Read Online A Gentle Hell by Autumn Christian - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Autumn Christian
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I’d never liked to watch people make art before, but I watched him paint because there was something alluring and impractically aesthetic about the way he moved, like an underwater machine. Even if I closed my eyes I’d still be able to feel his movement, the shadow of it, and all angles of him digging a hole into gravity.
“I saw you watching me the other day,” he told me one night when we went back home. “You were watching me from the grass.” He slouched in a chair in the corner of the room underneath a portrait of his last ex-girlfriend, flowers spurting out of her decapitated head. He looked up at me with bug eyes that bit like teeth and he smiled.
But the girl he saw in the grass wasn’t me.
I remember as a child I went out to the singing grass with a notebook and I’d write what I saw like it mattered, poetry about love and other abstract concepts I had no real understanding of, journal entries about the friends I made up. I didn’t know what the singing grass meant back then, or what it contained, but it drew me to it anyways. I thought the blue grass looked like mammoth skin, and in the night when the full moon came out to the meadow I thought it was silently conversing with the dirt below.
Out on the edge of the singing grass I learned the rules. When you’re a writer, you can only use words like serpentine and aberrant once in a lifetime. “So” and “very” are pointless modifiers. The road to hell is paved with adverbs. If you ask your friends to read your work, they’ll never tell the truth.
And if you’re artistic and attractive and enigmatic, people will fall in love with you at the most inconvenient of times.
Keep reading, that wasn’t the most important part. As a child out on the edge of the singing grass I met the girl that sprung from the earth, the girl with the sewed-on jaw and Morpheus eyes and thin line of drool running down her chin. Her clothes gleamed with moths tied into the fabric, still alive. Snake skins hung intertwined in her hair, and she clutched to her waist a formaldehyde jar full of black arms.
“What are you working on there?” she asked when she saw me. Her voice was the voice of glass and mulch.
I said nothing. My pen hovered over the page of my notebook. When I swallowed my throat felt like the blades of a meat grinder.
“Can I read?” she said.
I closed my notebook and shook my head. I didn’t mean to; it was nothing but a reflex. Even in the face of something alien I tried to hide my unfinished work. And I knew she was alien. No girl from the town could’ve snapped her head back until it touched the tip of her spine. No, she emerged out of the singing grass, out of the electric song that whipped through the meadow and straight through me.
“That’s too bad,” she said. “Can I show you something?”
She set the formaldehyde jar down in front of her. The wind blew through the singing grass and it started to keen. The noise swept through the girl, into her snake hair and gleaming clothes, in and out with her breath, pulsing to the rhythm of the moths beating her wings. She grasped the fabric of her dress in her fists.
“One day we’re going to be good friends,” she said.
Slowly, she started to lift up the hem of her dress. As she did so, the black arms in the formaldehyde jar stirred. The black fingers pressed against the inside of the glass jar and it tipped over on its side in the singing grass. The fingers kicked, the serrated ends of the arms braced themselves. The jar started to roll toward me.
I ran.
I didn’t come back to the singing grass until years later, after I’d met him, the artist, and realized that if I fell in love with him I’d go insane. We met in a coffee shop in town. He hadn’t slept for days and I could see it in his face, the purple-rimmed eyes, and the slack, paralyzed skin. He was holding an art show there. I wanted to impress him because his art somewhat intimidated me, but I couldn’t think
I’d never liked to watch people make art before, but I watched him paint because there was something alluring and impractically aesthetic about the way he moved, like an underwater machine. Even if I closed my eyes I’d still be able to feel his movement, the shadow of it, and all angles of him digging a hole into gravity.
“I saw you watching me the other day,” he told me one night when we went back home. “You were watching me from the grass.” He slouched in a chair in the corner of the room underneath a portrait of his last ex-girlfriend, flowers spurting out of her decapitated head. He looked up at me with bug eyes that bit like teeth and he smiled.
But the girl he saw in the grass wasn’t me.
I remember as a child I went out to the singing grass with a notebook and I’d write what I saw like it mattered, poetry about love and other abstract concepts I had no real understanding of, journal entries about the friends I made up. I didn’t know what the singing grass meant back then, or what it contained, but it drew me to it anyways. I thought the blue grass looked like mammoth skin, and in the night when the full moon came out to the meadow I thought it was silently conversing with the dirt below.
Out on the edge of the singing grass I learned the rules. When you’re a writer, you can only use words like serpentine and aberrant once in a lifetime. “So” and “very” are pointless modifiers. The road to hell is paved with adverbs. If you ask your friends to read your work, they’ll never tell the truth.
And if you’re artistic and attractive and enigmatic, people will fall in love with you at the most inconvenient of times.
Keep reading, that wasn’t the most important part. As a child out on the edge of the singing grass I met the girl that sprung from the earth, the girl with the sewed-on jaw and Morpheus eyes and thin line of drool running down her chin. Her clothes gleamed with moths tied into the fabric, still alive. Snake skins hung intertwined in her hair, and she clutched to her waist a formaldehyde jar full of black arms.
“What are you working on there?” she asked when she saw me. Her voice was the voice of glass and mulch.
I said nothing. My pen hovered over the page of my notebook. When I swallowed my throat felt like the blades of a meat grinder.
“Can I read?” she said.
I closed my notebook and shook my head. I didn’t mean to; it was nothing but a reflex. Even in the face of something alien I tried to hide my unfinished work. And I knew she was alien. No girl from the town could’ve snapped her head back until it touched the tip of her spine. No, she emerged out of the singing grass, out of the electric song that whipped through the meadow and straight through me.
“That’s too bad,” she said. “Can I show you something?”
She set the formaldehyde jar down in front of her. The wind blew through the singing grass and it started to keen. The noise swept through the girl, into her snake hair and gleaming clothes, in and out with her breath, pulsing to the rhythm of the moths beating her wings. She grasped the fabric of her dress in her fists.
“One day we’re going to be good friends,” she said.
Slowly, she started to lift up the hem of her dress. As she did so, the black arms in the formaldehyde jar stirred. The black fingers pressed against the inside of the glass jar and it tipped over on its side in the singing grass. The fingers kicked, the serrated ends of the arms braced themselves. The jar started to roll toward me.
I ran.
I didn’t come back to the singing grass until years later, after I’d met him, the artist, and realized that if I fell in love with him I’d go insane. We met in a coffee shop in town. He hadn’t slept for days and I could see it in his face, the purple-rimmed eyes, and the slack, paralyzed skin. He was holding an art show there. I wanted to impress him because his art somewhat intimidated me, but I couldn’t think
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