Still Life by Olivia Burness (Lucent Dreaming Issue 12)

1.
On a particularly unforgiving morning Carla rings me and tells me to meet her at the V&A Museum where she plans to spend the day looking at people who are looking at paintings. I say yes. We meet in the main foyer and politely enquire after the other’s various schedules and scandals. In both, I am lacking, but Carla’s life is a riot of colour in which the grey I provide completes her social spectrum. We are friends because we sit together in our Saturday morning still-life, both of us artists incapable of producing art with pen and paper. Carla works in textiles; I work in installation. Both of us will fail this year if we can’t produce a series of life-sketches our tutor deems suitably still.

Today Carla is cold, as she was in our previous meeting, and I acknowledge her frostiness with a kind of cool delight. Carla’s still-lifes have stagnated. The only thing she can draw is shells, and not even impressive shells at that. The kind that that grow large with spirals and spokes, the kind you see rendered and immediately long to trace with your fingers, are absent from her page. My own still-lifes have flourished, a development that has evoked in Carla an ongoing irritation and intrigue. On Saturday mornings, as we sit side by side, she taps her pencil in time with the ticking clock; in profile I can see Carla’s brain go tick-tock, tick-tock. I wonder how much longer she will tolerate me, if my mediocrity in all other aspects will override this one insidious betrayal.

2.
When my mother was my age, she lived the street over, and each morning she rode the same bus I take now, saw the same streets with thirty years wiped away. She trained at the Royal Ballet, and in her second year arrived late to class one morning. Ballet shoes are the most beautiful things; they’re a dream of satin and silk. That morning she slipped hers on and sliced her feet to ribbons: there was a razor hidden in the bottom. Someone’s dangerous gift.

3.
Downstairs, Carla sketches, and so upstairs I make my way from room to room. I’m looking for something to catch my eye, and then I find it. A small black and white photograph on the wall; a grotesque, a horror show. I stand frozen, fascinated by a single image of a clock, lush fruit, and a disembodied arm.

The arm is coiled languidly up, up and over the clock, its fingers positioned around the hour hand in a post-mortem pinch. It is so delicate, and so diabolical; my hand flies to my mouth. I step forward. I drink the image in. My eyes follow that central contour over and over again: that inhuman curve of the elbow, the wrist. Silhouetted against a backdrop of flowers, the macabre scene sits atop a white tablecloth, as if it were prepared for some sort of perverse dinner party. The severed arm opens: it is an invitation.

I take out my sketchbook and begin to draw.

4.
The artist said that when he was young he saw a girl decapitated in the street outside his house. He and his brother were on their way to church. Amidst the commotion of a car crash, the people screaming, wailing, her head rolled towards him and came to a stop just at his feet. The head presented itself to him as if it were a present, and, enamoured, he leaned down towards it, stretched his fingers out to touch –

When he closes his eyes, can he see her face? Or has time sanded down her features, worn them smooth, indistinguishable?

Would it be a blessing or a curse to forget a face like that?

5.
By Saturday morning, I have drawn that arm seventeen times. I touch pencil to paper and my hand moves of its own accord; it is a unique obsession, some form of artistic possession. I can’t tell if I’m drawing in the hopes that it will expel the image out, or if some part of me wants to invite it further in.

I am late to class. I overslept my alarm, had no one else to wake me in my empty flat. At night my dreams are feverish; I wake and my bedsheets are stained black, charcoal from my hands transferring to the sheets. I toss and I turn, I wake up to sketch, fall asleep at my desk. I leave charcoal smudges everywhere I go. There is one I can’t quite get rid of, no matter how many times I stand under the scalding shower. A thin band, ringed around my left forearm. I think I trace the line in my sleep.

I slide into my seat next to Carla, and her acknowledgement is faint. Today she sits, scalpel in hand, carving lines into card to create some sort of inverted spiral. More shells. I open my sketchbook to the latest page, feel her coolly assess my work. She turns, leaves her own canvas bleeding. Carla cuts: her scalpel cuts, her tone cuts.

I think of the razor in my mother’s shoe.

6.
I’ve seen it before. This sort of slow unbecoming. This gradual unravelling. I was the one who called the ambulance the day I came home from school and found my mother in our bathtub, the water frothing pink around her.

Had there been any signs? It was a question asked twice, from far away. I was sat at the end of her hospital bed, my feet tucked up under me, eyeing her bound up wrists. The thrown out photos, late nights and late mornings, the classical music, the ballet shoes, all the mirrors in our house in her bedroom. The way she looked at me as if she could no longer remember who I was. Or, worse still, the times that she would look at me and scream, sobbing and incoherent, and I could do nothing to help her, could not get close, because when she saw me she was seeing her own face looking back.

7.
Each night, it starts the same way. My hand, the knife. A cut. Blood blooms from the wound, a red flower unfurling, encircling the skin. I’ve never been squeamish, and so I work until it is done, press through sinew, scarlet, bone.

I arrange my tableaux on the tabletop of my own kitchen. Red roses wilting, the razor still soaked with blood. Stilled life.

8.
At night, I lie in bed, raise my arms to the ceiling. I’d never given much thought to my own body, never tried to guess at the thoughts of those who had seen it, but now it is everywhere, it is everywhere I go. I touch the fingertip of my right hand to the fingertip of my left, trace the line down, down to the crease of my elbow, down to the seam of my shoulder.

I let my hand fall away, I close my eyes, but the image is already there, waiting: the flicker of a peep show disc. I sit up, turn the light back on. In the dim glow of my lamp, a woman stares at me from across the room. My unfamiliar twin, the suffused glow subdues the contours of her face, makes her soft. I shift a little, remove my face from the mirror’s rectangular frame. In the quiet of the room, I stretch out my arm; it curls, of its own will, into the shape of that other arm. I watch it float in space, astonished by its severity, imagining its sever. In the dim light, I can just about make out the shape of a crescent-moon, the mark of my nail indicating the line where the cut would be made.

Olivia Burness is a bookseller based in Bath, England.
T: @oliviaburness | I: @oliviaburness

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