Free A Gentle Hell by Autumn Christian Page B

close. He did that often; would go quiet if I asked about the underlying fundamentals of a thing, or would talk about something completely unrelated. That’s what happens when you forgetting you’re writing a story and you think you’re going to be profound. You ask questions trying to get to the center, like the answer will lead you to some ultimate revelation, the perfect Platonic form.
    If there was anything important I learned it was this: he taught me how to see a thing for what it is and not what I thought it represented. Not every atom has to be torn apart to get to its nucleus. Not every fact or idea has to be labeled and put in a schema. No, here is the earth that I’m gripping between my fingers. Here is the heart I’m chewing apart. Here is the rattlesnake tied to my wrist and the sharp pain that follows.
    Here is the tornado, god of entropy, tearing the house apart, and all I can think is that he looks sexy when he’s bent over a broken mirror snorting MDMA through a dollar bill. Everything else is extraneous.
    He painted her in profile, with the snakes in her hair writhing as if they were still alive. Her Morpheus eyes became empty slaughterhouses that caved inside her head and then collapsed. The moths sewn onto her dress turned into little children.
    It should’ve ended there, but of course it didn’t.
    He elongated the bones of her face and stretched out her skin. He gave her a muzzle and a cold black nose tipped with white and a thin line of a mouth. He painted her skin taut and brown and dull. Her dress melded into her bones and on her back he painted spots of white.    
    Then he ringed her mouth with a rusted red.
    On the nights when he couldn’t sleep sometimes he crawled onto the bed and leaned over me while I slept. Then he watched, waiting for me to wake up and see him. He touched my face then with both hands, his face stoic.
    “What’s wrong?” I asked him.
    “Nothing’s wrong,” he said, “just go back to sleep.”
    I felt the cougar heart in my stomach about to spill out my mouth and nose. It had stayed a part of me all the while, chewed up but indigestible, keening inside of me like the singing grass. I turned my head away and his hands fell. I went to sleep dreaming of being eaten alive.
    When he was almost finished with the painting I went back to the singing grass alone one night. She watched me as I walked, I knew she did, like a barefooted changeling from the trees with her hair bending down to flay me.
    This time all the furniture from my house waited out on the singing grass. Everything except the walls. There were chairs, bed, shower and sink, the refrigerator, the living room television, the desk from the hallway corner, all of it strewn out in the meadow.
    The formaldehyde jar of black arms lay on my bed. It was my bed, there was no doubt, there were the chipped white bedposts, that was the cover I hadn’t replaced in seven-odd years, with its ridiculous pink flowers and faded gray corners.
    “What is this place?” I said out loud, knowing she was nearby.
    No response. The wind whipped through the grass, and the grass howled.
    I approached the black arms, expecting them to jump to life in their shroud of formaldehyde. But they remained still, floating in suspension. I reached out and touched the slick jar.
    The girl grasped my hand from behind. I jerked my hand away from the jar and whirled around. She stood there, head cocked, a half-smile on her face. The snake skins hung from her hair sung like the grass. In one hand she held a shovel.
    “What is this place?” I asked. “And why is all my furniture here?” My voice sounded odd to me, like it was coming up from the ground at my feet instead of my throat.
    “I’ve assembled everything here. Everything you wanted to lose but couldn’t.”
    “Stop being enigmatic,” I said.
    “Am I?” she asked. “Listen. He’ll be here soon. You have to start digging.”
    “What?”
    She held the shovel out to me.