by K M Cholewa
A creak cut through the noise in his head. He looked up from his knees. The closet door had popped just an inch. The wish to rip the door off its loose and squeaky hinges shot through him. He stood and took three strides to the door. He jerked it hard and, sure enough, tore out the top hinges. Inside, there they were. Untouched. The shoebox. The canvas.
Paris reached in and lifted the canvas by its top corners and backed it out into the room. He held it before him and pressed his forehead to its grainy surface. He spoke to a god he did not believe in.
“You win,” he said.
He laid the canvas on the floor and returned to the closet. He went down on his knees and opened the shoebox. He withdrew the long, flat, interior box and retrieved a stick of charcoal that was smooth and cool in his hand. He left the closet and started in on the canvas. Paris worked. He worked on his hands and knees, without trying, no more than the wind tries to blow or fire tries to burn.
Linda came first. She emerged on the left side of the canvas, sitting profile on her heels, neck stretching and mouth opening as though to sing. She was holding something close to her heart. A hand. The kind you get dealt. Tatum stood, her back to Linda. Her body was twisted at the waist and shoulder. An arm covered her breast but not the scar.
Paris could not escape the thing he feared, and he did become each of them as he moved them through him and onto the canvas. He knew the hunger and want as he bent a limb and created light with shadows. But he found he could not draw them and hold onto to them at once. They moved through him not like spirits but like something pumped from his heart out through his hands.
Then, the birds came. On Tatum’s knuckle. On Linda’s shoulder. Some had just one wing. All were in some way broken. But their necks were thrown back and their beaks were open. Mute and singing, they were a chorus that sang of loneliness, unaware of all the subtle, winding harmonies, each believing its call was unreturned. Paris blended lines with his shirttail, his fingers, and the side of his hand. The image on the canvas hung like the smoke trapped in the sky.
Paris didn’t try. As he pressed on, soon he didn’t work either. Paris simply Paris-ed, just as wind blew and fire burned and love did its thing, seeking out willing hosts and looking for itself through their eyes.
Finally, he sat back on his knees. His hands were filthy. The canvas had the texture of skin.
He didn’t hear the man come down the stairs and enter the apartment behind him.
“Hey, you,” the man hollered, and Paris jumped and looked over his shoulder, eyes shot with blood, face bruised, and the side of his head shaved and sewn. But the man who had called to him was no longer looking at him but at the canvas.
Paris left. He took the canvas with him. He remembered his car and drove west. He didn’t drive far.
He knew that the wanting was not the love.
Let go of the wanting and what do you have?
50
Time fills space unevenly. When Rachael would come to tell her story, she would exaggerate, stretching the seven months she had lived with her aunt into as much as two years. But her time in the valley did, in fact, end up extending beyond those seven months. Rachael returned to the valley every summer once her father remarried. For four years, Rachael had never let him out of her sight, worried he might float away. But when she was thirteen, beautiful, and boy crazy, she blinked.
Her father’s marriage didn’t devastate her, as her own attention was diverted as well. Boys on bikes rode past her house, back and forth. Later, they came by the carfuls. Geneva became Rachael’s confidante, always believing in her, sometimes to Rachael’s chagrin. Geneva had so much faith that everything was going Rachael’s way that she never felt sorry for her. “I understand you’re unhappy,” she would say. “But it’s hard to feel sorry for someone so fabulous.”
In the throes of adolescent angst, Rachael once had thrown up her hands in the face of Geneva’s persistent optimism.
“Everything isn’t okay,” she had insisted. “Sometimes things are hard or bad. You haven’t always been happy.”
“Yes, I have,” Geneva said. Then her brow furrowed in thought. “Although it could be,” she added, “that I just don’t remember feeling any other way.”
Rachael stayed with her and John part of every summer. Sometimes, they stayed at the house John built on the slab. Other times, they stayed in the duplex. Renters moved in and out of the apartment across the hall. Social misfits with good hearts, mostly.
After high school, Rachael went to the university two hours west of the valley. Not far. Only as far as Paris had gotten when he left with his canvas ten years earlier. When he first arrived, he had worked as a sous chef at a local hotel. Then his art took off. His first series was of a one-breasted woman. Thigh to cheek. Waist to eyes. Never the whole woman at once. The collection was bought up by lesbians and brave, bald, middle-aged women who used the word empowerment. When the National Breast Cancer Foundation in New York commissioned a work, Paris was made. Not rich, but able to make a living from his art. He lived in a modest bungalow he had bought with cash. It had great northern light.
His next series did as well as his first. It consisted of images of places unoccupied. Doorways. Empty stools. The images implied missing persons. Something in the rendering forced the eye to a thing not there. The empty space filled with the viewer’s attention. They were bought up quickly. Paris wasn’t sure how he felt about the series. He worried they did the world a disservice.
Rachael’s freshman year, Paris had a show at one of the local galleries during a community art walk. He had celebrity in the local art scene, and his show was packed. Paris accepted compliments and congratulations with sincere modesty. Invisibility had become harder to come by. The only place to disappear was into the work. But then, in a way, that’s how it always had been.
The well-heeled of the community shook his hand. Red dots went up beside canvas after canvas. One well-wisher would step away from him only to be replaced by another. In an open moment, through a gap in the crowd, two young girls no more than nineteen appeared. One had dark green eyes and long brown hair. She wore an olive suede coat and a black cap.
“Do you remember me?” she said hesitantly, lifting her brow.
Paris’s heart missed a beat, and his insides seemed to flood with warm water.
Tatum.
“Rachael,” he said.
She smiled and slipped a strand of hair behind her ear.
“Well, I go by Mallory now,” she said. She swung a backpack around to her front. She unzipped it and withdrew a file folder. She opened it and handed Paris a piece of paper with a ragged edge.
“Geneva gave it to me,” she said. “Remember Geneva?”
Paris recognized the picture. He had drawn it in the basement of the duplex in the back of Tatum’s Book.
“Geneva,” Paris said, looking up from the picture. “How is she?”
“Great,” Mallory said, rolling her eyes. “She’s always great. Will you sign it?” she said and dug in her bag for a pen, “now that you’re famous and all.”
Her friend giggled. Mallory handed Paris the pen. Paris pressed the paper to his knee. As he signed it, Mallory spoke to her friend.
“See this scar,” she said, pulling back her hair. “I fell in this lake. Paris and my aunt took me to the hospital. He held me super tight in the back seat of the car. Do you remember that?” she said to Paris.
He handed back the paper and pen. She kept asking him, do you remember? Paris looked into the eyes that reflected light. Bits of amber were illuminated within the green murk. Mallory cocked her head. Paris could barely detect the scent of her. There seemed to be a sound just out of range too. Paris felt the urge to follow her home and sit on her stoop. Chase the promise of the thing only sensed. But the impulse was just itself. It moved through him. It was not his.
“I remember,” he said, and Mallory smiled. They
were awkward for a moment then loosely embraced.
Geneva got the twenty years she had ordered from the gods. When she and John both had died, Mallory was entrusted with half of John’s land, Geneva’s duplex, and both of their ashes bundled as one. Mallory did not bury them. She released them to the wind. Her boyfriend of the time was with her and stood at her side on a windy afternoon in April on John’s prairie while the ash was carried off in gusts. As she stood there, Mallory remembered Geneva telling her that life’s journey was like the walk of the Russian dolls, but in reverse, emerging not from the larger to the smaller but the other way around. When you realize you’re bigger than the self you’ve known, Geneva told her, you’ll feel pressure. You’ll think you have to struggle. But pressure is a lie.
As the ashes blended with prairie dust, Mallory knew that John and Geneva had taken the walk. They’d moved from the smaller to the larger, let go and let pressure turn to flow.
Mallory — Rachael — learned early of impermanence. Some might say, too early. But time refined the lesson. She learned that shifting sands were the way of life. Space is open, not empty. Loss is movement. She grew to be a woman too detached for many men’s taste. She suffered too little and failed to suffer on others’ behalf. It wasn’t on purpose. It wasn’t that she couldn’t see that there is fear as well as love. Pain as well as courage. Redemption and mistakes. Snakes and beauty.
But it all slipped past her like someone else’s dream because she knew the thing she didn’t know that she knew. Yet it operated beneath her skin as both compass and antennae. The thing she knew didn’t save her soul, as it wasn’t a soul in need of saving. But the thing she knew did save her time. She rarely got distracted. She knew.
There is good.
The End
About the Author
K.M. Cholewa is from Chicago. She writes in Helena, Montana where she lives with a large, black dog. Shaking Out the Dead is her first novel.
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