Illusion

We smoke for the first time together in her attic apartment, the ceiling unfinished, hidden by tapestries that meet at a point in the center. One is pale purple and patterned with flowers. Another holds colors of a sunset.

She packs the glass bowl, and hands it to me. When she says the word, “Greens,” I watch her mouth open to reveal her teeth, and it looks more genuine than the smile I saw back at the bar.

“I never—” I say, and she adjusts my hands, and lowers the flame in front of me. I take a deep breath and cough and she laughs as the small amount of smoke I’d taken in fills the space between us.

I can’t stop myself from kissing her again, this time with tongues and teeth, which clink together like our wine glasses just an hour or so before.

I met Prue at a place called Gypsy’s.

She pointed to women dressed in thick petticoats, brocade blooms patterning the fabric. She told me they called themselves sisters of the sun, homemade henna tattoos on their arms to prove it.

“You have to meet the fortune teller,” she said, pulling me to a table near the back of the bar.

I waited in line while she drank more wine, staining her lips a deep red. I wanted to kiss her an infinite amount of times, but I didn’t tell her this. Instead I kissed her once, and proceeded to the table.

“You are faithful, a loyal man, true. But you see the colors, too,” the fortune teller said, tracing the lines of my palm. I wondered how they were visible beneath my callouses; if she knew I was a painter. I said nothing, just nodded and tipped her and walked back to Prue, who gave me her hand. I traced it the same way the fortune teller did without seeing anything but her in front of me.

She said, “Follow me.” And I did.

Prue kissed me from one street corner to the next until we reached her place.

Now, when she smokes, she seems to fall back against the world, and as I take another hit, I wait to feel the same thing. But I find myself distracted by the way the bowl gleams beneath the lights on the ceiling, so purple and pure and pulsing when I squint just right.

“The lights,” I say, because I can’t say anything else. I don’t know how to explain that the lights look more alive than I feel because maybe they are alive and I’m just here; an illusion.

“I strung them myself,” she says. And I kiss her for the lights, and the moment. I can’t remember ever feeling the world in such a monumental way.

She offers me another hit, holding the bowl in front of me, letting me go slow.

“You see the fortune teller,” I say.

“Where?” Prue asks. I trace the outline of the purple flowers on the tapestry above.

We find other shapes on the tapestry, too, like we’re cloud gazing, but the ceiling is the sky, and after a while, my eyes feel heavy, and I sink into the floor, falling back against the world.

                                                                                                    ***

The first few weeks together exist in a black hole; time tentative and unreal. At my place, Prue runs her hands over the half-finished people who live within my sketchbook.

She dips her finger in a bit of blue, same as the spring sky. She paints points on blank pages. “The mountains,” she says. “They’re calling me.”

“I’ve never been,” I say, my brush in the blue, letting it puddle just so beneath her eyes.

She explains time in the mountains changes people. “But I know I’ll never go,” she says. The words are clipped, as if she's cut her hopes before they feel too real. Her eyes wander, reveal her gypsy soul within that bathetic body; an unmoving juxtaposition between want and need.

I paint Prue with perfect lips, covering the canvas with her arms and covering those in small swirls, which remind me of the sun and our first date and the beginning of everything.

“What’s your favorite season?” I ask. “For the background, you know?” I try to imagine the color scheme she’ll choose before she says it, but I can’t.

“The In-Between. That’s what I love,” she says. “One sprout through frozen ground, not quite thawed. Dandelion snow. The just-there-crisp as the first leaves fall; days disappearing,” she says.

When I finish, Prue looks at my work, stares at herself, and the faint hint of mountains beyond. I wonder if she recognizes this version, almost sad. She kisses my hands despite the paint, and I think she understands; I know her.

                                                                                                    ***

Most nights we sleep and smoke beneath my painting of Prue, her acrylic eyes protecting us from the world. I kiss my Prue and see her in shades of yellow: butter and daisies and faded henna and honey. I don’t remember when I start to see her this way, until one day, her jaundiced skin is all I see.

                                                                                                    ***

Prue sleeps and sleeps and never wakes. I’m not sure where she goes, but when I look at her, I feel trapped in the sun’s rays, eyes blinded. Sometimes it hurts too much to look at her, so instead I kiss her, and ask if she believes in the future. When she doesn’t answer, I roll a joint with thin sketch paper from the book she bought me for my birthday. While she sleeps, I smoke, and I wait for everything else to disappear.

                                                                                                    ***

One month later, Prue disappears.

They take her body and leave me with her painting. And for days after, I paint her. I surround her with pale purple flowers, eyes clouded with something I could never see.

I pack her few belongings from the attic apartment, and bring them back to my place. I take each of the tapestries, and the purple lights, which burn out.

                                                                                                    ***

I’m arrested outside her building.

The officer waits until I finish the henna lines on Prue’s arms, which I’ve painted on the side of the building.

She exists for everyone now, the brick bleeding through her skin. Her lips are dark red and everything else is pale and pure and if I squint just right, she starts to fade at the edges; only a ghost.

                                                                                                    ***

I’m released the next day, and I return to her building because I need to see her.

From the alley, I smell fresh paint.

Prue isn’t here.

Painted over.

Disappeared.


Written by: Kayla King
Photograph by: Tiffany Melanson

The Man Who Made Bigfoot

A plane flew Barker McMullin just south of the Arctic, but it was tragedy that drove him mad.

This was, of course, after he’d discarded his possessions via a heroic garage sale where he sold pretty much everything but his pants.

On a Delta flight he jumped over the Canadian border. From there, it was Bearskin Airlines to Flin Flon, Manitoba, arriving at an airport with the culinary offerings of a vending machine. From a brochure he learned that the mining town had been named after a fictional character, Josiah Flintabbatey Flonatin, from a novel called The Sunless City.

Barker wanted to live in a sunless city. He figured if he got pale enough he’d turn into a ghost.

From Flin Flon he hitched deeper north into the forest with a trucker named Zach, who told him he would die come winter.

This was all years ago.

                                                                                                 ***

He did not die that winter, nor any of the ones after. He built a cabin on a lake that had no name, so he called it Susan and Beau Lake -- the names of his dead. He did not want to forget his grief, so much as live in it for so long that he and it fused together, and in their new shared existence there would be limits to his self-sentience; like one’s inability to smell his or her own tang.

That was the idea, anyway.

But he could never quite get there. In the end he had to settle for some good old fashioned transmogrification, the final result of which was nothing more than an empty vessel; his body just a container to store organs and eyes.

To say that he was ruptured with grief would be an understatement. He lost track of years like you and I lose pennies. His beard grew long. His eyes dimmed. His skin stretched tautly over his angular bones.

And then Bigfoot appeared, nonchalantly, like she’d been there all along.

She materialized in the last moments of dusk, when the light of the world colluded with the brainy tendrils of imagination to create images that might not exist, and doubt in the ones that did. It was just the right environment for mythmaking.

As a shadow, she at first blocked his path. Only when he got closer did he realize her authenticity: her heavy coat of hairs, and peering eyes. They looked at each other with the look you give a funhouse mirror. And why not? In the dark, they appeared simply as fantastic deviations of their own images.

Maybe they were too tired for violence. Maybe surprise paralyzed them. But for an unknown amount of time they stared at each other through the woods, through the dark, and though we can’t speak for Bigfoot, the results of this encounter -- which finally ended with Bigfoot shuffling silently, far too silently given her size, into the woods -- laid the foundation for the next phase in Barker McMullin’s life.

Because of Bigfoot, his empty vessel would be full again. He would discover that the will to live was really just inspiration; the revelation of creation manifested in whatever form you chose: in progeny or business, architecture, guitar, politics, painting, law, or even sculpture.

                                                                                                 ***

Not long after their encounter, Barker McMullin left the woods. He rejoined civilization. Heading south, he parlayed his few belongings into cash, bartered down highways, and cut through the Canadian winter.

He made it back to America through Minnesota, and from the land of the lakes through the empty shelf of the plains -- all halcyon days and billboards -- he thought of nothing other than his muse. He found Oklahoma and with it, a fine new place to start.

Using the last of his funds he purchased a large block of cement. In the parking lot of the Good Gravy! Diner, across the street from the Industry Turbo Car Wash, he began to chip away.

The going was slow. The Oklahoma winds dusted up his allergies and diners came and went with questions of why and comments of neat-o, knocking him out of his artistic groove. But inside his brain stood such a comprehensive image of what he wanted that each hammered corrugation and crease, each wrinkle and line, came from his hands through his tools and onto, into, the cement block with a level of serenity he had railed against for so long that he’d forgotten its existence.

So perfect was the final product that he was never to make changes. He worked like an assembly line after that first statue. His muscles no longer sovereign in their action, but rather automatic; never spiritless, but instead glowing with the electricity of their flawless instincts.

That is what it felt like for Barker McMullin to make Bigfoot. Or at least, some form of her.

He hoped that in his concrete creations there was no extraction of spirit from his muse -- our myth -- and that his art (he really preferred not to call it that) was selfish. Narcissistic, if he was being truthful. He did not want to comment on the lore of nature, the extension of mankind’s industry, lumber or fish farms, spilled oil in the gulf, climate change or pollution. He did not have thoughts on the obsession of the missing link, or the proto-religion of evolution.

So when they asked him this and so much more; when they took pictures and wrote magazine articles; when they interviewed him and put him on camera; interrogated him on the psyche of the creator, the license of the artist, and the warrant of individuality in today’s changing landscape of taste and influence; he didn’t know what to say.

Flashbulbs, flashbulbs, what do you mean you don’t know? They threw genius at him and were appalled when he dropped it, and it shattered in the dirt.

Through it all, what he wanted to say was this:

A lifetime ago I saw curiosity in her eyes, and it made me want to marry her. I loved the idea that she found joy in the questions of things. And when those eyes were forever closed, I was gone. My body existed, but there was nothing else. And then I stumbled upon a myth in the forest. And in those eyes, fact or fiction they may have been, I saw that same curiosity. And it brought me back from the dead. And it inspired me to survive.

Written by: Logan Theissen

Photograph by: Kassie Ritman