BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! | ODIS WEFF ONESHOTS

INHERITANCE OF A GIRL IN PINK

//i read a piece of the world so i had to shove all my emily and tommy feelings into that but also art so i made this ramble

— IN WHICH A COUPLE DEBATES MODERN ART

December, 1950
The Museum of Modern Art
Manhattan, NY

It was flat and cool and wide, the floor, untouched. Emily's stocking were scuffed as if with dirt when she took them off, not that it mattered. She stared at the even white paint, the coiled edges of the frames. She remembered the way the brown door of their Brooklyn apartment had started to click erratically if a stranger opened it, who didn't know one had to push in the knob slightly. Lights outlined corners, expanses of canvas. It felt cynical in its simplicity. Severe, edged. Odis was thinking the same thing, she could tell: his eyes were smooth.

A few abstract European paintings with thick lines and flowing stripes and dotted backgrounds. Then one in chalk. He liked the ones that depicted real objects out of order, of scale: a street, a window, a glass of wine. It reminded him of a frantic, yellowed novel or pulling petals off a pressed flower. Something almost, something altered.

"That one's alright," she pointed out, gesturing at a small piece of squares that looked stained, cracked. Like the neurotic rendering of a bathroom floor.

"Only good one here, I think. Or maybe we j-just don' get it."

"Maybe not." She took in flat color, attempted shading. "How d' you think they know when a painting's done?"

"That one doesn' l-look done." A stretch of grey canvas smattered with wide circles in the colors of wall-paint. He surveyed the label. "'S only th-three years old, we couldn't be arrested for that long if we defaced it a little? to improve it?" His gave her a tilted smile.

She laughed. "Next time we bring a pen."

A tangle of spiked, textured oil paint, fine as hair and shattered at intervals, all spiraling out from a rounded square in the middle. It was based in dark pink, smeared with blue, then dandelion yellow. Around the edges were clumped, green, bile-like drips. The attack of something true. Something, anything real choked out by flourishing, jagged strokes, so amassed they looked thick, one whole. The farther out towards the edges they traveled, the more erratic these strings became. Wires, violin strings pulled to snapping, listless, something once with purpose. What could've been, chances locked in velvet, romanticisms and bones wrapped in satin.

Like looking at the sky through a nest of twigs, there were slivers of needlework white so thin thet looked silver. It reminded him of a sensation he'd had since he was a child, like his brain was shaking, like getting lost in invisible thorns, his body feeling small and his eyes numb. At night, sometimes, he would feel over his palms what the grain in photographs must've felt like. Cold sand in a cosmic haze. He would close his eyes and think in primary colors, in green smeared traces of red stars. He would breathe and his lungs would pinch, the air would feel white and dry. Just fragments. He watched, got lost in the infestiminal chunks of space so long that she touched his arm.

They went slowly after that. Room after hallway after windowed image and spatters and one light blinked. Glossy marble tile. She thought of how a place like this was hers in the way a butterfly's wings belonged to it; tethered by image, by expectance and by soul and nothing in between. A girl who wore gold and tiny cherry-colored diamonds, who tied her hair back with fine ribbon. A girl fluent in euphemism and subject to euphemism. They were very quiet, and she bounced her own thoughts around in her head, curtained. Every so often she stopped in a doorway and studied at the blank space on the walls, the distance between frame and drywall and wood and screws. She thought, more and more, of the museum as a vessel and considered her mixed feelings about it moot. She wondered about Tommy, his shaded faces and animals and landscapes far better than that drawing, or that mess of smudges.