by Allyson Bird
Interlude I, the tattered edges of a beginning: Neveah overheard a name once in a snippet of conversation at a party, and she wasn’t eavesdropping, merely on her way to the restroom; she paused only for a moment when she heard the word audition and a name.
Maybe she misheard, but she remembers the eyes widened in alarm and the silence when they realized she was listening so she doesn’t think so.
This, too, is a beginning: a blank canvas propped against an easel, a palette with tiny mounds and craters of paint—an alien landscape of nascency, a selection of brushes, a tin of solvent, ambient music taking shape in the air.
Neveah tips her head from side to side, rolls her shoulders. She props the painting of the strange landscape on an easel next to the blank canvas and double-checks the colors on her palette. In spite of the yellow in the painting, since she didn’t use the color when she created the landscape, she’s not using any this time either. She isn’t sure if that’s the right choice to make or not; she’s going by instinct alone and has to trust that it knows what it’s doing. And anyway, she already knows she can’t mix its match.
She selects a brush and begins. Two hours later, she stands in front of the easel with her brow creased and her mouth downturned. There’s no sensation of a doorway opening, of slipping away. She touches her chest, grimacing at the spot of emptiness within.
The proportions of her replica are all wrong. From a distance, they seem fine, but a closer view reveals that the stars are slightly out of shape, the sun not perfectly round, the haze in the sky too subdued, the cobbles out of place, and there’s no hint of yellow anywhere. She steps backward and forward several times to be sure.
She runs a hand across her forehead, pulls both paintings from their easels and sets them against the wall. Side by side, the differences remain the same: not noticeable when standing halfway across the room; glaringly obvious when two feet away. It reminds her of trying and failing to replicate the symbol and the specific yellow color and she’s terrified that she had one chance and blew it completely.
Interlude II, finding a thread to a beginning: a party, artists Neveah knows, artists she doesn’t, coolers filled with beer, a table crowded with bowls of potato chips, plates of sliced veggies, store-bought hummus.
She moves through the room, engaging in conversations and laughter. Drops the overheard and remembered name into a few. No one recognizes it, but later, shoved into her hand by someone who vanishes into the crowd—a scrap of paper with the name and a phone number.
Of such beginnings: Three canvases, three replicas, not one a match to her original, and the doorway remains closed.
Interlude III, a beginning that is not: a phone call, the space between rings that feels like taffy pulled out of shape, the hitch in the breath when a ring cuts off and a husky voice says, “Hello.”
“Is this Ivy Milland?” Neveah asks with one hand fisted between her breasts.
“Yes.”
“I’m Neveah Scott, a friend of Simon’s. Simon Phillips? You don’t know me but I was given your name by another friend, and I was hoping you’d be able to tell me about the, the audition. I got an invitation but I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do. I’m not trying to cheat, but if you have any advice…”
There’s a harsh intake of breath. Neveah gnaws on a cuticle. Should she have said who the audition was with? Does Ivy even know what she’s talking about?
“Don’t do it,” Ivy finally says, her voice gone even deeper.
“But I—”
“That’s my advice, my only advice. Don’t fucking do it. Throw out the invitation and forget you ever had it.”
Then silence on the line.
“Dammit.” Neveah tosses her phone aside. Steeples her fingers beneath her chin. Glares at the paintings resting against the studio wall.
The next beginning: paint, brush, and canvas. Neveah paces back and forth in front of her original painting, studying the details in sidelong glances. Madness is repeating the same thing over and over, expecting a new result. She taps the brush handle against her lips and steps close to the original. Runs her hand along the edge; feels a faint vibration in her chest.
She crouches down and eyes the details at the edge—half of a building, a mix of whole and split cobbles, the left side of a star. Maybe…
She slides the blank canvas next to the original, begins with the other half of the star, and spreads out from there, extending, not replicating, the landscape. Time slips as she gives herself over to the steady rhythm of her brush and the pauses to add and mix the paint—a symphony of creation, of beginning.
When she finishes, the world muffles its sound and the doorway begins to open. As it does, details of the new painting stand out in stark relief—a blade of dying grass pushing up from the dirt between two cobbles, the jagged edge of a broken pane of glass, the shadowed branches of a stunted tree. The noise of fabric moving across cobblestone breaks through the muffling and on the first painting, the bit of yellow is larger, large enough to see that it’s the hem of a robe or a similar garment and for a split second, she sees the fabric ripple.
Then she slips down and into nothing, into everything. Silk on skin, an embrace of warmth—pleasure, perfection, transcendence. Whispers touch her arms, as if tasting her flesh with incomprehensible words, and then draw away. Time slides, stretches as she rides an unseen current, her limbs buoyant, her mouth open, and then there is no time, only a sublime infinity.
Until the doorway closes, cutting her off, cutting her loose. She silences a groan behind trembling hands, but when the groan ends, she’s smiling.
And the next beginning, and the next: two more paintings continuing the landscape, two more sensations of opening, of a perfect state of being, two more spots of yellow on the original painting.
Lined side by side, the paintings are a perfect symmetry; the buildings, the sky, flow from one canvas to the other as if they were painted as one then split apart. The full image is still in the making—the latest piece shows the edge of a new building, a second sun, the hint of a dark lake.
The weight of the air in her studio has changed, grown denser, and there’s a scent of rich earth and old brick, a lingering dampness on her skin, and occasionally, the soft susurration of water caressing a shore.
The paintings no longer speak of desolation, but of possibility; the work is a glimpse into a secret world, a world into which she’s been invited. She trails her fingers across the surfaces, moving delicately across the ridges of paint. Feels an ache, a longing, an emptiness desperate to be filled, but she knows it’s only a matter of time before she falls again and that knowledge makes it tolerable.
The ringing of the phone pulls her from her thoughts, but her gaze is still locked on her creation as she answers. A husky voice says, “Meet me at The Lamplight in an hour and I’ll tell you what you need to know.” Then the call disconnects.
Neveah glares at her phone. Contemplates ignoring the summons, for that’s what it is. She doesn’t need anything from Ivy; the answers are in front of her, but a strand of doubt coils in her abdomen nonetheless. Maybe there’s a piece of the puzzle she can’t see. Better to spare a few moments of her time than to wonder.
Interlude IV, someone else’s beginning: a small dive bar, cheap drinks, the thick scent of greasy hamburgers and beer battered fries, a few patrons sitting at the bar watching a Ravens game on the flat screen.
Inside The Lamplight, Neveah orders a beer and takes a booth with a bird’s eye view of the front door.
Ivy isn’t at all what Neveah expected. If she’s five feet tall, it’s barely, and beneath her baggy jeans and oversized sweater, her limbs are stick-thin. She slips into the booth with a wince, as if the act is painful. Her pupils are dilated, sharp commas frame the corners of her mouth, deep lines groove her forehead, and her nails are bitten to the quick.
She opens not with a greeting or even an inquiry as to Neveah’s identity, only a low, “When did you get the invitation?”
> “About a month ago,” Neveah says.
“Have you found the doorway yet?”
Neveah twists her fingers together. Doesn’t answer. The intensity of Ivy’s gaze and the anger within it is startling.
“Did you find Carcosa?” Ivy hisses the last word. “Did you paint it?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve been painting a place with a lake and stars and two suns.”
Ivy nods, plucking at her sleeve. Offers a sly smile. “Did he show you what it’s like?”
Neveah touches the center of her chest with her fingertips, feels the hollow, thinks of floating.
Ivy leans over the table, leans kissing close. “He did, didn’t he? He gave you a taste, I can tell. You’re marked—I see it in your eye—but understand this: you’ll never get there. Never. There’s no way in. Artists have been trying for years. Quit while you still have enough of you left, burn your painting, burn the invitation, and forget about Carcosa. You won’t be able to, but you can try.”
“I don’t understand.”
Ivy scratches her arm; her sleeve rides up, revealing scars and scabs and a constellation of crude stars tattooed on her skin. She yanks the fabric down and her mouth twists into cruelty. “I don’t understand,” she mocks.
“Did he let you in?”
Ivy slams her hand on the table hard enough to draw glances from the customers at the bar, but if she notices she doesn’t care. “Do you really think he’ll pick you? There’s nothing special about you. He’ll never let you in.” She makes a sound, half-sob, half-laugh. “All he’ll leave when he’s through, when he’s used you up and tossed you aside, is a black hole that you can’t ever fill, no matter how fucking hard you try. The mark in your eye doesn’t mean a damn thing. He can take it away like that.” Ivy snaps her fingers.
Neveah slides from the booth fast enough to jam her hip against the table, and as she reaches the front door, Ivy’s mocking voice rings out once more. “Call me when he locks you out and let me know how you feel then.”
The mark of a beginning: a face leaning close to a mirror, a dark mote in the brown of an iris, the echo of a voice: you’ll never get there.
Bullshit, Neveah thinks. She hasn’t been marked—she’s been chosen.
Endless beginnings: late nights, the sound of a brush on canvas, of a forearm wiping sweat from a brow, sharp inhales pinpointing when the doorway opens and she falls into perfect, when she hears water touching the shore, footsteps, the robe whisking across cobblestones, harsh sighs when the doorway closes and normal sound returns.
When she finishes the eleventh painting, after the doorway shuts, Neveah realizes the edges match both the tenth and the first. In a frenzy, she arranges the pieces in a circle, stands in the center.
“Carcosa.” She breathes the word and knows it to be both truth and beginning.
A flicker of yellow passes from painting to painting, the movement too quick to see directly. She holds her breath, stands as still as possible with her arms at her sides. Sweat trickles a cold snake along the length of her spine. A fleeting glimpse of a robed figure with broad shoulders and a hooded visage; the weighted sensation of eyes upon her, of a gaze hidden behind brick and broken glass. Is he judging her work, judging her?
The doorway opens. She exhales. Waits. But there’s no warmth, no time slipping away, only the hollow, and then the door slams shut with a force strong enough to send her to her knees. The movement of the yellow ceases and with dismay, she sees it’s no longer visible in any of the paintings, not even the first.
No, please, no.
She hears Ivy’s words—there’s no way in—and clamps her hands over her ears. No, Ivy wasn’t right. She couldn’t possibly be right.
“I don’t understand,” Neveah cries. “I painted it. I painted all of it. What more do you want?”
An impossible beginning: the paintings still arranged in a circle, the palette waiting atop an upside down plastic crate, sketch books stacked haphazardly in the corner atop another crate, a box overflowing with tubes of paint, brushes sitting in a tin of solvent, paint-streaked rags and twists of paper like deformed origami scattered on the floor, the tang of acrylic in the air. Everything in its place, waiting like a faithful dog while its master is away.
Waiting. But not for her. Not anymore.
Every night for weeks, she’s returned to the studio, and the sensation of place has faded a little more with each visit. Carcosa has become nothing more than paint on canvas, and the dark mote in her eye has begun to fade even as the emptiness has swollen, grown fat and pregnant.
She knows there are only two possibilities: either she failed the audition or Ivy was right. Both leave the taste of ashes in her mouth, but Neveah doesn’t want to accept that this is the end. She can’t. Not when she worked so hard. (Not when she tasted perfection.)
“Damn you,” she shrieks, but her voice dissolves into tears.
She scrambles for her box of paints. Squeezes tubes into anorectic commas, fills her palms with any—every—color. With sorrow coursing down her cheeks, she smears the paint across the paintings, obscuring the lake, the stars, the suns, the windows, the cobbles, concealing her failure.
Then she walks out of her studio, slamming the door shut behind her.
Interlude V, the absence of a beginning: Neveah works, sleeps, eats, pisses, shits. She fucks beautiful men and women, traces suns and stars on their flesh, leaves behind the impression of her teeth and if they insist they want to see her again, a false phone number. Her fingers ache to hold a brush, the crook of her arm yearns for the shape and the weight of her palette, but she quells the hurt with glasses of red wine.
She doesn’t have the skill. She’s never had the skill.
Sometimes she catches glimpses of the man in the tattered robe, his face concealed, in half-open doorways, in glimmers of wine, in plate glass windows, in dreams, and each time she turns away, shaking with need and anger. If he’s judged her and found her lacking, why then must he rub salt in the open wound? Why won’t he let her forget?
No narcotic, no orgasm, no fantasy, can fill the hollow he’s left behind.
The end of a beginning: Neveah opens the door to her studio, takes a deep breath, turns on the light. Cups her elbows in her palms. The weight of the emptiness is a heavy burden, one she’s tired of carrying, and she’s been dreaming of taking a razor to her skin to see if the hollow will run out—a rat to desert the shipwreck she’s become. Maybe if she throws everything away and forgets, the ache will fade. She won’t end up like Ivy. She refuses. She’s better than that. She’s stronger. (She hopes.)
She gently takes down the first painting and sets it against the wall. Takes down the second. Flakes of paint spiral to the floor and expose what’s underneath—Carcosa, the real Carcosa, not of paint and brush but of brick and stone and earth. Still there, still waiting.
Laughter, high and thin and sharp, slips from her lips. She races across the studio, digs through her brushes and tools, finds a palette knife. Places the paintings back where they belong and stands in the center, breathing hard. Carefully, she scrapes away the paint, beginning with the first piece, revealing—unpainting—the real. The architecture expands, stretches, filling and replacing her studio.
The doorway blooms like a shadowy rose. Sobbing in relief, in wonder, she holds out her arms, trails her fingertips across brick and mortar. Smells the water of the lake, the rich loam of the shore, feels the cobblestones rough beneath her bare feet. She’s floating, falling, in silk and nothing.
The rustle of fabric fills the air and he emerges, the darkness of his hidden eyes boring into hers, from between two building. The Yellow King—not lie or myth, but real and here. Here for her.
And then the doorway begins to close, leaving only a whip-thin trace of the sweetness, and Carcosa begins to bleed back into the paintings.
“No,” she says. “Please, no.”
A voice intones, “Unmask.”
And finally, she understands. Laughing
, she disrobes, opens a tube of paint, and squeezes it into her palm. She covers her breasts, belly, arms, legs, and face; covers herself completely.
Carcosa returns. The King—her King—waits.
With the palette knife, she begins to remove the paint, already impossibly dry, from her skin, and as she peels away the false to bare the real, black stars take shape in her veins and twin suns burn in her eyes. A little like dying; a little like lust and barbed wire entwined. She is everywhere and nowhere, everything and nothing, undone and remade and undone again.
A robed arm lifts, a hand extends. As Neveah slips her own into his, she trembles, unsure if this is the correct ending, but it is an ending, and all endings are also beginnings.
“Unmask,” she whispers with a smile and the last traces of paint flake from her cheeks and seesaw like confetti to the floor.
This is how it begins: a rumor, a whisper, a story.
SHE WILL BE RAISED A QUEEN
BY E. CATHERINE TOBLER
I dream of water.
When the men found me in the sulfur-yellow waters of the nameless lake, some thought I was a mermaid. Ridiculous, Ambrose Kowal declared with a twitch of his impeccable mustache, for mermaids did not vacillate in sulfur, did not draw succor from the volcanic stench of the plague-ridden air.
Indeed, my skin was not scaled and I possessed no tail; the men touched my legs, hands encircling my ankles before spreading me wide for study until I kicked out in protest and sent Nicholas to the crusted ground, the salt staining his otherwise fine suit for the rest of his days. Likewise, my hair was not crusted with precious jewels and did not drape my breasts as a second skin. It was only drenched with sulfur and salts, tangled with weeds, reeking of Hell’s depths, Frederick said in a voice gone rough and hollow both, and wouldn’t he know, for had they not listened to his own story of the black stars in the black sky just nine days before? They had, within Ambrose’s own comfortable rooms. She was a queen, a queen of Carcosa, and would do, Frederick whispered and reached a hand for me.