Prose by Dalia Currie
Art by Alex Hoang
My God smelled of beer and salami, and carved my world with his paint knife. He would ignore me for months, he knew I would wait. Then, he would spend sleepless days and nights ravaging me so deeply that his breath became my body heat, pressing his full weight into his brush, spilling sweat onto the cold basement floor. Amongst the drip of pipes, and the rattle of the hot water tank, he sometimes spoke to me. He would ask me what I needed, what was missing, how he could make me better. Even when he stopped touching me he would still come talk and stare. I don’t know what he wanted to see. We spent hours like that, with him chewing the skin off his lips, and me strapped to my easel, naked to his glare. That’s when I started to dream. I dreamt I had fingers, and could twist things. He sold me to a gallery for a coffee shop gift card.
In the gallery I was grazed by tourists, I was photographed and put in the gift shop as prints. I sold well because I fit seamlessly into every room and aesthetic — there must be something about me that’s beautiful.
A woman hung one of my prints in a bedroom crowded with empty soda bottles. I was surrounded with the smell of her vanilla perfume as she splayed me against the wall, crucifying me under thumbtacks. She introduced me to the boy who lived in the room with pride, as if she were the first to find beauty in me. He smiled, and hugged her, but after that day he barely looked at me, except for the five minutes each night when he’d hide his bible under his pillow and unzip his pants. In my dreams, I had fingers, and they could pinch people. After a week he tore me off the wall and climaxed into me while moaning a girl’s name. His mother touched me as little as she could when she took me to the trash, cursing under her breath how no-one appreciates art anymore.
When the gallery went bankrupt, I was hung in an exhaustingly white room and given a price. Suddenly every eye, every jeweled hand, already knew what to think of me. It had been laid out in numbers.
When my new owner showed me off to his friends and family, he would stand beside me, smiling, as if we were a team. He hung me in the dining room, in a shimmering, jewel studded, silver frame. He talked to me as he ate dinners of steak and gin, his meals spilling onto his sweaty work suit. He was not a nice man, or a beautiful man, but when he smiled at me he wasn’t pretending, and that was all the fulfillment I needed. When he stumbled to bed, and the lights went dark in the dining room, I dreamt I had hands, and could play piano.
My owner found a wife, and she decided I was gauche. They gave me away to the daughter of a family friend who hung me in a thrifted frame over the piano in her tiny apartment. When she came home from work, she’d say hello to me, and when she left, she’d wave goodbye. She’d cry sometimes while looking at me. On weekends, she’d light candles in her apartment and write in a diary. One night, a candle tipped onto the curtains and the room flooded with smoke. In the panic of beeping and heat she only grabbed her computer, diaries, and cat. Soon the smoke became fire. Like my God, the flames were careless, and grabbed me with scalding fingertips. As the sparks became ravenous, swelling and devouring me, stripping me from my frame like meat off the bone, I dreamt that I had hands and had touched many things.