Carrion Sister

It was two weekends after your sister died that her clothing arrived as a gift from her widower. You were holed up in your studio in the guest house and I had answered the front door to the boxes of furs and jewels that Clyde Ogden had gifted to you as your sister Caroline would no longer need them.

You said you remembered the sound the glass and blood and how she lay in the street as the car that hit her sped away. It was so late at night, no one saw it happen besides you. They never found the car; you could only say it was a yellow sedan. You pushed the cut meat around on your plate and did not look up at me as you told me this. I wanted so badly to hold your hand, but I knew it would not be received well. You had such a cold energy.

When you had gotten back from Caroline’s funeral three days ago, all you said was that it had been a gorgeous ceremony with peonies. You smoked cigarettes all of the way through and wore a black duster and sunglasses to cover your face. People did not ask you about how Caroline looked after she had been mowed down in the street in her fur coat on your visit to New York. You didn’t say much else beyond this. You said you didn’t want to expend energy where it didn’t need to go, as Caroline was gone. You processed things differently. You said you needed to work on your show.

I left Caroline’s things in the entrance way. I didn’t know what to do with them after this, so I knocked on the door to your studio. We had sequestered you away to the guest house for your work. You opened the sliding metal door to the 2000 square foot mock gallery and studio and poked your head out. Cigarette smoke followed you and plumed out of the slit in the doorway. Your hair was piled on top of your head in a messy bun and you wore a black turtle neck with high waisted black pleated skirt. You were barefoot. You hadn’t come to the dinner table in a long time.

I told you that Caroline’s things had arrived, and you slid the door open more and leaned against the frame of the entrance to your studio while I stayed on the steps. We had an unspoken agreement that I wouldn’t look at your work unless asked. You said you were working on something new, something different for the show. I tried to peer into the studio and saw splintered canvases littering the concrete floors and white walls. You blew smoke upwards into the air and looked to your side. I opened my mouth, but I had no clue what to say.

“Leave it in the guest room,” you said, “I’m working on something new.” You turned and shut the door behind you before I could reach out and touch your shoulder. There was a lack of something between us in that moment. I couldn’t help you process, but you knew I was there. I piled the furs in the guest room in their cardboard boxes. The brooches, necklaces, and rings amassed by Caroline from Clyde laid on a table and created a gorgeous mosaic of diamonds ranging from canary to flawless and clear. Pearls and rubies interspersed in the collection. You often discussed how fashionable Caroline had been when she was alive and how the Ogden family money had kept her satiated in the best clothes, but you never liked the fact that she wore fur.

…

I did not see you eat but you said that you took a break for a snack while I was at work and if you had the time. You had isolated yourself into the studio and rarely came to bed. When you had an idea, your skin ran hot, and you would pull away from me. You threw the sheets off of yourself and would walk down the hallway through the living room and I would hear the back-door slide shut. In the distance I would hear the sliding metal door to the studio open and close. I was alone and I had no clue what to say. I considered calling a doctor in the morning for you and fell asleep.

The next morning, I found you in the kitchen, barefoot and still dressed in your black silk pajamas. You were wearing a string of Caroline’s pearls from the guest room and you said you had a spark of inspiration. You had stayed up all night you said you would call the gallery; you needed an extension. You said you were perfecting things. Color had returned to your face and your eyes had so much warmth in them I did not question what was going on. Your hair caught the sunlight so beautifully at our kitchen table. You seemed back to normal.

…

A month later we had gotten back into a routine, you would be in the kitchen making calls for work if you weren’t shut away in the guest house. On a particular Thursday, you sat at the table with a mug of coffee on the phone with a private dealer, a close friend. You were saying it was some of your best work. That you felt revived. He would have to come by for a private showing in the coming weeks before it was sent to the gallery. You were in a black cable knit pullover with bare feet. You turned your head and smiled at me while I hung my coat on the rack in the entryway. I crossed the room and tickled your back as you leaned over the table and continued to chat on the phone. As you wrote down the time of arrival for the dealer and I noticed you were wearing one of the tennis bracelets Caroline had left behind. The diamonds glinted in the sunlight playfully like many pieces of glass. They shot spectral colors throughout the room. I thought it was fantastic that you had decided to carry so much of Caroline with you. You hung up the phone and turned to me and cupped my face in your hands. There were flecks of red paint underneath your fingernails. I was glad you had decided to use color for your pieces. Your palms felt so clammy.

“It’s almost as if I can feel her” you said. Wrapping my arms around you, I could feel the warmth in you once again.

…

The night before the dealer came, you flung the sheets off of yourself and rolled from the bed. I turned and looked up at the ceiling and sighed as the sound of the guest house door shut in the distance. My eyes were about to close but, in the distance, I heard the studio door slide open and the back door open as well. I saw the light in the hallway come on and heard your bare feet approaching our room, but you did not come, instead I heard the door to the guest room open and the ripping of cardboard. Putting my feet on the cold hardwood floors and walking towards the hallway, I looked out of our room and let out a yelp. A massive pile of furs stood in our hallway, with a pair of bare feet peeking out from the swaths of material. It was a monstrous amalgam of colored pelts. Deep sable, coyote, lynx, chinchilla. Caroline’s coats were amassed in our hallway and were lit by the warm recessed lighting; you poked your head out from behind them. Your eyes were wild and puffy. Red paint flecked your face. Your hair was out of place and the lighting made your eyes dark. Your skin had tightened with excitement, and visible sweat slicked the surface of your face.

You said nothing to me and walked out the back door and into your studio. You didn’t ask me to follow and I conceded to your artistic routine. Things had been going well up until this moment, but grief is relative. I convinced myself it was a lapse in the process of your bereavement, and I went back to bed.

The next day when I came home from work you were fully dressed in a long basic black gown. Your hair was pulled neatly into a bun and I could hear the sound of heels beneath the skirt of your dress. Your neck looked like it stretched from out of the black fabric, accentuated and delicate, almost bird like with your gaunt eyes, black from a night of perfecting the work in your studio. You were so hungry to show your work.

You received the art dealer in our entryway with all of the kisses on the cheeks. Swathing him in a hug with the long sleeves of your black gown, they engulfed the man like wings. You were circling about the room as you poured him a glass of red wine before making your trip to the studio. I noticed you wore no pearls. You wore no bracelets. You had done your nails like the talons of a bird and they stuck jagged and black from your hands around the stem of the wine glass that you handed to the dealer.

“Enough, enough” you said, and you took the dealer by the hand and led him out the back door of our house and into your little home that you had tinkered and toiled in since the accident. I was not invited and understood that I would most likely be able to look at the art based on the dealer’s reaction. If he left without making many fervent calls in our entryway raving about your work, I would see the pieces later that night. If he got in his car without doing so he would say he would be in touch, I would hear the smashing of canvases from the studio all through the night and you would come to bed and collapse into me.

He did neither of those things that day.

I heard the door to the studio open and shut and had only poured myself a glass of red wine before I heard a clamor in the studio and the sound of glass breaking from the open back door. I rushed out into the yard and slid the heavy door open to the studio.

There stood the art dealer, he had barely entered your den and his hands covered his mouth. He was a ghastly white. He had dropped his glass of wine on the concrete floors and it had shattered in a spectacular fashion painting the brushed concrete a deep plum.

In the center of the room on a large white wall was a painting of calicos, reds, and yellows. It was massive and engulfed the whole of the back wall. My eyes focused on the piece and I slowly realized that the calicos were not any sort of paint, but Caroline’s fur coats strategically tacked on in a macabre patchwork. They were spattered with a deep burgundy paint; the paint had soaked into the pelts and gave it a grotesquely wet look. Amongst the fleshy look of the pieces there were glimmers of what looked like glass and white paint. They were Caroline’s fine pieces of jewelry sewn into the large bloody quilt. The pearls hung like embroidered teeth knocked from an unfortunate mouth. The diamonds glinted like pieces of crushed glass against the faux roadkill.

In the center of this piece, a tall menacing figure in a black gown stood and laid its palms and head flat onto the flesh of the wall in an embrace. After a moment it turned its head and looked back at me with gaunt black eyes. Half of its face smeared in deep red paint.

In a tone washed low with grief, it said, “I can feel her again.”

Submitted August 26, 2019 at 12:47AM by officialwriting00 https://ift.tt/2ZqXIN1