IMPRESSIONS
Their collection was coming along. The drawing room was a menagerie of eclectic pieces, some abstract and seemingly changing with the migrating sunlight, some rigid and unwavering. Often conceptual or ironically nouveau riche, but mostly gaudy and loud for the sake of the noise. All were necessary, they thought.
Each morning Jane made tea for the two of them, but not before stepping past a six-foot, cherry-red acrylic hand and procession of ceramic, monkey-faced mannequins to reach the kitchenette. Ingrid usually took her tea on the wraparound veranda, regardless of the weather, perched atop a large wooden cigarette carton filled with giant, rubber French fries. She watched the cows graze between faceless marble sculptures and paintings pierced by daggers. Some just didn’t end up being right after all. The ranch house was far enough away from the city that the noise did not reach them. This was necessary, they thought.
After tea and a slice of wheat toast each—one with butter and cinnamon, the other burnt and covered in raspberry jam—they slipped on sundresses and curled their hair. Every so often one or the other would insist on a smudge of peach lip gloss or some blush. In the mirror they stretched their mouths like elastic bands and wiggled their fingers vigorously. The carbon cracking between their joints set the musical score for the day’s plan. Jane drove, of course. Ingrid watched the tall grass pass rapidly out the window and become increasingly cropped as the city approached. The front doors of the fine art museum downtown stayed open all day, until nine forty-five p.m. when the main guard rounded up the stragglers and politely asked them to visit again soon. Jane and Ingrid always left just before this group converged.
They did not enter knowing what they’d take. If the light reflected nicely off the finishing gloss, or it had a prism effect, or it was shaped like something dirty and made them laugh, they took it. Everything was shoved into pockets or chipmunked into cheeks. These were the things that would survive them through the winter. Jane and Ingrid had learned to loosen their teeth just enough that they could softly lean aside the walls of their mouths so as not to damage the art in transit. They wiggled incisors and canines until they were all but free from their gums, and used the resulting depressions as hiding places.
If something bulged or poked or trapped a tongue beneath its weight, they hurried. They usually hurried anyway. Not that they needed to. They held hands, whoever’s thumb ending up on the outside softly stroking the other’s. Often, the tips of their noses would brush, cheeks sweetly press together, reveling in a mutual love for tenderness and creation. These moments of their physical closeness were all the male guards—they were always men—noticed as their sundresses softly swished around their knees and out the door. This they counted on.
On occasion they would run, not out of fear but merriment. What the excursions lacked in adrenaline they made up for in inspiration. The powder room will burst with light and fresh orange scent once we mount these strings of petrified clementines, Ingrid might say. How quaint the parlor will be with the addition of this nebulous capture of the human indifference to others’ pain, Jane would muse. Each piece was treasured, even if only fleetingly.
They’d retrieve their treasures from their hiding places, stuff everything in the trunk, drive home under the pink and lavender watercolor sunset, and try it all on. Anything that did not make them clutch their chests or pinch their nose in perplexity was given to the cows. Their simpler brains would find better meaning. Monthly, there was a bonfire for the truly egregious things—anything that tarnished when the sky turned blueblack, anything that embodied excess. Jane and Ingrid were thieves, but even they knew the limits of greed. The purge was necessary, they thought.
Once, on a rainy April Tuesday, as Jane rested her head against Ingrid’s shoulder in front of an abstract splatter painting rendition of Venus on the half-shell, a guard stopped them. A solid gold finch scraped at the side of Ingrid’s thigh in her pocket. She was not anxious. The hypnotic swish of sundresses had beckoned the guard. He soon fixed on their clutched hands and stroking thumbs.
You must be visiting from out of town, he said.
Must be, they echoed.
Those are nice dresses, he continued.
Thank you, they replied.
I bet you get mistaken for the art, he said.
We are actually wasps wearing human suits, they said.
How do you breathe in those things? he asked.
Through tiny openings in the tops of our heads, they replied.
An elbow of the marble statue in Jane’s mouth completely displaced one of her molars as she spoke, and she spit it out before him. He kneeled to pick it up and offered it to the thin space between the women’s wrists, his knee still on the floor. Jane took it from his outstretched hand and squashed him, buglike, beneath her kitten heel. She tucked a thought aside to polish her shoes that evening. The copper stink of blood-endings followed them home, but lifted in the wash.
They abstained from visiting for months after this. Better to enjoy their love and their art away from hungry eyes, they thought. On the late summer evening of their return, they lolled until close. For the first time they did not hide their want, smashing glass displays and carefully dancing among the sparkling disaster. Two bejeweled masquerade masks, one a deep eggplant and the other a gradient of sunrise creamsicle shades, tied lightly around their faces were their only spoils. As light, chime-like alarms echoed through long halls, they clutched hands and ran, giggling as they went.
At the exit they faced a line, miles long on either side, of guard-men. Each one was identical in face and stature. Same dark eyes, same impression of a kitten heel on their chest. The girls were not afraid. As they floated across the threshold of guard-men’s linked arms and out the heavy brass door, every head turned, fixed only on the soft sway of a sundress and the fading scent of peach.
Shelbi Church is a poet and fiction writer from Dallas, Texas. She earned her BFA in creative writing from Emerson College. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 86 Logic, the lickety~split, Eunoia Review, Hobart After Dark, and Poetry Online. She lives and writes in Boston, MA.
