hot. She brought her hand up to look at it. She tasted it. Salt and copper. Slippery like oil between her fingers.
Her first thought: I want to paint.
So she dragged her body back to the barn next to her own house even as she could barely walk or stand or bear the weight of anything and she found a wooden plank and she took what was left of her strength and painted with her own menstrual blood. That is how her parents and brother found her. Almost like a wild animal.
As she looks at the red water around her now in the bath, the girl thinks, That is the blood that has returned to me now. The blood I have waited for. And she thinks of the wolf’s paw, the severing she witnessed one night when she first came to this house.
The widow shows the girl how to use a pad to carry the blood close to her body, and in the months to come the girl’s and the widow’s monthly bleedings synchronize. From that day forward, the widow accelerates her teachings. She teaches the girl how to be present in her skin, how to leave it; how to kill animals to eat them and to use their skins and fur; how to extract medicine from drying and grinding their internal organs; how to chop wood; dig your way to food or shelter; how to shoot to hunt, how to shoot to kill a man; how to use your hands to make things. How to hold charcoal to draw, how to make oilpaints, what a sable brush is; how to take a pinhole photo using a box and the sun; how to hold a violin and draw a bow against its thin, unimaginable strings; how to make language go strange and vertical to make a poem. How to trust the moon.
Sometimes, when the widow is retrieving more wood for the fire, or when she is gathering materials to close a hole in the wall or roof, or when she is milking the goat or digging up frozen potatoes or shooting fowl or retrieving a rabbit from a trap, the woman catches a glimpse of the girl in the act of painting. Out in the barn. On scraps of wood. With colors she has invented from berries and roots and olive oil and mud. She paints with her bare hands. And sometimes, the widow sees her paint with her own blood, her hand dipping down to the well of her body. When she watches the girl paint with blood, it takes her breath straight out of her, lifting it up to a place she has not admitted to for years. Frenzied and animal the girl’s hands are. Wild, her blond tangles of hair. Her body thrusting forward and retreating with an unbashful sexuality. Without anyone’s permission or knowledge. Sometimes the girl is laughing. Sometimes she shouts, “ Ne !”
What she paints: a face. And the face is either screaming or laughing, at what it is impossible to tell.
The woman then understands that the girl will someday leave the house. Maybe soon. That the force within this girl is not anything belonging to the widow. And because she sees something that the girl does not, the woman starts to teach her English. She tells her, “Someday you must leave here and take what we have left in us to America. What we have left in us, buriedand ravaged as it is, needs to come out. It is not a perfect place, America. It’s simply a way out of this story.”
In this way art becomes the whole world of the girl. And her hands become painter’s hands; and her body leans toward becoming; and her tongue begins to move from the cornered shapes of one language into the rounded edges of another; her dreams begin to carry scenes from an unknown country; and her origins, which are a white blast zone, begin to seek form, like the crouch of violence in her fingers, like the unstoppable sex of a child leaving childhood, making for the world.
Love Is an Image
It’s quiet like snow.
The filmmaker is holding the writer’s hand in the hospital room.
His head is on the bed near her chest.
Their breathing—a husband’s, a wife’s—synchronizes and hums with the hospital’s life-machine sounds.
Their beautiful boy is walking around the room with his Canon camcorder. Filming the lines
Her first thought: I want to paint.
So she dragged her body back to the barn next to her own house even as she could barely walk or stand or bear the weight of anything and she found a wooden plank and she took what was left of her strength and painted with her own menstrual blood. That is how her parents and brother found her. Almost like a wild animal.
As she looks at the red water around her now in the bath, the girl thinks, That is the blood that has returned to me now. The blood I have waited for. And she thinks of the wolf’s paw, the severing she witnessed one night when she first came to this house.
The widow shows the girl how to use a pad to carry the blood close to her body, and in the months to come the girl’s and the widow’s monthly bleedings synchronize. From that day forward, the widow accelerates her teachings. She teaches the girl how to be present in her skin, how to leave it; how to kill animals to eat them and to use their skins and fur; how to extract medicine from drying and grinding their internal organs; how to chop wood; dig your way to food or shelter; how to shoot to hunt, how to shoot to kill a man; how to use your hands to make things. How to hold charcoal to draw, how to make oilpaints, what a sable brush is; how to take a pinhole photo using a box and the sun; how to hold a violin and draw a bow against its thin, unimaginable strings; how to make language go strange and vertical to make a poem. How to trust the moon.
Sometimes, when the widow is retrieving more wood for the fire, or when she is gathering materials to close a hole in the wall or roof, or when she is milking the goat or digging up frozen potatoes or shooting fowl or retrieving a rabbit from a trap, the woman catches a glimpse of the girl in the act of painting. Out in the barn. On scraps of wood. With colors she has invented from berries and roots and olive oil and mud. She paints with her bare hands. And sometimes, the widow sees her paint with her own blood, her hand dipping down to the well of her body. When she watches the girl paint with blood, it takes her breath straight out of her, lifting it up to a place she has not admitted to for years. Frenzied and animal the girl’s hands are. Wild, her blond tangles of hair. Her body thrusting forward and retreating with an unbashful sexuality. Without anyone’s permission or knowledge. Sometimes the girl is laughing. Sometimes she shouts, “ Ne !”
What she paints: a face. And the face is either screaming or laughing, at what it is impossible to tell.
The woman then understands that the girl will someday leave the house. Maybe soon. That the force within this girl is not anything belonging to the widow. And because she sees something that the girl does not, the woman starts to teach her English. She tells her, “Someday you must leave here and take what we have left in us to America. What we have left in us, buriedand ravaged as it is, needs to come out. It is not a perfect place, America. It’s simply a way out of this story.”
In this way art becomes the whole world of the girl. And her hands become painter’s hands; and her body leans toward becoming; and her tongue begins to move from the cornered shapes of one language into the rounded edges of another; her dreams begin to carry scenes from an unknown country; and her origins, which are a white blast zone, begin to seek form, like the crouch of violence in her fingers, like the unstoppable sex of a child leaving childhood, making for the world.
Love Is an Image
It’s quiet like snow.
The filmmaker is holding the writer’s hand in the hospital room.
His head is on the bed near her chest.
Their breathing—a husband’s, a wife’s—synchronizes and hums with the hospital’s life-machine sounds.
Their beautiful boy is walking around the room with his Canon camcorder. Filming the lines
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