The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [129]
Caleb and Camille, perhaps forgetting their cover, held hands, kissed each other. Buster and Annie began to walk away from their parents, Mr. and Mrs. Fang. Annie, still holding on to the fantasy of causing unrest, wanted to scream out, to make a huge scene, get the police involved, grind everything that mattered to their parents into dust. Buster, sensing her whirling anger, touched her softly on the shoulder, squeezed, kissed her on her cheek. “Let’s go,” he said. “Let’s get far away.”
Annie, her anger unabated, resisted the urge to do what her parents would have done in the same situation, to cause chaos no matter whom it hurt. This, she finally understood, was not what she and Buster had to be a part of anymore. They had stepped mere inches away from the life their parents had made for them, and all they had to do now was to keep moving. She nodded her assent to her brother and her posture relaxed. As they continued to put distance between themselves and their parents, Annie and Buster resisted the urge to turn around, to change that final image of their parents, embracing, happy, nothing in the world that mattered but the art that was inside of them.
Annie and Buster walked out of the mall. They stepped into their rental car and pulled onto the highway. They did not speak, could not find the words to say what they felt. They had brought their parents back from the dead, some kind of strange magic that only the two of them possessed. Annie held out her hand, and Buster took it, the way their joined hands could steady the rotation of the Earth. They listened to the sound of the car’s tires on the road and hoped that wherever they ended up next would be a good place, a place of their own making. And they believed, for the first time in their lives, that it would be.
favor fire, 2009
artist: annie fang
Annie sat on the floor in the middle of a cavernous bedroom, a row of tiny beds lining the west wall, as she stared at the four children, two boys and two girls, who surrounded her. “Your hair is short like a boy’s,” the youngest of them, Jake, seven years old, as beautiful as a doll, said. “It is pretty short,” Annie admitted. “But it’s very pretty on you,” said the oldest, Isabel, a fifteen-year-old girl with huge blue eyes and crooked teeth. The other boy, Thomas, twelve years old and already awkward in his body, said, “Your hair smells nice, too.” Annie nodded at these children, who seemed to close around her. “Can I kiss you?” the last child, Caitlin, a ten-year-old girl with a dusting of freckles across her nose, asked Annie. Annie paused, looked down at the floor and then over at the closed door to the bedroom. “I guess so,” Annie said. “If she gets to kiss you,” Thomas said, “we should all get to kiss you.” The children held hands and danced in a circle around Annie, screaming, “Kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss.” Annie looked at the door one more time and then said, “Okay. Okay. One at a time.” The children shook their heads. “All at once,” they shouted. Annie nodded and then closed her eyes. She felt their little mouths, slightly wet, press against her cheeks, her forehead, her own mouth. The children made a single, sustained sound, a humming noise that rumbled in their throats. And then Annie smelled smoke, spiraling around her, emanating from the children, and she pushed them away. “No, no, no, no,” she whispered to the children, who merely laughed and ran to the far corners of the room, smoke trailing them, kicked into strange shapes by their tiny feet.
“Cut,” Lucy shouted. And then the shapes of nearly a dozen people, who had somehow made themselves invisible up to that point, began to scurry around the room, setting and resetting lights, clearing the smoke-like fog from the room. One of the crew members held out his hand for Annie and she took it, pulling herself up from the floor. “Looked good,” the man said, and Annie smiled. It was the first day of shooting, but it felt to Annie, who had spent so much time in Lucy’s presence leading up to filming, that it had been going on for months. Lucy