***
“What’re you reading?” Peter said, holding out a glass of champagne to Astrid.
She shook her head.
“No, you don’t want the champagne, or no, you don’t want to tell me?”
“I don’t want the champagne. I can’t.”
“A teetotaling Ass at her own opening? What’s that about?”
Instead of replying, Astrid held up a ragged piece of paper. “Rogie sent me two pieces of Simon’s diary. I only used one in the shot.”
“Read it to me.”
The villagers came like dragonflies, moving through the darkness in a swarm I hadn’t thought possible. And the sound. Like an endless rumble somewhere beneath the surface of the earth. All of them moving in one direction, toward us. No one knew what to do. In all the lands we’ve been to, all the people we’ve met, never have we felt that we were about to be run down by a herd of humanity. I looked at Ted, and he made an evil face, and I remember thinking “that isn’t enough; stop joking,” but I didn’t say anything. Then, all sound, all movement stopped. We were surrounded and the bodies blocked what weak natural light filtered into the little village. The only thing I could hear was the panting of a dog somewhere to the right of me, hidden by those bodies and the darkness.
Really, we were probably just tired and they were just curious to get a look at the doctors sent here to fight an epidemic that acted like a balloon filled with water. Press on one symptom, and another would bulge out. We were ready to set up camp, tired as we were from the drive, but the people insisted that we take one of the huts. “It means a great deal to us,” they said. “The family who lived there died.” How could we refuse that? These people, how alive they are, like they say soldiers are just after a battle. So, that is the story of our arrival in Suelo. Sorry, no pictures. It was just too dark.”
Astrid looked up. Peter had turned his face toward the door where the dusk was milling around outside. Soon, people, more strangers, would start queuing up there to see an Astrid Kent exhibition on opening night. Peter’s eyes moved around the room where the 63 photographs were arranged. The final nine occupied a long wall reaching back to the end of the gallery, but they only took up a third of that wall’s space. The rest of the long wall remained blank, except for a title card that read Silence. Peter stared straight down the barrel of that blankness.
“All of this because of a lucky break,” Astrid said. “Remember my first shot? The woman committing suicide by leaping off a ten story building? I just pointed my camera and started clicking madly away, and when I developed the film, there was her tumbling body between two rays of reflected light that looked like a long bungee cord bulging with her fall.”
“You called it ‘In The Arms of God,’” Peter said.
“I feel like that woman right now.”
“Falling or being caught?”
“Both.” She tugged at the sleeve of Peter’s tuxedo. “Come on. I want to show you something.”
She led him down that blank wall that ended in a heavy hanging drapery. She pushed it aside, and Peter followed her into the dark space. Astrid moved ahead, kicking a metal chair before finding the string to turn on the light. On the table was a blown-up collage containing pictures of Simon that Astrid had arranged in the shape of a body. In the groin area, Simon’s face was replaced by an ultrasound photograph of a fetus in the womb.
“Marty wanted me to hang this rather than do the silence bit,” Astrid said, still holding onto the string, “But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. To open up Simon and me like this to all the world. I’m not ready for that yet. Someday, maybe, but not now.”
Peter grunted a quick “uh-huh” before pointing to the ultrasound photo. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Astrid grinned at him and pulled on the string.
Joseph Kenyon has published numerous short stories and poems in literary magazines and anthologies over the past twenty years. At the same time, he has taught writing at community colleges in New Jersey, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Currently, he is on the English faculty of the Community College of Philadelphia. His first novel, All The Living And The Dead will be published by Mill City Press in April, 2016.
The Myths of Living Page 7
