The performance artist nods, distracted. The children: where can they be hiding this time? Under the paper skirts of the table with its ranks of plastic cups? She can feel her dealer watching her. There is a smell of burning meat in the air — the mini sausages, maybe.
“Oh, no, here he comes,” said the woman with silver hands. “Don’t do it. You’ll just live happily ever after. Again.”
THE YOUNGEST BROTHER’S LOVER
He turns his back to me in bed and I tuck my hand under his wing. I can feel him thinking, thinking, thinking; then he softens to sleep.
I know what he thinks about, I was someone else once, too. I hopped it when she kissed me, scared of such a pink and hearty love. I whose blood had not yet warmed, between whose fingers translucent webs still stretched. Ugly with gravity, I lugged myself back to the pond — weak jump, volcanic splash. Quelle surprise! The water barely covered my head.
Now I’m thick and pink myself and sometimes pull a sweater on. I have hair on my balls. Hell, I have balls. But I still blush green, and I knew him when I met him. Saw, in my mind, red legs coming down from a feathered sky. Neck coming down, pearls of air in the feathers. Robber’s mask over bulging, vulnerable eyes. We had shared that cold world. I did not hold it against him that he once might have nibbled me up with the duckweed. If anything it thrilled me. But.
Sliding down the long curve of his throat, or lying next to him on a double futon: both are, I guess, love, but I choose this.
MOTHERHOOD, BROTHERHOOD
Time goes by. The children don’t turn up. Did she ever have children? The performance artist considers adoption. She reads from the information packet: “Fees may be significantly lower for foolish and lazy youngest sons, children thumb-sized and smaller, those with the heads of hedgehogs or the ears of donkeys. Many so-called special needs, given proper care, will not significantly impact the future health and happiness of your child.” She schedules a home study. “So they can determine whether I am likely to eat my children, I guess. When it should be obvious that I am responsible to a fault. But I do have doubts. My brothers, for example: I lost them. Who was it who said, ‘to lose one brother may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose six looks like carelessness’?”
“You were how old?” said the woman with silver hands. “What kind of father leaves seven children alone in the woods? For that matter, what kind of father marries a woman he can’t trust with his children?”
What kind of father cuts off his daughter’s hands, thinks the performance artist.
“Anyway, you got them back,” said the woman with silver hands. “How’s your brother?”
“He and his boyfriend have bought a house in the Berkshires. Well, a cabin, really. You’d like it, it stands on a giant chicken foot. Hops around the yard. In winter they’re going to ‘tool down to Florida’ in it. They’ve asked me if I want to come along, but I don’t know.”
THE PERFORMANCE ARTIST DAYDREAMS
A group of swans — six cobs and one pen — shift their weight uneasily as a woman walks toward them, carrying six little shirts.
LIVE POULTRY
The performance artist goes to a live poultry store in south Brooklyn. There are hand-painted Arabic letters on the yellow sign, and a proud white cock with one red foot raised. Inside are a lot of Hasidic men and Mexicans, or maybe Guatemalans or Colombians, who knows, and cages stacked to the ceiling, with dirty feathers sticking out of them. She bends and peels up a feather from the sticky floor.
She buys six swans, no, geese, the live poultry store does not sell swans, and barricades them into the backseat with cardboard boxes. They honk out the windows as she drives over the bridge, possibly smelling water, and draw startled looks from passing drivers. In the gallery, they walk around importantly, looking like art critics and nibbling at electrical cords. The next morning, the gallery reports the theft of artworks valued at thirty thousand dollars.
NEWS
Six small robbers are spotted on a department store security video, pulling on identical shirts and turning this way and that in front of the mirror, then dropping the shirts on the floor.
Six small robbers are caught on video attempting to enter the glass building by that architect, the one who did that thing in Sidney. They are frightened away by a night watchman.
Six small robbers are found sleeping in children’s beds in the Red Hook IKEA. Locked in a room to await the arrival of a law-enforcement officer, they apparently escape through a third-floor window. Goose dung is discovered on the windowsill.
ABOUT TIME
“Isn’t it about time you came out with something new?” said the art critic. “Not that it’s any of—”
“No, it isn’t.”
When they met, she wasn’t speaking. They went for walks in the dark; sometimes she climbed a tree, and when he, growing impatient of the game, begged her to come down to bed, she would throw down her shoes, her stockings, her dress, aiming at the red light of his cigarette (several of her favorite dresses still had tiny round holes in them); she would unhook her bra and pull it out through her sleeve and throw that down, until she stood barefoot on a branch in nothing but her slip, looking down at the darkness where he stood.
“Marry me,” he would say, to the pale shape roosting in the tree.
“Of course he knew I couldn’t answer,” she told the woman with silver hands.
Now that she is speaking, their relationship has deteriorated.
“It’s about time you came out with something new, don’t you think?” said the art dealer. “If you’re ready.”
“I think the art critic is sleeping with my dealer,” said the performance artist to her friend.
“Ew,” said the woman with silver hands.
FEATHERS NEEDED
The performance artist puts an ad on Craigslist. Feathers needed, swans preferred.
FACTS
The best quill pens were cut from swan feathers.
A female swan is called a “pen.”
Right-handed writers favored feathers from the tip of the left wing, which curved outward, away from the line of sight.
THE PERFORMANCE ARTIST WORKS (AGAIN)
In a storefront gallery in a big city, a performance artist sits at a spinning wheel, spinning feathers into thread, sits at a loom, weaving thread into cloth for little shirts. Down drifts around her, collecting in loose, dusty rolls on the floor. Her nose is running; she has developed an allergy.
THE PERFORMANCE ARTIST DREAMS
The feathers, too, sting her fingers.
THE PERFORMANCE ARTIST’S REVIEWS
“Lacks the critical edge of her best work”. “Has the performance artist lost her sting?”. “The aspirational tone is a welcome shift from the claustrophobia and bitterness of her ‘Nettled’ show, but the feather shirts, while frankly gorgeous, resolve the vexed issue of female domestic servitude perhaps too easily in resorting to the hackneyed metaphor of flight”. “In repeating with variations her own earlier work, is the performance artist cannily engaging
