Exhibition: Four Drawings of a Farmer

None might be true, but the fantasy is sufficient. She believes everything and now she’s overdue with what she owes.

I look up at the second story of a two-tiered balcony on the exterior of the house and taped to the outside of the railing is a piece of computer paper. In red marker is written $5 massage for 30 mins. Once you get up there it is actually $1000 for 3 hours. It’s so humid that even from down here in the garden I can see that the paper is damp.

A young blind girl – a natural redhead – sits inside at the kitchen table with her head face down in her arms. I hear the dry heat of someone in the phone asking if she’s mad.

I’m not mad, I just don’t get it.

Since discovering the crows outside can recognize her face, she is not so much mad as she is terrified. The difference between in here and out there is that in here nothing moves unpredictably. That noisy gust of a wing near her hair was not a low hanging palm leaf after all. But maybe that’s just what she’s been told.

There is a cavernous whistle that carries on as far or as close as the walls are built. Though I’m not entirely sure if the sound is internal or external--if it’s coming from within me or from far away. I’m feeling the anxiety of making any more noise at all. Too many possible wrongdoings becoming a crippling justification to do nothing. There seems to be a more practical surrender though. Let’s just stay in here. Let’s just be still with the prognosis that perhaps, beyond our beliefs, we’ll live again to go outside in another life.

She dreamt once of a pot of gooey glitter. Flecks of clear, blue-green sparkly glass and thin hair-like gold she spread around in the palm of her hand. In the dream her neighbor smeared it all over his face and arms until, when his fat tongue appeared to lick the rest of the pot clean, it looked like a salmon out of river water in the sun. She thought about it constantly.

I sit down at the table next to her. It’s quiet, aside from the whistle,

Stop crying. They’re not even there anymore. Look, I have here four photos as proof. All the crows are dead. I shot them all! Does that make you feel better?

I look down and don’t have anything in my hands but a glass of water, and if she were to reach out in front of her and feel around the table she’d find nothing there either.

-MC