The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [50]
A man, covered in mud and thin, lash-like wounds that dripped blood, wandered in a field of palominos.
A little girl, buried alive, played jacks by match light while her parents wailed above her grave.
An ocean of dead, decomposing geese were stacked like cordwood by men in biohazard suits.
A woman, her hair on fire, held a brush made of bone and smiled in an exact reproduction of the Mona Lisa’s expression.
A young boy, his hands wrapped in barbed wire, wrestled with a tiger while the boy’s classmates circled around them.
Two women, handcuffed to each other, stood over the steel teeth of a bear trap.
A family sat cross-legged on the floor of a cabin, surrounded by rabbits, and hurked entrails from the still-living animals.
“What are these?” Buster asked, his eyes moving from painting to painting as if they told an interconnected story.
“Maybe someone sends these to Mom and Dad. Remember that lady who kept mailing them Ziploc bags filled with teeth?”
“They’re not bad,” Buster said, with some admiration. Technically, the paintings were nearly perfect, especially considering the tiny dimensions of the canvas. They were the work of an artist of some accomplishment, however unsettling the subject matter. He imagined these paintings made into animated movies and those movies being watched with great reverence by people who were steeped in psychedelic drugs. He then imagined that, if he were a better writer, he could make an entire career out of explicating the circumstances that created each one of the images on display. Instead, all he could do was stare at the paintings and feel like he and his sister had found something akin to pornography and that they should not be looking at them out in the open.
As they stood, afraid to move, the paintings surrounding them in ways that now seemed alive and threatening, the door swung open and their mother walked into the room. Whatever words were poised to be spoken aloud were replaced by a gasp so resonant that it seemed their mother had inhaled all of the oxygen in the room. Then a dark shadow passed over her expression, her eyes narrowing. “Don’t you dare look at these,” their mother said, her voice barely above a whisper. She pushed her children out of the way and hesitated for a few seconds before she began to turn over each painting so that the image was concealed. Annie and Buster stared at the ceiling as their mother removed the offending articles from their sight, a procedure that seemed as perilous as defusing a bomb or handling unsafe chemicals. Once it was finished, their mother, her breathing now unsteady, as if she was on the precipice of a long crying jag, sat on the bed and said, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”
Buster and Annie, unaccustomed to emotion, kept their distance. “What’s wrong, Mom?” Annie asked. “I don’t know,” their mother responded. “What are these?” Buster then asked. “I don’t know,” their mother again responded. “Where did they come from?” Annie asked. “Me,” their mother said, finally looking up at Buster and Annie, “I made them.”
Working together, the three of them moved the paintings from the floor back into the closet as Mrs. Fang explained their origin.
“I used to be a painter,” she told them. “That’s how I got a scholarship to study art in college. And then I met your dad and I fell in love and, well, you know how he feels about visual art.”
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