BY HANNAH GRIECO (ART BY JANEZ BERNIK)
“Jesus, I hate corpse art,” you say and I laugh. Like that’s a thing.
“It’s an arm. Why would think you it’s a corpse?” I lean in, my nose close to the border of black and blue. The painting could be a child’s, scratched with fingernails and smeared with palms. But that arm was painted by a grown woman. No man would see the lines, deepening inward between the fingers, the hollow of the inner elbow, feminine, splayed out in surrender. No, in acceptance.
“It’s a dead kid,” you say.
“It’s a woman,” I say. “It’s a story.”
“You think everything is a story,” you say and walk over to the trio of Degas dancers stretching.
Degas, ruined forever for me by that children’s picture book our daughter brought home from the library. The one with him yelling at the women around him, waving money in hungry, thin dancers’ faces as he demands to sculpt and paint them. Shouting insults as they cry in exhaustion, their arms drooping from holding still for so long.
“I like this,” I say. “Look at the grid. What do you think the numbers mean? Look at the scratches, the plumes of black fluff, the spatters-”
But you’re in the next room already. The Monets speak to you. The Renoirs. Muddled women, dabbed on one brush stroke at a time. I should catch up with you. You wanted a picnic in the outdoor café, a jazz concert. It’s our anniversary, which means it’s yours, too. Not just mine. It’s always like this, I tell myself, or you tell me, our voices twined and blurred until it’s one murmured song to myself that replays and replays.
I poke and prod. I force things. I wasn’t always like this, I mean I’ve changed in the last six years, or maybe I’m not who you thought I was, but somehow giving birth transformed me into this gaping maw and why can’t I see what I’m doing, or was it on purpose, an attempt to trap you, because you feel fucking trapped and you never wanted this, any of it, and Sarah deserved better, deserved not to be born into this bullshit because you never signed on for fatherhood and she never asked for a mother who-.
“Oh nice,” I say as I reach you, where Women in the Garden holds you transfixed.
You don’t answer, just reach a finger out like you want to touch the woman holding the umbrella. You outline her mid-air.
“This is corpse art,” I want to tell you. “This is what you love.”
“This is pretty,” I say. “I studied this in college.”
Bio: Hannah Grieco is a writer and advocate in Arlington, VA. She is the cnf editor at JMWW, the fiction editor at Porcupine Literary, and the founder and organizer of the monthly reading series 'Readings on the Pike.' Find her online at www.hgrieco.com and on Twitter at @writesloud.
(artist) Janez Bernik (1933-2016) was a multiple-time awarded and internationally acclaimed Slovenian painter and academic. Bernik was born in the village of Gunclje, now part of Ljubljana.