15 COMPEL FICTIONS, DEVOUR VISIONS
15
C OMPEL F ICTIONS , D EVOUR V ISIONS
Saz went to help Caroline take her paintings down and cart them back upstairs to the studio while Amrita and I hung her work up. The process was simpler than hanging Caroline’s had been—Amrita’s paintings were all pieces of paper attached to thin board. All we had to do was stick museum putty in the corners and eye each piece with a level.
“Whimsical,” the elderly woman said as Amrita took her seat, pen poised for notes.
“Such a wonderful sensibility for color,” Fujioka said.
The comments for Amrita were kind but hesitant, as if they didn’t quite know what to say. Her row of ten paintings all sat at the same size, about the height and width of her torso. They were rich with warm hues of yellow and lavender and sky blue painted with the attention of a light, illustrative hand.
“My mother liked to tell stories about our family,” Amrita said. “As a kid, I always blew those stories out of proportion until they became myths. My grandmother riding a horse across town became a legendary outlaw preparing to lasso the love of her life. My mother stepping in an anthill became a specter standing in a field, body made entirely of insects. I wanted to make those daydreams physical and let the invented stories live on, larger.”
Moody called her time, and I wanted to get the whole crowd on their feet to clap. Instead, the room rustled quietly, and Amrita plucked each painting carefully off the wall and stacked them together.
Then it was Veda, whose surrealist abstractions the panel compared to “putting Salvador Dalí in a blender and hoping the mixture didn’t come out gray.” Cameron followed, and they ate up everything he presented, much to Veda’s (and the rest of ours) dismay. Finch had another cigarette during Cameron’s critique—when she sat back down, I saw her hands shaking against her thighs.
“Alright, Jodie Finchard, come on up,” Moody called.
Caroline resumed her seat at the end of the row. She had the distant look of someone deep in thought as Finch and Saz hung up the twelve pieces Finch had selected. The lights seemed to dim as I stared into those portraits—each one was a haunting removal of anything bodily, with the faintest outline of hair and shoulders against a rich panel of color. Only the eyes remained illustrated with care.
“There is so much light in these,” Moody said proudly. “You’ve really mastered letting them glow beyond all the dark hues. And the contrast of your rendering of the eyes against the loose, painterly landscape is just delicious.”
Someone in the crowd scoffed. Finch remained unbothered, shoulders slumped casually, elbows resting on her knees as she splayed them wide.
“ Delicious is a great word. They’re saturated with feeling.” Tortoiseshell gave Finch an approving nod.
Something thumped behind me. The hair on my arms stood on end. I turned and caught a glimpse of the windows out of the corner of my eye—a fat insect bumped its body against the glass, trying to get inside. It was moving so quickly that its wings were a blur. It hit again. Then again, harder, so hard I almost expected to find a fine crack beneath its wings. There was a moment where I thought I could hear it flutter against my ear, and my fingers flew up to feel for it with a full-body flinch.
But the glass just kept thudding as the panel’s voices fell into a dull drone. My mouth was dry. I dragged my tongue over my lips and swallowed nothing.
“You good?” Amrita whispered, and I just shrugged as Finch’s voice called me back.
“They’re meant to represent partial memories, the ones just out of grasp. Like spending time away from home and then trying to remember all the specifics of your father’s face, and only being able to recall some of the most prominent details.”
The panel hummed appreciatively. Caroline was rigid. The bug’s body went pat, pat, pat . It looked like a moth—thick and gray with heavy wings. The sound made the hair at the nape of my neck prickle. I pressed down on my ear and muffled it.
“Any comments from the student body?” Moody posed, turning to face us.
“Yeah, I have one,” Caroline said, with her hand lifted in the air. Every head swiveled to look at her. “Can you talk about your process? Where exactly do you find inspiration for your work?”
Finch had a slow, suspicious smile on her face. She spoke languidly, as if placating Caroline for asking something she already knew the answer to. “I don’t really like to use any references. I try to sketch the same image ten or more times until the composition feels right, usually in pastels.”
Caroline smiled back. “Let me rephrase my question. You mentioned your father and how you can’t seem to remember his exact facial structure. When was it that you realized you couldn’t bring the image to mind? Was it after he called you a miserable dyke?”
The room drew in a collective gasp. Amrita said Caroline’s name like it was a curse. I was frozen. All I could think about was lying on the porch that last summer, spent from the sun, the five of us in a lapdog puddle. The house empty and dark. All of us a little high as Finch told us about the time she’d run away for a week when she was sixteen and exactly what her father had said to make her go. The way Caroline had leaned on Finch’s shoulder, eyes squeezed shut and a hand on her knee and said— I’m sorry, Finchard. Fuck that guy.
“That must’ve been it,” Finch responded lightly, “or it might have been the time yours told you your life wasn’t worth the change he dropped between couch cushions.”
A beat of profound silence. All I could hear was the gritting of Caroline’s teeth and that moth’s incessant thump. My fingernails dug into the skin of my earlobe until it stung.
“That’s enough.” The light drained from Moody’s face. “If you have constructive criticism to share, I invite you to do so. But I’ll remind you to be cordial to your peers while they’re presenting. Let’s take a break. Caroline, may I speak with you?”
Caroline followed Moody without a word. The room filled with rushed whispers. Thea spun around in her seat to face the remains of our group—Saz, Amrita, and me—and said, “Trouble in paradise?”
“I need a coffee,” I muttered.
Caroline and Moody stood in the hallway as I left the gallery. I caught them on the fringe of whatever Caroline was saying—it sounded like infantile behavior, no regard for anyone else’s work —and they clammed up when I passed.
I kept my head down the whole walk to Banemast, where the cafeteria was mostly empty. When I returned, paper coffee cup searing my scarred palm, everyone was seated again for Mars’s critique. I could barely hear anything the panel said. Couldn’t hold Mars’s work in my head, all its patterning and vivid colors blurring before my eyes until it was nothing more than a hallucinatory glow. I didn’t even have it in me to feel anxious about my critique coming next as Yejun followed Mars. All I could think about was the heat in my ears and the hum of the overhead lights and the thumping, the thumping, the thumping, the thumping.
Moody called my name. Everything tasted like static. Amrita’s grasp on my fingers was the only thing that let me know I’d been shaking. She said something about helping me hang my work that I only half registered, and I moved like I’d been programmed, hauling my paintings into the gallery with Amrita on my heels and leaning them up against the wall where they were meant to hang. Caroline was still gone—only Saz and Finch sat in our row, watching me like I was an animal limping away from the scene of a hit-and-run.
As a collective the paintings were an exposed vein, pressed on and spurting. I could hardly bear to look at them and preferred to watch the panel’s faces as they took them in. I’d spent so long planning how they might appear on the gallery wall that I could describe it without a glance. The Gatherings included the painting of the four of them around the table, several portraits of late dinners and our group surrounding the glow of the blue TV, a depiction of the Manor at night with them all peering out at me from their bedroom windows and backed by gold light, and finally, the five of us standing in Lake Michigan. More than anything, I’d wanted to hang the painting of our cornfield ritual. It was the piece I was proudest of out of anything I’d made yet—but it was too damning. I had, however, taken Moody’s suggestion and worked a shadow figure into each of the paintings. Sometimes it was an active participant in our world. Sometimes it was just a distant blip on the horizon.
“You’ve managed to build an impressive collection,” Moody said.
The ceramics professor chimed in right after her. “It’s rare for a student to present a body of work that feels this cohesive. You seem to have a firm grasp on theme, and your depictions have a lovely sense of chiaroscuro.”
“I agree, they’re very cinematic and eerie. Like stills from a horror film,” Tortoiseshell said. “Did you intend for your figures to feel so impenetrable?”
It probably wasn’t his intention, but I took it like a compliment. I gave a weak smile and tried to direct my gaze somewhere other than his stare as I answered. But my eyes fell on the memorialized chair with Kolesnik’s photo.
The photo was gone. The seat was now occupied by an increasingly familiar horned shape. It was less an animal and closer to human, like a body in an ill-fitting costume, the limbs too long, the edges of it frayed with the impression of fur. Its tusks curled up and over the mouth and nose. Lidless amber eyes peered back at me. The dry corner of my lips cracked, and copper flooded my mouth with the sting.
Moody’s face crinkled with concern as she turned to look at the spot I couldn’t tear my gaze away from. The creature stared at me, unbothered. Its eyes were so alive. They seemed to beg me to speak.
“It hurts,” it said with Kolesnik’s voice.
Said was the wrong word. It was more like the echo of a scream, as if Kolesnik’s voice started down in hell and crawled along a thread, tin cans held to the ears, a makeshift séance between worlds.
“Jo? Is everything alright?”
“I’m ...” The words wouldn’t come. I blinked a hundred times and opened my eyes each time to find that boar man. It was so massive, so impossibly opaque. The room filled with the snuffling sound of its breath. A low whine slipped from its spent throat. Saz stood up, her face appearing over its shoulder with worry written all over it.
The creature keened a desperate sound. The head rolled back and forth. “It hurts,” it wailed again. “It hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts.”
The gallery’s door slammed shut. I looked away from the creature to find Caroline hovering in the doorway. Her gaze flitted over the panel and finally fixed me with a burning stare.
“I’m so sorry,” my body said. “I think I need some air.”
“Must be the nerves,” I heard someone say behind me, but I was already brushing past Caroline and hurrying down the hall. “No need for them, really, her work is quite moving.”
I didn’t know where to go. I let my feet take me down the promenade to Lysander Gate, where the garden slept dormant. Topiaries and sculptures watched me hurry forward. I nearly made it to the water before I had to crouch and dry heave in the grass. When I finally stopped retching, I wiped the back of my hand across my mouth and slid my fingers over my eyes, shaking, unraveling.
Tears had fallen without my noticing. They dried in frozen tracks, toes numb in my boots. The grass crunched when I sat. It was barely afternoon, and the world already felt close to dark. Evening kept coming quicker and quicker.
I didn’t know how long I’d been gone, but the cold drove down to my core. As the sun fell, I was immediately aware of the consequences of being in the garden alone—the trees were too close, the woods too dark, water sloshing roughly at the pond’s edge. I got to my feet. I’d missed Saz’s critique by now. How long had everyone waited before they realized I wasn’t coming back? Who had taken down my work?
By the time I got back to Grainer, the gallery was dark. The room had been cleaned and the chairs neatly put away. I carried myself up, and up, and up the old staircase, winding my way to the top. The studio was alive with rustling and stools screeching and someone hammering a nail into place. I followed the noise and found Finch in her studio. She whipped her head up when I knocked on the doorframe.
“Fuck, there you are. Where the hell did you go?”
“I—” I started, then faltered again. “I needed some air. Didn’t feel well, but I’m okay now. Are you and Caroline ... fine? How did Saz do?”
Finch grimaced. “The whole day was a shitshow, but they did okay. They called Saz’s work ‘dense’ but ‘intriguing,’ which felt like code for ‘we don’t know what the hell we’re talking about.’ I guess shit hit the fan for all of us in some way. Are you sure you’re alright? You look like you’re about to throw up.”
“I think they liked you,” I said softly, letting the rest of her words fall away.
A new voice interrupted us. “Of course they liked her. All she does is throw the rest of us under the bus and kiss their asses in the meantime.”
I turned to find Caroline in the doorway. Saz and Amrita followed close behind, likely anticipating the mess that was about to unfold with Caroline’s raised voice.
Finch froze. “What exactly do you mean by that?”
“You know what I mean,” Caroline said, smiling.
“No, I don’t think I do. If you’re going to accuse me, then accuse me. Have a fucking conversation with me instead of trying to make insulting quips during my Survey.”
“I just think it’s funny that you take a smoke break right before my critique, and then I find a massive burn in my painting.”
Said painting was propped against the wall outside of Caroline’s studio now. The burn almost appeared bigger, blackened around the edges as if it had spread in the short time between Survey and now.
Finch gave a disbelieving laugh. “You’re ridiculous. You know I wouldn’t do that.”
“Do I?” Caroline’s stare was a challenge. Her pale dress made her appear taller, as if she were growing toward the ceiling where the fans spun, flickering light and shadow, light and shadow, light and shadow. “I think you’d do anything to be chosen for Solo.”
“Are you serious? I’m the one who would do anything? I don’t give a fuck what happens, Caroline! You’re the one whose parents pin her whole worth on whether she shows twenty paintings to a bunch of washed-up, wine-drunk professors.”
“Finch, stop,” Saz pleaded. “Both of you, come on.”
Caroline ignored Saz and stepped closer to Finch, index finger pointing hard. “I’m sick of you acting like you’re better than the rest of us.”
Finch rolled her eyes. “Jesus, this again. When have I ever said that?”
“You don’t have to say it. I can—” Caroline cut herself off, her chest heaving.
“Go ahead, speak your fucking mind,” Finch snapped.
“You want to win without having to accept accountability,” Caroline said immediately, her lip pulling back in disgust. “If the rest of us fail, it makes it easy for you to reap the benefits and go on being Moody’s favorite pet. You don’t care what that means for us. What we’ll lose in the process.”
“As if you could ever lose anything,” Finch said, her smile cold and mocking. She shrugged and said, “You’ll be fine, Caroline. You’re just mad they liked my work better.”
Amrita stepped between them. “Enough. Get out. Go.”
Finch looked at her, appalled. “Why do I have to leave? She interrupted my Survey!”
Saz had an arm around Caroline, steering her away, murmuring something under her breath.
Amrita’s voice was strained. “I cannot have you both in this room right now. You’re friends, remember? You’re supposed to care about each other and not ruin what was supposed to be a good day.”
“God,” Finch sighed, fingertips pressed over her eyes. “Whatever, fuck this. I need to get my bag from the Manor. Jo, can you let me in?”
I blinked back, surprised. “Sure, yeah, of course.”
I gave Caroline one more glance over my shoulder as we left Grainer. She stood rigidly outside of her studio, staring at the burned painting. Saz put a gentle hand on Caroline’s arm as if hoping to comfort. But I knew she couldn’t. Caroline was too close to immolating.
Finch called my name one more time, and I followed. We walked the promenade in silence.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Finch snapped, “and I didn’t do it.”
I stayed quiet. I was thinking about the burn. But I was also thinking about Caroline and how worried I was that something crucial had snapped within her. Caroline needed Solo like it would keep her alive, but so did the rest of us. There was no way to win.
“I don’t understand why you always take her side,” Finch said when I still hadn’t answered. “You let her get away with anything just because she’s Caroline. She could kill someone, and you’d go about your day as if nothing had happened, saying the person had probably deserved it.”
I flared with a combination of guilt and irritation. “ We killed someone and he did deserve it.”
Finch balked. “You don’t actually believe that, do you? He was old as dirt, Jo, and blew half his brains out with a tissue box every week. We are not responsible for the natural order of life, no matter how many internet rituals we act out.”
We paused at the Manor’s front door. I fumbled with my keys. “Listen, I’m not taking her side. I’m not taking anyone’s side. I just want us all to make it through this year without losing our minds.”
Finch stopped my fidgeting with her hand on my wrist. Her fingers were so cold. I wished I had gloves to give her, that I could tuck her fingers inside of them and clutch them between my own.
“I didn’t do it,” Finch whispered. “I need you to believe me. You especially, out of all of them, or else I have nothing to stand for.”
Everything about her face pleaded with me—the wisps of her hair curling out from beneath her hat, the pink of her cheeks, the intensity of her gaze.
“I know you didn’t,” I said, and as the words rushed out, I realized that they were true. Finch was evasive, clever, too blunt—but she could never be cruel. That was what made her and Caroline so similar, what made them grate against each other so viciously. They could pick and prod at one another, but the tension always melted away to reveal barely concealed admiration.
And while I knew that, there was a terrified part of me that wondered what had burned the painting, if not Finch. I thought about the shadow of the Boar King by the water, perched on the end of my bed, seated at the gallery, living in the blackest corners of my mind. I wondered how physical something had to become before it could cause harm.
When she didn’t answer, I said, “I’m sorry, of course you didn’t. I know you wouldn’t do something like that.”
We stepped inside, and she grabbed her bag off the sofa before hesitating. Hypocritically, she said, “You look exhausted. Promise me you’ll try to get some sleep.”
I promised her. Finch pulled me into a hug, her breath warm against my cheek, hands firm at the small of my back. I shut my eyes and inhaled the scent I’d always associated with her—smoke, apple, something warm and nutty.
“I don’t like any of this,” she whispered. “It scares me.”
With my eyes closed, I could feel her pulse where my forehead met the thin, cool skin of her temple. My brain sabotaged me with images against my eyelids—the eyes of the boar and its hulking humanoid shape.
“We’ll be alright,” I murmured.
Voices rose in the distance, coming closer—Amrita arguing with Saz, the words impossible to make out but the tone unforgettable. Finch stepped back and said she had to go. I let her walk away, let her leave us behind, let the rip down our center stretch wider. I closed the door behind her.
In my room I tried to wipe the day from my mind. Clearly there was something wrong with me, if no one else could see the monster we had created. If I could fix it—if I could make up for my faults, for all the ways we had fucked up—maybe Kolesnik would leave me alone.
Amrita knocked on my door and asked if I wanted to talk. I pretended to be asleep until she went away, and when the house at last grew quiet, I went around my room and took all the mirrors down.
Out of sight, out of mind. The night passed with only a blink of sleep. Was I out of my mind?