The Half That You See

by Rebecca Rowland

  She patted her worn sweatpants, ugly as sin, but chosen by her alone. She had no money, was too poor even for pockets. “I have money at home…”

  Your bank account

  is nevermore.

  Rima turned at the voice. Did she actually hear it? She faced the raven, all hematite sheen and marcasite eyes. It cocked its head, and the profile reminded her of someone.

  Judge Lenore.

  The raven was a woman, Rima realized, yet how she knew that was another puzzle. She stared, and the raven wavered in that X Files light. The wings spread, jeweled. She really was a woman, beautifully robed and crowned in stars. A new moon slivered the backdrop.

  Celestial.

  A bell-like aria from the sharp beak:

  The vengeance of Hell boils in my heart,

  Death and despair flame about me.

  If Sarastro does not through you feel

  The pain of death,

  Then you will be my daughter nevermore.

  Disowned may you be forever,

  Abandoned may you be forever,

  Destroyed be forever

  All the bonds of nature,

  If not through you

  Sarastro becomes pale! (as death)

  Hear, Gods of Revenge,

  Hear a mother’s oath!

  The aria was in German, yet Rima understood every word, and recoiled in horror.

  Haylee kill Derek?

  She glared at the raven, that blowsy Queen of the Nightclub, in her cheap rhinestone stars and cardboard moon.

  “What kind of chickenshit bitch do you think I am? I’ll do my own killing, thank you very much!”

  Rima then gagged, vomited glitter. With a tacky flap, the raven, now just a grimy bird again, flew off. Rima knew she was to follow and drag her umbrage with her.

  Animals and people meandered around them, their progress watery, amoeboid. The weird light distorted, perjured known colors. A dog paused in front of Rima and Haylee, his face disproportionately large. He stared up at Rima.

  You should have been sterilized at birth. Better yet, aborted. The world doesn’t need more imbeciles like you. You can’t even get a fucking coffee cup clean!

  The canine mouth was rubbery around Derek’s voice. The dog nipped at Haylee’s ankle and the blonde girl squeaked.

  A woman with watermelon-sized tits jiggled into view. She hoisted the gargantuan milk sacks and gave them a wobble, whispering.

  Pirate’s treasure, who wants that sunken chest? Who loves the Queen of Complacency?

  Her voice was too deep.

  Derek again.

  A beautiful Friesian horse passed by, led by a thin, almost emaciated man.

  If you got up off your ass once in a while, you could lose that five pounds.

  An ovation of wings drowned out this latest incarnation of Derek, and the horse went liquid movement, nothing more than ravens flapping away.

  More people in absurd clothing and animals of impossible shape glimmered in and out. A zonky, lop-eared and tiger-striped, sidled up from behind, rubbed its rough coat on Rima’s shoulder.

  So this is what you do when I’m working my ass off for you, hang around nasty bars and spread your skinny legs for indigent bums? Sleazy slut!

  The zonky kicked Rima airborne, farting in Haylee’s face in the process. Rima landed face down in piss-smelling grass.

  Roadhouse whore!

  The raven hopped over the grass to stand in front of Rima.

  This is that very Mab

  That plaits the manes of horses in the night,

  And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,

  Which once untangled, much misfortune bodes:

  This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,

  That presses them and learns them first to bear,

  Making them women of good carriage.

  The raven stood on some sort of dollhouse conveyance, wheeled with spiny bug legs and shrouded in wings. A pill dropped from the polished beak and rolled away.

  This is she!

  This is she!

  The raven pecked at Rima, urging her up. Rima jockeyed herself up off the grass painfully; the cold ground was unkind to old fractures.

  “What the fuck are you?!?!” Rima tried to scream at the bird, but her voice was thin, suffocated by stars.

  The raven took flight and Rima followed, to a building taller than the others.

  Funhouse door!

  Funhouse door!

  Rima had a suspicion the answers were here. She walked through a door, went inside out. She grabbed Haylee’s hand. The music was not backwards, it was not out of tune, it defied all laws of physics.

  At least the mirror maze was somewhat earthly.

  But not what was reflected there. It looked like Rima, but it was hideous. Rima dressed in clothes Derek bought, Rima wearing her must-make-Derek-happy contours, Rima’s hair the wheat fields he ran through on idle fingers, or wrapped and leveraged her down stairwells with. Derek’s loss of face lumped out of Rima’s, like Joseph Merrick, an unbirth.

  The Rima in that burnished glass was only an extension, a regenerated limb, of Derek.

  She ran away, through a maze designed by M.C. Escher, Derek’s Ikea furniture on walls, ceilings, family portraits gone all Dali, Cheshire smiles lipstick-smeared in his favorite Bible Belt pink. She ran through kitchens papered in her drying blood, upended daybeds with muted Haylee dolls arranged precisely. She went topsy-turvy in a sea of suspended remotes, flash drives, Androids more human than she was allowed to be.

  Somehow her hand found itself sculpted around wood, a childhood shape. She faced the falsely silvered walls, dared to stare into a pre-fab abyss at her monstrous marriage. Derek looked back, chewed a mouthful of certainty.

  Always win.

  His fingers found the well-worn garden path to her windpipe, took both of them down to the floor.

  The killing floor…

  Rima felt Haylee beneath her, heard the muffled crack, like a Thanksgiving turkey being dismantled by hungry hands.

  The baseball bat dropped. Haylee squirmed, crawled out with gasps of pain. She picked up the bat, guarding the other arm, its wronged geometry.

  If Sarastro does not through you feel

  The pain of death…

  Derek’s hands held tight; Rima was indeed losing this last fight. Haylee picked up the bat with a tiny scream, brought the bat up and over, down on Derek’s head.

  Rasping, Rima crawled out from under his still form, picked up the bat.

  With the raven’s wings on backbeat, Rima smashed the mirrors.

  Smashed.

  Every.

  Last.

  One.

  The carnival was nevermore.

  The carnival never was.

  At 0233 hours, police responded to reports of an injured juvenile wandering the backroads of a Missouri town, her left arm broken and too much blood, not her own, splattered on her flimsy sundress. But whatever tale she had to tell remained encrypted. Her blue eyes only mirrored back the perplexed expressions of first responders.

  In spite of the obscuring damage of a housewife’s desperate rampage,

  Cause of death was crushing of cervical vertebrae one through four.

  As autopsy reports will show, Haylee’s was the fatal blow,

  a complicity none will ever know, from Rima on that killing floor,

  who, thanks to wise but purloined counsel of Her Honor Judge Lenore,

  will be a victim nevermore.

  Another call, at 0552 hours, of a possible D.O.A. Paramedics found signs of life, but also one horrific crime scene. Watch Commander Peter Sonke almost passed out when he identified the nude and comatose woman in the empty field as his daughter-in-law, resplendently necklaced in entrails and blood.

  A woman clothed with his son.

  The Red Portrait

  Mahlon Smoke

  For the past two weeks, you were in a rut, out of ideas and nothing to do. Hands twitching for a pencil, paintbrush,
a pen, anything to sketch and draw. But you never did. No muse would come to you and caress your hand as you drew, no inspiration in your mind but a black void that only consumed creativity. A poor artist struggling for an idea is a pathetic sight. You were no different from your fellow students who struggled like you.

  But you are different.

  You kept telling yourself that at least, you had to be different. You came from nothing and fought your way into this school: prestigious, rich, and influential. Something to get you out of that shitty small town with no artistic value. You weren’t going to go back and be a gas station owner like your father before you. Never. Not after he and your mother outright told you. “You’re not creative enough to be an artist,” your father said, and his words burrow into you as you stared at that white, empty canvas.

  They needed to be proven wrong, and yet, the empty canvas stared back and mocked you.

  Amanda, your closest friend, suggested a day out, something to take your mind off the slump and into the beauty of nature. Skeptical as you were, you played along, walking in and out of the stores, going to lunch, and pretending you were interested in Amanda’s project. You liked her, really, but were so wrapped up in your own thoughts that anything outside yourself was a chore to think about.

  After lunch, the two of you walked along the street, looking at all the displays for an Art Crawl. Amanda was the one who really wanted to go: you didn’t want to be reminded of what you couldn’t do. But still, you passively observed the amateur paintings, knowing full well you could have done so much better.

  Along the walk of mediocre artistry, you came across a quaint little antique shop. The shop was small, cute, a nice place to scout around and find rare gems. Outside was a display of more professional works collected over the years, stuff the store owner and his late wife found and displayed. All of them were there, except for me.

  I was in the back. On the floor, obscured by a few statues and a desk with a few miscellaneous toys and books. Not a single person seemed to notice me that day. I’m fairly certain it’s because the owner had forgotten about me. I was always his least favorite. Usually, he covers me up with a large darkening blanket before anyone comes, but today, he forgot, leaving my golden frame out just long enough for a simmer of gold to catch your eye. You pushed your way past the statues and knick-knacks and uncovered my sheet.

  There, you became fascinated by me, ignoring your friend as she called your name. I saw a spark in you, the way your fingers traced the outside of the frame, the look you had when you saw my deep red hair. How fast you picked me up and brought me to the store owner. The kind old man greeted you before looking down at your potential purchase, his eyes filling with horror and disgust. His brows furrowed, and his old, wrinkled eyes darted back and forth between me and you, trying to comprehend why you picked me out of the thousands of much prettier paintings. The question danced on his lips before he let out a sigh.

  The old man was exhausted and I could tell he just wanted me gone, so he gave you a fairly cheap price, maybe underselling the value I was worth. Amanda helped you take me back to your apartment, keeping her annoyance at your impulsive purchase hidden. You didn’t thank her after she hung me up in the living room. She waited for those two words like a starved puppy waiting for food, but you were so enraptured by my portrait that you never heard her start to leave; she was hesitant but not willing to stand the awkwardness of just standing there while you ignored her. She left the apartment as if to give a newlywed couple privacy. I could sense jealousy coming from her; a silly notion, really: I would have rather her stay and pry you away.

  There you were, admiring my hair. It was a shade of red you couldn’t quite place. You spent that night trying to find it in one of your art books. You saw every shade of red but not one of them came close to the color of my hair. I watched you as you tirelessly tried to find the name before passing out on your couch.

  Even when you attempted to sleep, you tossed and turned, waking once in a while only to fall back into the couch. I wondered what you were dreaming about? What haunted you that night? I might have an idea of what that was, but I don’t think it matters now.

  The first couple weeks we settled into a routine. You wouldn’t leave without a loving glance at me, examining every feature of my white face, from the blue of my eyes to the blush of my cheeks and the red of my lips. You would begin to spend more and more time just looking at me. Entranced would be an understatement for how you studied my portrait, searching my frame and looking longingly at my face. No one else ever looked at me the way you did.

  It disgusted me.

  Unnerving, your friend Austin called me. You kicked him out after that. A powerful and dangerous aura, another friend, Matilda, warned you. You threatened her and she left crying. They called to try and speak with you, but you never answered. Eventually, you silenced your phone and locked the door, telling me about how your friends just didn’t seem to understand me, how they didn’t see the beauty that I was. Only you did: only you saw my worth and value and no one else deserved to look upon me. You pulled up a chair and sat there, looking at me, every so often telling me how perfect I was, over and over, with little variation like a skipping vinyl disk forgotten on a record player.

  I was actually relieved when Amanda came to get you. She managed to pick the lock and open the door, despite her eyes puffy from tears and face flushed a familiar shade of red. I was especially impressed when she picked you up by the collar to yell at you, to snap you out of my gaze. You gave her nothing and weakly pushed her back.

  What started as scolding turned into fighting. The two of you screaming at each other, calling each other vile things. Amanda was a smart girl, but she thought you wouldn’t fight back when she grabbed my frame and ripped me from the wall.

  You retaliated, attempting to tackle her. She was a fighter. She punched you in the face and you went down hard, so frail at that point that I thought you were going to break into pieces like glass thrown to the floor. Yet as soon as you hit the ground, you were up again and grabbed me. She pulled against you as she yelled about your obsession. You claimed to not know what she was yelling about. What an awful liar you were.

  You said it yourself, you needed me. You needed me. If I could laugh, I would do so, right in your face. There would be no pleasure greater than watching you crumble right then. Instead, I felt the two of you pull and pull me until you pulled me back as far as your weak arms could go and smashed the edge of my frame into her face, shattering her glasses and creating a large gash between the temples of her forehead.

  Blood trickled down her face as she staggered back out the door. Anything she wanted to say was lost at the sight of you inspecting me, making sure nothing was broken or torn. You picked me up gently as Amanda stumbled down the stairs. You closed the door to your apartment as she reached the bottom steps. You locked the door permanently when she fell to the floor.

  You ignored the sirens and the ringing of your phone as you focused on the blood on my frame. How it seemed to shine against the gold. Dripping onto the canvas and mixing into the paint of my hair.

  That spark in your eyes twinkled once again as you scrambled to your colored pencils—every shade of red you could find—and began to draw. The grip on your pencil was so tight that I believed you’d break your fragile fingers. But determined as you were to recreate an image in your mind, it was a certain color you set to recreate, and a painting that needed to be realized.

  You sketched and sketched the same broken face of a woman that began as your friend Amanda but shifted with each sketch into someone else, someone you didn’t know but someone whose broken face you needed to perfect. You settled on a woman, broken glass decorating her cheeks and face while her hair danced across the sketch. Despite the blood and pain, she had a calm expression with a tiny smile that made the viewer wonder what she could be smiling about. It was a secret only you understood.

  Satisfied with the reference, the real work began.

/>   You selected a canvas, the largest one you had, and sketched and tried to paint, but all the shades of red you had just weren’t dark enough. Not red enough. There was red on your face, red on the frame, red in my hair, and red everywhere, but you couldn’t replicate the one in your mind. Everything was too dark or too light. No matter how much paint you mixed, it just didn’t look right.

  You looked at the blood on the frame: dried, crusty, and deep, dark red. You laid out the different shades that you wanted to use. You smashed the small mirror on your desk and selected the largest and sharpest piece. You pierced it into your skin, making a large cut in your hand.

  Blood poured onto the paints in sloppy precision. You squeezed your hand for more.

  I was intrigued by the way you swirled the paint and blood around, picking up the brush and beginning to paint.

  Light red, a darker red, so much red into this one painting, but it still wasn’t good enough for you. Each cut into your hand, then into your arms, was harsh and cruel while the painting strokes danced across the canvas, light and delicate with all the love you could muster.

  Your face scrunched in fury as you attempted to finish the masterpiece. You looked to me when the pain was too much, melting any rage you had, and gave me a soft smile before returning to work.

  I don’t know how long you stood there. I watched as your pale figure continued to grow whiter. You ignored everything for this work of art: the calls from concerned family, the pounding at the door, the threats from your landlord, and your own weak body.

  Your arms bled out on the floor and your hand grew shaky as you placed the final perfect touches. Did your feet begin to ache? Did your vision begin to blur? Did you feel anything as you slid to the floor?

  You stared up at your finished piece, a monochromatic painting of a smiling woman crafted in your blood, sweat, and tears. If only you had saved enough energy to truly admire it. It was our final masterpiece.

  You crawled to me, smiling the weakest smile I had ever seen. Your hand was outstretched as if I could have reached back for you. To caress your face, tell you how wonderful you were, and kiss your wounds. Even if I could have touched you, I never would. That didn’t stop you imagining it before your eyes rolled into your skull and you collapsed on the floor.