She’d wanted to disappear without a trace – there are no notes, no videos, no pictures. She made it a spectacle, her body slick with gasoline and set aflame in the steel matrices of unfinished construction work, a living inferno bright enough to see from the highway two miles south. Nothing means anything until it’s over.īut you never really expect someone to kill herself for art. Life is like a string of firecrackers, and those moments of violent, reckless sensation that end the moment they start are the most valuable of all.
Above everything else that Phee loved – fireworks, the texture of acrylic paint, the smell of anise – she adored endings the most. She should’ve seen it coming, then, but that’s always easy to say after the fact. It took three tries before the rabbit’s legs stopped jerking like a fish on a line.Įven on days when Jay isn’t angry, she can admit that Phee had been out of her mind. “This is art,” Phee told her, all smiles, their hands wrapped together around the handle of a too-small knife. The sound of the wrapping paper being torn from its wooden crate nearly stilled its heart from fright, but no. On their first anniversary, she got Jay a rabbit. She hid things to purposefully forget where they are, bought plants to watch them wither. Jay could not explain her to anyone that asked, and Phee liked it that way. She was a person with religious dedication to the strange. Jay is angry most days, and Phee loved metaphors almost as much as she loved art and hated plastic, which she decided is hollow and empty and not artistic at all. So she’d spend her life literally picking up the pieces. On days when Jay is angry, when her guts twist into knots and food is flavorless and music is an electric needle in her brain, she thinks that maybe Phee did that on purpose, to give her something to do. Phee hid them everywhere before she left. By scrounging for quarters under the paint-splattered cushions and the tiered shelves of dead plants in her apartment. This is how she grieves: with her eyes closed and her pockets empty. Her mother should’ve named her Jinx instead. She tells him she doesn’t have any more money and gets up, tipping the wooden chair over and nearly spilling his beer. The man one seat over jabs her in the side. Her fingers twitch across the felt surface, over and over in increasingly tighter circles like water swirling down a drain, or the lines of a snail’s shell, or a woman wandering, not remembering where she is, until she’s just barely moving, scratching at the surface. Jay counts out her regrets in the grooves of one-dollar casino chips, spends half of them at the blackjack table with the lowest entry and loses the rest at poker.
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