Life’s Work, by David J. Wright

Stories in the Ether #1 Now Available! Thirteen compelling stories and original inspired art for your favorite eReader! Available in ePUB and PDF from RPGNow.com or direct to your Kindle Reader from Amazon for only $2.99.

I find the girl down one of the wide gallery halls, folded forward on a bench, elbows on sharp knees, the fingers of one hand at her lips. She’s long like a fishing pole, and her head is just about shaved except for a couple of curls pigtailing off the top, and her nose is long. I see five or six jangling earrings in her left ear, the ear facing me, and I can see a ring in her lower lip, and a ball-headed stud in her left eyebrow. She’s not beautiful – hey, she’s not even pretty, not from this angle, not in this light, probably no matter what.

“Hi,” I say, sitting down on the bench, a person and a half between us. I offer her a look but she doesn’t return it. I turn my head to see the painting she’s examining.

It’s a big one, a rectangle maybe two feet on the side, maybe four feet across the top. There are a lot of dark colors, blacks and browns and purples, stroked in wide, circular patterns around a pale yellow starburst in the center. The strokes are funny, since they don’t look like they were made by a brush. They’re irregular, fat to thin to fat again, smears almost, made by some semi-rounded surface. *Fingerpainting?* I wonder.

The card underneath the painting has the word *Capture* in calligraphy, and underneath that in block capitals is the word *Ami*.

“Do you like it?” the girl asks. She doesn’t turn toward me and she doesn’t move her fingers from her lips, so the question comes out a little blurred, a little self-conscious.

“Yeah, I do. There’s real energy in it,” I say. “It’s almost like you can see the darkness moving in on that light.”

She doesn’t say anything.

“I don’t usually get abstracts,” I say. “Give me hunters on horses or big fat naked women any day, and I know what I’m looking at. But this I like. It’s the movement. You know, the energy.”

She doesn’t say anything.

“I guess I’m not really much when it comes to art. I didn’t even know this place was here actually. I’ve driven by it, I don’t know, maybe a hundred times. You see the sign, *Temple D*, you think it’s another of those funky religions, the ones where they say you can only eat home-grown wheat and you have to wear black headbands and you can’t go out on rainy days.”

She doesn’t say anything.

“Friend of mine put me on to it. He’s not exactly an art type either, but he said the work in here just blew him away, that I had to check it out. That’s my buddy Bernie, always wanting to try new things. I wasn’t even sure if they’d be open on a Tuesday night.” I smile at her, but she doesn’t smile back. “My name’s Walter, by the way.”

She doesn’t say anything.

A real hottie, this one, a real firecracker. Getting a look at her closer up, under the wash of the 40-watters recessed in the ceiling, the harsher bulbs throwing funnels of lights along the walls, she looks like she might be cute, maybe even pretty, if she didn’t have those lines in her forehead, the sharp incision between her studded eyebrows–yes, there’s a twin stud on the other side–her narrow lips pulled down in a fart-smelling frown. She has a half-T on, silkscreened with pastels and spattered with dribbles of old paint, and she has black tights on. It doesn’t look like she’s wearing underwear.

“I see the paint,” I say. “Are you an artist?”

She nods. Her index finger, the one at her lips, straightens up briefly, and she says, “This is one of mine.”

I look at the painting again. “Really? Yours?” I look at the card. “So you’re… Ami?” I pronounce it *AY-mee*.

“Ah-MEE,” she corrects, making it sound like the word for “friend,” I think in French.

“Ami,” I say, pronouncing it her way, feeling foolish.

There are a few moments as we both enjoy the name, and then she says, “So you like it?”

“Oh, sure, absolutely,” I say. “Real… um… energy.”

She glances my way, but not at me, and she nods to another painting, this one smaller, square, about two feet at a side. “That’s one of mine too.”

I slide down the bench to take a look at it. This one’s almost all black, and I can see where the paint has been applied with four fingers and the side of a hand. There’s no sign of a brush stroke anywhere. Again, there’s movement in the work, starting at the left and right sides and arcing down toward the bottom and then joining and moving up in the middle. Near the top, a ragged area of white canvas was left blank like an ascending ghostly shape, riding that tide of motion.

The card underneath reads, *Release*.

“Wow,” I say. “That’s amazing. My eyes can’t help following it.”

“Do you know what it is?”

I can see she’s serious, so I lean forward and really give the painting a good looking at. I mean, I examine the hell out of that painting, assuming a pose similar to hers, elbows on knees, fingers at mouth. “Is it…” I say. “Uh… it looks like… is it somebody dying? That part right there, it looks like a ghost, that’s the first thing I thought of. A ghost going up to heaven.”

And for that, I get a smile. It’s not a pretty one. Her teeth overlap, point inward, and they are a few shades off of white. That might just be the lighting in here, but I don’t think so.

“You do see it, don’t you?” she says.

“I’m not sure what I’m seeing actually. I’m just telling you what it looks like.”

“No, you’re right. You’ve got it exactly. It’s my Gramma. She was sick. Real sick. She wasn’t getting better. And I thought it would be nice. Her dying. All the pain stopping. So I painted this. I let her go.”

“You… let her go?”

She makes a microscopic laugh–*heh*–and looks right at me. Nope, not pretty at all. Intense, yes, but not pretty.

“It took me a while to figure it out,” she says. “I was in third grade. I did a painting called *Autumn*. I didn’t know why. It had a lot of red in it. At the bottom. And there was… what did you call it? Movement? From top to bottom. At recess I fell off the Jungle Jim. Hit on my head, right on a big rock. I still have the scar.” She turns her head, rubs a webwork of matted skin behind her ear. Her hair’s a little thicker there, but I can still see the old wound.

“Really,” I say.

“I thought my work was just seeing. Back then. I painted one, *Displace*. It was boxes in a house. My father got a new job. We had to move. I painted one, *Shred*. It was books and papers. They were torn up. My parents got divorced.”

“Okay,” I say.

“I painted more like that. I thought I was seeing these things. Then I thought I might be causing these things. I started trying. It was hard. Really hard. I almost gave up. A lot of times. Then I painted one called *Through*. Bright colors, yellows and oranges, some pinks. I was painting my first show. My art teacher came to me. She said my paintings were going to be put up in school. That’s when I knew.”

“Huh,” I say.

“That’s where *Release* came from. My Gramma. I’ve done a few others. It’s how I got in here. It was one called *Faith*. When I needed money for rent, that’s when I painted *On Deck*. I got a check from my father. When my car was breaking down, I painted *Marathon*. It started working again. I don’t do it that much. It doesn’t seem right.”

“Wow,” I say.

“I talk a lot. Sometimes. I’m sorry, it’s just that I love my work. I love to talk about it. You understood *Release*, I thought you would understand about everything. Do you?”

I take a moment to answer. “I want to say I do, but I’d be lying. There’s a lot here to take in, a lot of amazing things, incredible things. But I’d also be lying if I said I didn’t want to hear more.” It’s risky, but I slide a little closer to her, now just half a person away. I raise a hand, like I’m going to touch her, but then I lower it to my knee. “I do want to hear more, more about you, more about your work. It’s always seemed like art had a power to it that was beyond me, but when you talk about it… I don’t know, it all seems to make sense. I want it to keep making sense.”

She mulls. I wait.

“You want to hear more?” she says.

“There’s this little place down the street, it’s a favorite of mine. It’s called *Caffeine Nation*. It hops during the day, but at night they turn the lights down, serve the dessert coffees and the biscotti. You find yourself a couch and you just hang out. It’s perfect for talking, for just… you know, being. Have you ever been there?”

She shakes her head. Her various rings jingle.

“Do you know where it is?”

She shakes her head. Her various rings jingle again.

“I’ve got my car parked around back. Did you drive here?”

She nods. *Jingle jingle*.

“Okay then, here’s the plan. Let’s get our cars, you follow me to the *Nation*. The parking’s a little tricky there, but there’s a laundromat next door, and I know the guy. We can park there, go in, get some coffee, some biscotti, talk some more. What do you say? Are you interested? They’ve also got a piano there. Maybe I’ll play a little for you. If you’re lucky, maybe I won’t.”

And that gets me another unpleasant smile. Does she brush her teeth at all?

We rise together, and I place one arm behind her, not touching, and extend my other arm in the direction of the exit. “Please,” I say.

She’s still smiling, and her head dips a little in acknowledgment. We walk together, with me one step behind, and her moving with her shoulders hunched and her legs extending like a stork walking on uneven ground. I follow her through the gallery, under a few archways, past a few displays–some of them feature my hunters on horses and my big fat naked women—and then we’re past the reception desk and out into the wet Tuesday night. It rained all afternoon, slicking the streets shiny and making the air feel like it weighs about a hundred pounds. It’s not raining at the moment, but there’s the damp and chilly promise of it all around.

“Where’s your car?” I say. “Are you on the street?”

“No,” she says. “I’m around back too.”

We head in that direction. The parking lot behind *Temple D* is big but this night it’s mostly empty, maybe a dozen scattered cars. It serves a couple different places besides the gallery, including a music store with massive pianos dominating the front windows and a kiddie rummage store that looks like if you opened the door, stuff would tumble out as though from a cartoon closet.

“Okay, I’m right over here,” I say to her. “You follow me, all right? It’s not that far.”

She’s nodding as she takes one step away from me toward her own car, a brown Dodge Dart that burns oil. I saw her climb out of it earlier tonight.

~.~

I lunge, cock my fist back, and hammer the knuckles *wha-bang* right into the base of her skull. You have to do this part right, because if it’s not hard enough, they get to screaming, and if it’s too hard, you could kill them.

I do it right. She gasps and goes down. I drop to my knees immediately, scooping her up with my hands under her armpits, and then I’m hugging her to me and walking her towards my car. I keep my motion languid, shouldering her backwards left and right, almost like we’re dancing. Anyone who sees us now might think my girl’s just had a touch too much to drink, and hopefully won’t think anything else of it.

I prop her against my Crown Vic, an ex-cop car, complete with back doors that don’t open from the inside and the reinstalled grating between the front and back seats. I also blacked out the back windows.

She’s boneless and slithery, pushed up against the car, but I hear faint groaning coming from her, so I know she’s still alive. I pop the door open and wrestle her in, and then I slam the door shut and – it’s done.

Now I can breathe again. The hardest part is over. I lean against my car and peel my cell phone out of my jeans pocket and dial up Bernie.

“Yeah?” Bernie’s voice, loud over the *thump-thumping* of the club music. He must be outside, having a smoke; I wouldn’t be able to hear him at all inside.

“Any luck?” I ask.

“Nah, dead night. You?”

“It pays to appreciate art, buddy. You want to do your place?”

“You got one?” he asks. He sounds annoyed. It was his idea to check out the gallery, but I’m betting he figured I’d strike out.

“Oh yeah, tall and skinny, just the way you like them.”

“Shit, you’re gonna get there first!” Now he wasn’t annoyed. Now he was pissed.

“I’ll leave something for you, man. Don’t you worry.”

I press END before he can say anything, and then I chuckle. Ah Bernie.

I open my own door and climb into the driver’s seat. “Hey, how we doing back there?” I say, looking over my shoulder.

She’s up. That’s surprising. She’s leaning against the passenger’s side door, exhaling mist on the window, scribbling in the mist with her fingers.

“What are you doing?” I ask, grinning.

She exhales and scribbles. She ignores me.

“Hey, what are you doing? Nobody can see that, you know. You can write HELP all you want, nobody’s going to be able to read it through those windows.”

She exhales and scribbles some more.

I look at the window, and realize she’s not writing words. She’s drawing something.

“Hey,” I say. I turn a little in my seat, and put my face up near the metal grating. “What is that?”

It looks like a pumpkin. Or maybe an apple. She’s drawing fruit?

“What is that?” I say again.

She’s adding lines coming out of it now, one curving off the top and going down, another entering from the side, another leaving from the other side. It starts to look like something. What is that?

That’s when she pivots on her butt, spins her long legs around and up, and then kicks her two combat-booted feet into the window. *WHAM!*

When I was seven, my stepfather punched me square in the center of the chest because I left a pile of Legos in the middle of the living room. It was the worst pain I ever felt, and that includes racking my head off a windshield two years ago in a car accident. The agony was enormous, consuming, and total. And that’s what it feels like when this girl–Ami, not *AY-mee* but *Ah-MEE*–kicks her drawing on my window.

“Oh my God!” I scream, my whole body rocking with the explosion in my chest. It’s a donkey kick, it’s a safe-dropped-on-you kick.

She’s saying something, repeating it. She kicks again, I rock again in my seat, my “Oh my God!” scream spinning up towards a shriek. I’ve got to get out of here, got to get out. She’s still saying something, still repeating it. Heart?

She kicks again, my stomach contracts, and something hot rushes up my throat and spatters on the steering wheel, a little on the windshield. It’s liquidy.

“Heart,” she’s saying, and another word I can’t hear. It’s almost audible over the roaring in my ears, almost meaningful over the supernova that’s building in my chest.

“Please No!” I’m screaming, my voice clogged and tight. There are razors digging into me, like a swarm of wasps, biting and stinging, and my lungs feel like they’re full of water. I can’t breathe.

She kicks again, repeating her line–heart something–and my eyes feel like they burst, my vision goes all red, and the top of my head must be cracking open.

She kicks again, and my face slams off the grating as my body seizes, my arms flailing around, my fingers catching in the steering wheel, snapping with weak pops. I can’t shriek anymore, and all that’s coming out of me is this punctured wheezing, high and whistley.

I couldn’t hear her over the shrieking, but now I can.

My legs are kicking, kicking, and I can feel warmth in my lap and I know I’ve pissed myself.

She’s saying, “Heart break, heart break, heart break.”

THE END