I could hear the sounds from the street outside. The street outside the painting. Carts rolling. A dog. People carrying on lives that were not there. I looked at the globe behind him and saw how papery yellow it looked, like a skull. I saw the thick red of the tablecloth so clearly I could have been feeling the grain of it myself, with my own fingers. All this, could be I was imagining it, yes, caught up in the details, getting a little lost in them. I stood and allowed myself to believe that. I’ve seen masterpieces that can do almost as much, like I said. But just as I was going to make my turn to the stool, to look for the first folks coming by, I saw him move his whole head and look at me.
He opened his mouth. Sweet mouth it is. I was terrified by its sweetness, and I saw his small teeth, which were wet, which nobody’s ever seen, and he put the pen down, and got up. The length of him, standing in his black frock coat and trousers, white shirt. He moved forward a little—the painting is close in on him, he had so little distance he could go. He plucked his hat off the back of the seat and put it on his head. He was getting ready to get down.
Then I don’t know what he did, because I got myself out of there.
Of course I had to go back to work after a little bit. You think I just ran out on a good docent job? I stayed my distance from him, glad when the room was chock-full of people, all looking at girls pouring milk from jugs. From across the room I kept him in my indirect line of sight. Paintings demand an emotional response from you, some more than most. Part of it is the quality of the work, part knowing how much older they are than you. That boy who is a man is three hundred and fifty-odd. Time enough for him to grow a self, and use it, when he can. Maybe I was just tired, you’ll say, thinking a painting looked at me. With the idea, maybe, that I’ve felt invisible in this line of work. Maybe no, I say. It was him that was that tired of being seen.
Instrument of the Ancestors
TROY L. WIGGINS
Back in the day Darius, Tavis, and Fred would go to Greenbelt Park, stumble down to the banks of the Mississippi, and skip rocks. Even though they weren’t supposed to. Darius loved the river, loved the sour smell of ancient rot and the moody, low noises of unseen things splashing in the muddy water. It was their Saturday fall ritual until Fred went under.
“It’s like breathing through somebody else’s mouth,” the Tavis of Darius’s memory said from way back. “Disgusting, how hot it is outchea.”
Fred smiled his goofy, lopsided smile. “Why you thinking about breathing in other boys’ mouths? You gay, ain’t it, Tavis?”
Fred was right, of course, though Tavis didn’t want to admit it. Darius knew that Tavis thought about other boys’ mouths all the time. Nobody cared about that. Tavis was Tavis, usually quick with a husky laugh or a soft smile. Except for this time. Instead, his response was to shove Fred. Fred was giggling even when his foot slipped on a piece of crumbling moldy wood, and Darius could still hear crystal clear through the decades the wet slap of Fred’s head against a cosmically positioned rock.
They don’t remember how the blood trickled down Fred’s temple. Just that he fell into the water and was swallowed without a trace. Neither Darius nor Tavis were thinking about other boys’ mouths then, at least not in that way. They cussed. They prayed. They ran. What else could they do?
Fred’s mother, Harriet, didn’t shed a tear at the news.
“The river just takes sometimes,” she said. “It gives and it takes, just like the Lord. We got plenty of ancestors in that river. Fred’s one of them now. Oh, my baby.”
Darius snapped out of his dream and found himself standing in the window of his seventeenth-floor office looking out over the Mississippi River. He didn’t even remember approaching the window. He felt half wet, like a towel wrung out and thrown across the floor. His office was full of buzzing, the disquieting clash of cicadas. For a moment he was a boy again, staring in horror at the river that had swallowed his friend.
“I gets weary and sick of tryin’ . . .”
Something tingled at the edges of his perception, like he wasn’t alone. It was his phone, he realized, stumbling to his desk. A 504 area code? You never knew these days. He tapped his earbuds.
“Hello?”
“Hey,” a husky voice greeted him. “Is this, uh. Is this Darius Beasley?”
“Yeah, who is . . . wait. Tavis?”
“Uh, yeah. I got your number from your mom. How you been?”
“Don’t call me after fifteen years with no ‘how you been?’ What you want?”
Tavis’s chuckle incensed Darius even more. “You never did have time for bullshit. But bear with me. Have you, uh. Have you heard from Fred lately?”
“Man, get the fuck off my phone—”
“Wait!” Tavis shouted, and the quaver in his voice made Darius pause. “Man, listen.
