIC
The ball of yarn rolls by itself, leading the way. All you have to do is hold on to the end.
FACT
A story is sometimes called a “yarn.”
THE OPENING, CONTINUED
She pushes through the crowd and closes herself in the bathroom, swiping at the light switch, and hissing as she catches, as well, the sharp tip of a nail. She pops her pinkie in her mouth, smearing blood on her lips.
The bathroom doubles as a storeroom; there are six small narrow wooden beds jumbled or stacked in the corner or spaced neatly along the wall. They are the perfect size for her brothers, who, coincidentally, have just flown through the window, dropped their feathers in six neat heaps, and now crowd around her, goose-pimpled but human, congratulating her on her big night. But they can’t stay, her brothers tell her, they will only retain human form for fifteen minutes, an hour, a night, and then the robbers whose den this is will return, and she, too, should leave at once.
How convenient that there were precisely six robbers, she thought. And such small ones!
I’m going, I’m going, she says. But do you have a Band-Aid?
THE YOUNGEST BROTHER’S LOVER
Once I caught him plucking it. The tip was already bare — a sorry raw red-spotted naked prong sticking out of a nest of feathers. I went down on it, which I think confused him more than it excited him. Me, too, really. Afterward I said, “Don’t you ever do that again. I want you exactly the way you are.” Which surprised me, because all I’ve ever thought about my whole life was turning into something else. That’s something we have in common.
THE PERFORMANCE ARTIST DREAMS
Nettles sprout from her shoulder blades, sheathing her arms.
She awakes, a strange taste in her mouth. Where are her brothers — that is, her children? Has she eaten them? Have they flown away? Did she ever even have children?
THE OPENING, CONTINUED
