Food Poisoning #2 looks exactly like it did the last time I saw it. Streaks and patches of color, unintended and unbalanced. My mom’s pile of blotchy tissues from the night she left is a better work of art than this. Hell, the peanut butter streaks on the microwave tell more of a story.
I dig my X-Acto knife out of my supply box and strike it across the canvas. Once, twice, from corner to corner. I carve a jagged square out of the center, a messy oval out of the top right corner. A zigzag of my initials across the center, punctuated with a V, for good measure.
And it’s not quite enough.
The canvas is in shreds, so I send it flying off the easel. The clatter I’m expecting is more of a dry thunk as it hits the thin carpet of the porch.
It’s dark and strange inside the house after being out in the sun. Angela sits at the dining room table with a notebook and calculator, but I can’t pick out the details in her face just yet. I brush past her to where I dropped my backpack when we came home from school. In the front pocket, at the bottom, it should be there—yes. My last Emergency Cigarette. I light it in the kitchen.
“Seriously, you promised not to smoke in the house,” Angela says.
“Ange, I need your help with something, just for a minute, and I swear I will finish this outside and you can get back to your homework, okay?”
“You’re being ridiculous. You promised.”
“I’m walking outside right now! Can you bring me a kitchen knife and my painting from behind my bed? Please?”
She goes. I shoot trails of smoke out my nose, the way Tall Jon and Bill taught me.
“Here you go, Your Majesty.” Angela hands me the knife, handle first.
“Gracias.”
I take Food Poisoning #1 in my other hand and place it on the easel. It’s a strange piece. Unsettling in some ways. I guess I can see why Mom insisted I take it off my wall. It’s layers of thick, dark paint, mixed with bits of the Lifestyle section of the newspaper. I hardly remember how it all came together—I mean, I recall the basic things, like how I bought all this glue, thinking I was going to need it to hold the newspaper shreds on the canvas, but it turned out the paint was sturdy enough. I remember painting birds, from flamingos to geese. Some of them were abstract, some more realistic. And I remember how Tall Jon got me Parliament Menthols instead of Lights when I was working on the last few layers of paint, and how they tasted too clean but I smoked them anyway.
Angela says, “Be careful.”
I kneel on the worn gray carpet and stab out the cigarette on the remains of Food Poisoning #2. “Do you want to help?”
“I don’t really understand what you’re doing here.”
“There’s nothing to understand. Trust me. Take a knife and go.” I hand her my X-Acto knife, and I stick with the kitchen knife. The first slice—it is less a clean cut than a rip. It breaks the layer of newspaper bits. It sends paint crumbs to the ground.
When they gave me the award, I was smiling. I was wearing a knee-length blue dress and a silver necklace borrowed from my mother.
Angela stabs through the canvas with the X-Acto knife. An interesting strategy—fill it with holes and let it collapse on its own. I poke a few holes myself, starting with the corners, but then send the knife stripping lines through the layers again.
Angela came to last year’s county art show. So did Mom and Victoria and Bill and Tall Jon. Mrs. Pagonis and some of the other studio artists were there, too. After the awards ceremony, my misfit entourage and I walked down the hall to the reception—or, rather, I walked, and the rest of them stopped in the lobby where Food Poisoning #1 was displayed. They wanted to take a closer look at this piece I’d been hiding for so long. Mom leaned forward, inspecting the layers, sniffing at them. She frowned.
I carve the center out of the painting. The feathery mess falls to the floor.
“Dang, you’re brutal,” Angela says.
I cough. “Thank you.”
“Is this your new project?”
“Something like that.” I point to the top right corner with my knife. “Can you slice that part out?”
Angela does. And I destroy the other three corners and, hmm, might as well do some more work on the stuff that already fell out. So I tear the feathery heart of the painting in two, hand half to Angela, and let her pull it apart again and again.
Finally, what remains of both canvases is the wooden backbone frames, with a few ripped flags of fabric still holding on to each. That’s good enough. No one will ever know what was there. No one will ever know that I didn’t know what I was trying to say.
I flop down on the floor of the porch. Angela and I have both been hit by some of the painted newspaper bits. They are stuck to our hair and clothes.
“I appreciate the help,” I say. “I’ll clean this up.”
“I think I’m gonna shower before I do anything else,” Angela says.
Angela never said anything specific about the painting during its brief period of fame last year, but she tolerated its presence, and that was enough. Bill said it was “cool.” Tall Jon said, “It looks like a bunch of dead birds, and I swear I mean that in a good way.” Victoria congratulated me about a million times and said I was definitely going to get into Ringling or the Savannah College of Art and Design (also known as SCAD, my dream school) or any other art school I applied to.
How did I not notice that when I tore up the Lifestyle section of the newspaper, I was tearing up recipes and ads for restaurants? A slice of one, covered with yellow: one-half teaspoon vanilla. The judges surely thought that was on purpose. It wasn’t.
“Are you okay out here?” It’s startling to hear a girl’s voice coming from that side of the porch. Lilia. She emerges from Rex’s house with a canvas in each hand.
“Yeah. I was just cleaning up.”
Her hair’s pulled back and she’s wearing a bright green dress dotted with a floral print and paint stains. She places the canvases flat on the floor. Two more paintings in the condo building series, one with a red sky and one with gray. The light from the windows is the same as before. Lilia studies them for a minute, then takes a step back and wipes at her eyes. Nothing I’ve ever painted has moved me to tears.
“Hey, it’s okay,” I say, because that’s my usual refrain when someone I know is crying.
“Thanks,” Lilia says, just as practiced. She moves away from her paintings and surveys the mess I’ve made, all the strings and feathers of my former pieces of work. “Too bad I didn’t get to see your work while it was still intact.”
“This was necessary.”
“I guess it is sometimes.” She smiles, and it’s like the first time I saw a Frida Kahlo painting in person—the thud of is that really what it is? It was, and it is.
“Can you tell me about your series?” I ask. The destruction of the paintings has made me feel lighter somehow, as though now I can reconstruct myself into whatever type of artist I want to be. “Because I know that building. I saw it all lit up like that the other night.”
“Oh yeah?” Lilia stares at me through the screen. She has long eyelashes and a scar on the side of her mouth. “Did it make you want something?”