11 TINY MYTHS OF THE EMPTY HEART
11
T INY M YTHS OF THE E MPTY H EART
It turned out I had plenty to fear. Without them all, the Manor was a fucking crypt. Even Saz’s presence on the second floor wasn’t enough to make the house less creepy—the empty attic with Caroline’s door sitting ajar felt like an abandoned impression of her life. Still, those reminders and late nights spent with Saz were better than nothing. Spending my fall break entirely alone, while likely beneficial for my work ethic, would have driven me up the walls until I was sliding back down with plaster under my nails.
It was like someone had ordered winter in a catalog and paid for expedited shipping. Campus was sheathed in a carpet of leaf rot. Frost coated the windows in the mornings and nights. Saz swapped her summer clothes for her cold-weather wardrobe—chunky cable knit sweaters, bejeweled hair clips under bright beanies, thick tights under miniskirts, black boots pulled all the way over her knees. I wore what I always did: my brother’s hand-me-downs, with a heavier jacket thrown on top. I started to find little holes in my shirts. Places where I had nicked the fabric carelessly with a palette knife, or where something had burrowed into the cloth. Thoughtlessly, I often found myself pressing a finger through the holes, straining the edges of the fabric.
The studio was mostly empty, but there were a few cubicles occupied by familiar faces. I waved to Mars and passed Yejun hunched over something on his desk. It surprised me to see that Finch, Saz, and I weren’t the only ones who skipped out on heading home for the holiday.
I hovered in the doorway of Saz’s studio as she shrugged off her puffy jacket and let it join the heap of papers scattered across the floor. Some of them were beautiful sketches—messy scribblings of gouache, pale washes of color over illustrations outlined in her favored red. Some of those nice ones had boot prints on them. One had torn down the middle where the leg of her stool caught it and ripped. They were a testament to how little regard Saz gave to the pieces the rest of us thought were her best. She was never satisfied, forever wiping a canvas clean and building it back up from the start. Still, she somehow had more technically “finished” pieces than I had at thirteen to my eight.
“Quit lurking over there, I need to get something done without you breathing down my neck,” Saz called. I held my hands up in surrender and did as I was told, heading back to my own studio beside Finch.
Wind pushed past the crack in my window. The Chapel was a dark outline against the purpled sky. That dull light filled my cubicle, illuminating the sketchbooks on my desk and the drying slabs of paint on my palette. I perched on my stool and wondered what my women were doing. If Caroline was playing backgammon with her grandmother in the same sunroom she always sent us pictures of, if Amrita’s sister brought her newborn baby to the house for Amrita to coo over. I could have checked our group chat—it had been buzzing with the explosion of a hundred different texts since the moment they left. But I had a hard time looking at it more than a few times a day. The steady funnel of screenshotted memes and complaints posed a distant normalcy that made me uncomfortable with longing.
The canvas pinned to my wall was smeared with orange, the color of headlights and sun coming through fingers. I dragged a blue-coated brush over it, lightening my touch where I wanted the warmth to come through the layers. Illumination was the goal. The kind of brilliant glow that couldn’t be ignored.
Could the hand move separately from the mind? Could my body translate something buried insensate, speak it through strokes and image? Wrist twisting innately, color spreading in broad washes, figures forming out of the cold blue?
If there was a threshold between myself and creation, I felt that the ritual had carried me over it. Because that had to be the reason, didn’t it? There was a veil between the work I made now and all the ways it had shifted from the past. It was the sensation of surety in the marks I made. I leaned close to the canvas and worked until the studio lights came on, until Saz left to find something to eat and Yejun’s music shut off. Until all I could smell was turpentine and the spice of oil paint, that combustible cling, that mineral grit.
“Wow, that’s fucked up,” someone called from the doorway. I looked up immediately, surprised I could hear them at all. I hadn’t even thought to put my headphones on.
It was Thea with Finch close behind her. Schooling the disappointment in my face at seeing them together was next to impossible.
“Can I take a closer look?” Thea asked, already stepping into the studio. I angled, hesitant, not wanting her to fully see what I had made. Finch gave me an apologetic smile from the doorway. What did she have to be sorry for? If she could tell Thea was irritating me, why didn’t she ask her to fucking leave?
That hot build of aggression startled me. I pushed my stool away from the canvas to let them look.
“This is wild, Joanna,” Thea murmured. The paint had a satin sheen under the bright overheads. The shapes had been sketched by my hand, but they felt detached, like someone else’s creation. I felt I could see the piece for the first time through Thea’s eyes.
It was the five of us, kneeling, just shadowed shapes without any features. The blue-black night around us. Mustardy earth meeting our crouched forms, a thin line of orange delineating the boundary of the sky and the ground. Small glowing spots marking the wicks of candles. Stalks of corn framing our bent heads. Our little conglomeration holding an indistinct black mass in the center, a limp body without the necessary bones to bring it to life. Somehow, without knowing, I painted the ritual.
“What is it supposed to represent?” Thea asked. She looked at me out of the corner of her eyes, and I wrung my hands behind my back.
“Sacrifice,” I said, like a fool.
Finch let out a choked sound. It was hard to tell if it was a suppressed laugh or a disbelieving scoff.
“Well, Moody will think it’s good.” Thea looked at Finch in question. I wanted to know what she was communicating there, what they were saying without me.
“I’m gonna get dinner with Jo,” Finch said finally, “go ahead.”
Thea gave the two of us a long glance and then shrugged and turned to go. When I heard her sneakers squeak past the main doors, I said, “Got tired of hanging out with your girlfriend?”
“Don’t be a dick,” she answered lightly. “You know, Saz was right, it wouldn’t kill you to have friends outside of them.” She gestured at the painting.
“I hate when you say them , as if you’re not one of us.”
“I can be your friend and still have a sense of individuality.”
“Riiight, I forgot,” I said, rolling my eyes as I wiped my hands clean on the paint-stiff rag tucked in my front pocket.
Finch gave me a flat stare. “Why are you in such a bad mood?”
“I’m not.” I scowled. Then, childishly, I said, “Why do you insist on bringing Thea in here when you know I don’t like her?”
“I didn’t think it was that deep. What reason do you even have to hate her? Thea’s chill, and she makes cool work.” Finch crossed her arms over her chest. Her jacket looked too thin for the weather. My irritation faded, just slightly—I wanted to put my own coat around her shoulders and warm her up.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Sorry. Forget it.”
We were silent. Neither of us could forget it. There was so much hanging between us, so much I couldn’t say. I tried to straighten up my desk a little, unwilling to look in her direction.
“It’s fine. We’re all on edge right now. But seriously, try to take a break and sleep in or something. You look fucking exhausted.”
If I answered that, I would burst into tears. The feeling constricted in my throat. I just shrugged and turned to the canvas. The painting stared back at me, our five forms intertwined among the illumination of the candles and the ears of corn. There was something jarring about the way I had arranged us—together, we looked like a poor imitation of Francisco Goya’s Witches’ Sabbath . I expected the creature between us to stand and rise a foot above the ground.
“A little on the nose, don’t you think?” Finch said at last, her voice strained as she pointed at the painting. “Do you think that’s smart, considering how it could implicate us if they ever find the suit?”
All I could do was shrug.
When I finished cleaning up, Finch followed me home, the two of us searching for Saz and something sustaining to put in our stomachs. We found her in the living room eating pretzels on the sofa, a sitcom on the TV.
“Finally,” she said when she saw us, crumbs littering her too-big T-shirt. “This place is terrifying without anyone else here.”
We curled up on the couch together. I was a bone-deep kind of exhausted, and I desperately needed to shower, but it was rare that we gathered like this. Finch and I spent time together alone at work, but I liked witnessing Saz and Finch interact—I could unlock all the ways they fit together individually, what pieces of us made the most sense to one another. And even though it was different without Caroline and Amrita there, it still worked. Saz rested her feet in my lap, and Finch tipped her head onto my shoulder, the room dark save for the TV screen glowing back at us.
It was past two by the time Finch rose to find her shoes, and we were all half-asleep as she went back to her apartment. She always left us like that, even when it was too late in the night and we tried to convince her to stay and take one of the other’s beds. But tomorrow was Thanksgiving. I had kind of hoped she would stay. That we could wake up together and do something that felt a little festive, even though I knew she would head home to eat at her parents’ table, hating it all the while.
“You going to bed too?” Saz asked when the door shut behind Finch.
I hesitated and then shook my head. “Not yet. Haven’t been sleeping well, I don’t really want to be in my room.”
Her eyes softened. I loved that about Saz—how open her face was, how readily she showed her affection. Everything she felt made itself evident in her mouth. She nudged me until I lay down on the couch and then snuggled up with her head on my shoulder and an arm thrown around my waist.
“Let’s stay here like this,” she mumbled into my shirt. “Let’s have a sleepover and share secrets.”
I dragged my fingers over her back and shut my eyes. “You go first,” I whispered.
“I’m afraid of ghosts,” Saz said immediately, “even though I really want to see one, one day.”
“Not a secret. That’s obvious.”
“Okay, whatever. Your turn.”
The quiet buzz of the room, the dim hiss of the radiator, the rise and fall of her chest against me. I felt I could say anything and let it die in the air between us.
“It’s a big secret,” I said finally. “You can’t tell anyone.”
Saz wriggled a little. “I won’t.”
“For real.”
“For real! I’m honored you’d even want to tell me anything. I thought you reserved that kind of thing for Amrita or Finch.”
There was something about the dead quiet of the house and the reassuring nearness of Saz’s heartbeat that made me want to confess. What I wanted to say was I think something’s wrong with me. I’m afraid that I gave a vital piece of my mind to that ritual.
But that felt too enormous to release. I wanted her to know what I needed to say without my having to speak it aloud. The core of me begged to ask, Do you see something in that corner? Is it looking at us? Do you feel it at the end of your bed? Do you remember bleeding into that effigy and wishing upon something bigger? Did you feel it come home with us? Did we fuck it all up?
Something brushed against my neck—a strand of hair or the tickle of an insect. I tried not to flinch so I wouldn’t scare her. Above all else, I didn’t want to scare her.
“Well,” I started, and then I just kept going, the words spilling out in an adolescent rush. “I can’t because—it’s actually—I think I have a crush on someone. And I can’t tell them.”
Useless mouth, hopeless heart. Saz tipped her head back and fixed me with a look; gentle, probing, a little pitying. “Why can’t you tell them?” She said them like she meant to say her . I hated how well she could see me.
“I don’t think I’m made for a relationship,” I said, the admission muffled by her forehead bumping my cheek. “I don’t think I’m like ... romantic. I don’t know how to make it last.”
“What do you call all this, then?”
I shrugged in her hold. “What do you mean?”
“Us,” she clarified, tapping once on my chest. “All of us. Haven’t we dedicated ourselves to each other, for the long haul?”
I went quiet, dumbfounded. She smiled at me as if I were a particularly naive child.
“Besides, isn’t this all temporary? I mean, not us. We’ll be friends forever. But we’ll grow and change, and we’ll do really fucking cool things. Solo isn’t life. There’s more beyond the studio being your life. Of course, it doesn’t feel that way now, when we’re like, in the thick of it. But we have so much time to figure it out. Graduation is only a few months away, and then we can let go of Rotham forever and you can kiss as many girls as you want.”
I closed my eyes.
“Aren’t you excited?” Saz asked. I could hear the smile in her voice. “Aren’t you ready for our lives to finally begin?”
Begin? I was in the middle. Hell, I was close to the end. I wondered where the fundamental shift between Saz and I lived, what delineated my devastation as her invention of the world. I tried to hold it all in my hands and failed despicably.
“I don’t know if we’re on the same path,” I admitted. “I think I’m doing a bad job.”
“Come on, we’re not so bad,” Saz said, her hand fisting in the fabric of my shirt. “We’ve done enough suffering. I think we can take a break for love.”
I swallowed. “Whatever you say.”
The room felt too dark. I kind of had to pee, but I was too afraid to leave the safety of the living room, to slip out of Saz’s hold. Her voice was so near that it vibrated against my chest every time she spoke.
“You worry us. Our tortured Jo.”
I couldn’t speak. That flutter again, up against my ear. This time I did flinch. I couldn’t help it.
“If you need my help, you can ask me. You know that, right?” Saz murmured, shifting against me. “Just ask me.”
It was a lifetime before I could coax my voice back into my mouth. Finally, I said, “I don’t know how to do that.”
But she didn’t answer. I could feel the breath of her sleep rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall with the desperate swell of my chest.