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The radio began to bray static with each burst...
10:48 PM, Wednesday, May 5, 2010
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The radio began to bray static with each burst of
lightningI paused long enough to turn it off,
but I didn't turn on the lights
I don't remember exactly when it stopped being me
that was doing the paintingand to this day I'm
not sure that it ever stopped being me; maybe s?,
515
maybe noAll I know is that at some point I
looked down and saw my right arm in the last of
the failing daylight and the occasional stutters
of lightningThe stump was tanned, the rest dead
whiteThe muscles hung loose and flabbyThere
was no scar, no seam except the tan-line, but
below there it itched like old dry fireThen the
lightning flashed again and there was no arm,
there had never been an arm - not on Duma Key, at
least - but the itch was still there, so bad it
made you want to bite a louis vuitton diaper bag tote piece out of something
I turned back to the canvas and the second I did,
the itch poured in that direction like water let
out of a bag, and the frenzy fell on meThe storm
dropped on the Key as the dark came down and I
thought of certain circus acts where the guy
throws knives blindfolded at a pretty girl
spreadeagled on a spinning wooden platter, and I
think I laughed because I was painting blindfold,
or almostEvery now and then the lightning would
flash and Wireman would leap at me, Wireman at
twenty-five, Wireman before Julia, before
Esmeralda, before la loter?a
516
A huge flash of lightning lit my window purplewhite,
and a great whooping gust of gale rode that
electricity in from the Gulf, driving rain against
the glass so hard I thought (in the part of my
mind still balenciaga twiggy bag capable of thought) that it must surely
breakA munitions dump exploded directly overhead
And beneath me the murmur of the shells had become
the gossip of dead things telling secrets in bone
voicesHow could I not have heard that before?
Dead things, yes! A ship had come here, a ship of
the dead with rotted sails, and it had offloaded
living corpsesThey were under this house, and
the storm had brought them to lifeI could see
them pushing up through the boneyard blanket of
the shells, pallid jellies with green hair and
seagull eyes, crawling over each other in the dark
and talking, talking, talkingYes! Because they
had a lot to catch up on, and who knew when the
next storm might come and bring them to life again?
Yet still I paintedI did it in terror and in the
dark, my cheap mulberry handbags arm moving up and down so that for a
little while there I seemed to actually be
conducting the stormI couldn't have stoppedAnd
at some point, Wireman Looks West was doneMy
517
right arm told me soI slashed my initials - EF -
in the lower left corner and then broke the brush
in two, using both hands to do itThe pieces I
dropped on the floorI staggered away from my
easel, crying out for whatever was going on to
stopAnd it would; surely it would; the picture
was done and surely now it would
I came to the head of the stairs and looked down,
and there at the bottom were two small dripping
figuresI thought: Apple, orangeI thought, I
win, you winThen the lightning flashed and I saw
two girls of about six, surely twins and surely
Elizabeth Eastlake's drowned sistersThey hermes birkin bag wore
dresses that were plastered to their bodiesTheir
hair was plastered to their cheeksTheir faces
were pale horrors
I knew where they had come fromThey had crawled
out of the shells
They started up the stairs toward me, hand in hand
Thunder exploded a mile overheadI thought, I am not seeing
this
"I can do this," one of the girls saidShe spoke
in the voice of the shells
518
"It was red," the other girl saidShe spoke in
the voice of the shellsThey were halfway up now
Their heads were little more than skulls with wet
hair draggling down the sides
"Sit in the char," they said together, like girls
chanting a skip-rope rhymebut they spoke in
the voice of the shells
They reached up for me with terrible fishbelly
fingers
I fainted at the head of the stairs
xx
The telephone was chanel jewelry ringi
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