01.
02.
03.
04.
BODY WITHOUT ORGANS
SHOP WARE
There’s a Pigeon in My Kitchen!
Fury, Unhappiness, AND OTHERS
01.
02.
03.
04.
BODY WITHOUT ORGANS
SHOP WARE
There’s a Pigeon in My Kitchen!
Fury, Unhappiness, AND OTHERS
Acryllic on canvas
June 2025
“Unhappiness”
28 May 2025
When it was becoming unbearable—once on an evening in November—I got up quickly from the couch and went to the bathroom without saying a word. I looked into the mirror where my skin turned white then red again, and with my fingers played a repulsive tune on overworked and tired flesh. I found myself wishing I’d hadn’t just clipped my finger nails, to get under the scab better, but reminded myself it was best, for this way the blood would not dry beneath the nail beds and show later.
Finally I pried it up, pulling fledging flesh too soon away from its mother. It fell into the sink more heavily than something yet dead and signed a red tail toward the drain. The afterbirth was less reluctant to wean, pooling at first, but very quickly, and soon was a large droplet which held for a moment, still, away from my face, in the surface of the mirror, before it failed to gravity and dropped beside the child, long dead. The decrescendo stung. I rushed to clean up my mess.
When the bleeding stopped I revisited my reflection in the mirror door where a red constellation was splayed out across the left cheek. Running a clean finger over the newly tamed spot, the final excavation site in a series of nervous digs, the area felt smooth, and when I closed my eyes the cheek was porcelain. A sweet and burnished illusion which the night will harden into raised scabs to be removed again in this obsessive pattern which has, softly and secretly become a part of life. The thought of blood opens my eyes again and the fantasy shatters. Upon realignment something ugly is molded; A sickly spectre with eyes-nose-cheeks-chin-mouth no longer combined into that Face who sings, “I, I am.” Instead Eye am cornea, conjunctiva, sclera, iris, pupil, aqueous and vitreous humor. No, wait, wait, cor, neaconjun, ctiv, asclerairis, pup, ill, queasy, vitriolic and laughable. In the depths of the mirror everything separates more and more rapidly into uncollectable bits until a pallid purplish flesh color has spread itself across every surface of the glass.
Everything is grotesque there, dissected. Emptied of blood, soaked in formaldehyde and layed out upon the medical student’s table for post-mortem diagnosis. “The patient clearly suffered from a minor case of obsessive compulsive disorder, as evidenced by the overwrought condition of the skin organ.” “But I pray you, look at the heart, clearly overworked with too much blood in the body.” “Poisoning of the blood,” another adds, “if you’ll see the toxicology, high protein levels. Could have been leukemia.” Another one, “I’d say she’s lucky to have died when she did, did you see the brain? What would have become of that amygdala I would never wish upon anyone.” They go on and on like this until a voice, cold and implacable, offers, “Aneurysm.” No one rebuts. “She would have never seen it coming.”
I’s remains there looking like they never belonged to anything with thoughts, now lying cold and claylike, in no one’s image, the work of a haphazard and drunken God. Suddenly they are all marching before me, hordes of them, the millions born every day for whom Probability will serve justly. Desperately I look for myself among them but I am already standing on the other side of the bridge, watching the colorful sky set on a day in the land of the living. I want to scream. A loud heart beat, out of time, tears me out of the mirror. The features realign themselves and I squeeze tightly against cheeks and jawbones to keep them in place with my hands.
I hadn’t shut the bathroom door completely before and nothing opens it and it creaks. I don’t scream and turn out of the mirror. Passing by the living room I asked him Will you join me soon? but he says I’m enjoying this, with an assuring smile, pointing towards the television.
Just as I lay my head down for sleep a child blew in from the window. She seemed in a daze. Even the orange lamplight, soft and diffuse over the four white walls of the room, threatens her half-shut eyes. A small spot on her leg signs a trickling red tail down towards her dimpled knee, but she is blithe to everything but the light. I ask if she’d please close the window, I don’t like the noise outside. “It’s no bother, but there are a lot of people busying themselves with living out there. The road becomes congested and very loud. It makes it difficult to sleep.”
“I’ve already closed it,” she said, “Just be easy on your mind.”
“Please just shut the window,” I ask her again, “Better you come in and away from it anyway.”
“What’s the matter with you? I’ve already closed it. And besides, what of the people outside? It’s not as if they care what you are doing here. If there were no light in the window, they may think no one lives here. And if they pay no mind to your being here, why should you pay any mind to their being out there? In the end it’s just you and me in here. No one else, really. But anyways, I’ve already closed it. You’re not the only one capable of closing windows.”
“I am not denying you that,” I feel desperate to get something across to her. “But there are some windows which are much more difficult to shut. The noise outside them is even louder. If you cannot bear the noise so much as to even approach the window, how do you expect to get over to close it?”
She doesn’t answer me. She is concerned with making it over to the bed without letting go of the walls, which she’s pressed her backside up against. Her right arm, small and porcelain white, almost blue, reaches out from her miniature body, and her fingers move desperately over its rough surface, as if its matte pentimento is the only thing confirming her existence. For a moment I think she might be blind, but she stares right at me. She keeps her hand on the wall even as she makes it up to the bed.
“What happened to your leg?” I ask. The spot, I can see now, is a small incision. It continues to bleed peculiarly, moving slowly and softly down the side of her body but away from everything else in the room, collecting nowhere and not staining the bedsheets.
“I woke up in the middle of something. At first it scared me, but then I liked how it bled, like I was able to see what was inside. They were trying to fix it, but I don’t think they got all of it. I left before they could finish.”
“To come here?” I asked. “What can I do for you, a child? You’ve come here looking for something, I imagine, but I cannot give it to you.”
“I understand you well enough to know you don’t have anything for me. It’s silly to think that. You’re not my mother.” I bring my hand up to my scarred face, and for the first time I realize just how small she is. I think I could hold her in my hand, but reason forbids the thought. She continues, “I’ve come here for your own good. You who forgets yourself, the way that things are. All alone out here, afraid of those living outside. You aren’t like them, the living. It’s not safe. I have a mother who can protect me from what’s to come. You––all you have is Vigilance.”
“You’ve come to tell me this? When you know I am trying to sleep? If you know me so well, you would know not to come to me when I am trying to sleep.”
“Sleep? How can you sleep while your body betrays you? All you do is peel the skin away from your face, which, I am trying to tell you, reveals nothing. Everything is more inside than that. Please, listen to what I’m trying to tell you.”
“Open the window again, any stranger would be a more welcome distraction than you.”
“You should be kinder to me, and pay me mind. I know you from a very early time.”
“And what about a later time? What do you know about what Will happen?”
“I don’t know anything.”
My heart began to beat in my head and in my eyes, and when I looked around the room Certainty sat like a hag upon my chest, her wings spread out, darkening every corner and whooshed out the lamplight as if it were a flame. I tried breathing into the very tops of my lungs, but with every attempt they became smaller until I knocked at the doors and could no longer get in. I resolved to cover my head with the sheets, thinking it better to die in a place void of all reference, removed of all possible memories so that there would not be so much to fear missing. I heard a whimpering sound. Any moment now. This is going to be the room where it happens, I thought. Here, alone and unready.
After some time I dozed off, and when I woke again fear had dissolved into drowsiness. I removed the covers from over my head to reveal a room upon which Certainty’s veil no longer loured, and wished to return to sleep before her weightiness came for me again. He came to bed, and I felt grateful for it. “Still up silly head?” He asked. He glanced at my cheek and his eyes frowned.
“I’m having a difficult night.” I said, feeling caught. “I think I might die very soon.”
“You say that as if it might snow tomorrow.”
“Well, what can I do? A thought is a thought. This one’s so loud it feels like I’ve just had a ghost in the room.”
“I can understand that. But what if you chose not to believe the thought? As one chooses not to believe in ghosts?”
“Don’t you think I’d like to? But how can my not believing help me? If something is wrong, I should pay it mind, shouldn’t I?”
“I just don’t think you need to be afraid of every minor pain. Nothing’s actually turned up, has it?
“Oh, that’s only a secondary fear. The real fear is what’s causing the pain. That there is something at work, underneath, that I ought to be mindful of. That I ought to pay attention to and get fixed.” A cold and sheer dread ran over me again and I reached up for my cheek, forgetting myself that someone was watching.
“Well can you think about how you actually feel? What your real symptoms are? It could just be nerves.” He’s turned onto his back, looking up at the ceiling.
“But nervousness plays tricks, and I’ve always been nervous. If you think nerves are the only thing causing my problems, then you obviously haven’t felt the difference between anxious disease and physical disease.”
“But I know that anxiety can actually trigger very real symptoms, especially if you feed into it. You seem fine to me. I wish for your own sake you’d stop filling it up. That ghost, as you say.” He was already turning over one final rotation to face away from me. He sounded sleepy, and I felt guilty for worrying him so much before bed.
“Maybe,” I said, “but I am still very afraid and I think I need to see a doctor.”
“Alright,” he said, and pulled up the cover so it shielded his ear.
“Alright,” I said, “Sleep well.”
Lying beside me, he joined all the things which rested still in the room, blanketed by the cold gray light who crept through the window. Flitting around the room, my eyes moved from one object to the next in time with a heartbeat that became quicker and quicker, louder and louder, until not even the sounds of car wheels rolling over wet pavement penetrated my consciousness. When I closed my eyes I saw him waking up in the morning, in the still room, amidst all of our things returning to their daytime colors. Everything but myself, which lay there still, beside him, cold and gray and left behind in the dull light of yesterday’s moon. I opened my eyes to look Certainty in the face once more. With my left hand I squeezed my temples to keep everything inside. With my right I grabbed for the wall and rubbed my palm and forearm desperately against its roughness.
“Please,” I whispered, “please. I promise I’ll be vigilant. Please don’t rip me away. Not yet.”
Based on the story by Franz Kafka.
Smoldering
Acryllic on canvas
December 2024