Still Life with Tornado: List 1

Carmen said that the sketch was not of a tornado, but everything it contained. All I saw was flying, churning dust.

Our next assignment was to sketch a still life. Miss Smith put out three bowls of fruit and told us we could arrange the fruit in any way we wanted.

I tried to spontaneously combust like a defective firework.

I catch my distorted reflection in the windows of the passing cars, and I think about how people elope to City Hall and get married without telling anyone. I’m doing that, but I’m doing it by myself. I will elope with the new me.

I don’t usually have hallucinations.
I say, “Are you a hallucination?”

Maybe this is some sort of existential crisis. I couldn’t tell you right now whether my life has meaning or value. I don’t even know if I’m really living.

Every year on my birthday, Dad gave me something a real artist should have—a wooden artist’s model, a set of oil paints, a palette, an easel, a pottery wheel.

I am a sixteen-year-old truant.

But now, there’s something condescending in her smile. Unsympathetic. It says I am silly and dramatic.

Two parents discuss their truant daughter and within five sentences, one of them is blaming the other for something that isn’t even relevant.

And yet, this conversation is a novelty. They are rarely awake or at home at the same time.

He’s a fanatic about maintaining façade and building-envelope integrity.

I open my umbrella. Superstition abounds. Students act as if I’ve brought a curse upon the building, but that’s only because they don’t know that there is already a curse upon the building.

In first-period English, the teacher asks me to close my umbrella and I comply.

For Mom, it was easy to be in a good mood while all- inclusive in Mexico.

She was a night nurse. Twelve-hour shifts in the emergency room from seven to seven. The only thing that bothered her was the sun because she considered herself a bona fide vampire.

Every four chairs had a thatched umbrella hut, some had a round table nailed to the tree stump that held up the umbrella part; some didn’t.

Almost all of the resort-goers stayed on their beach loungers. Very few went into the water. So Dad wasn’t an anomaly or anything.

He was just a player in the sterile, geometric beach scene he called Our Family Mexico Getaway.

Bruce said, “Fish don’t like humans, Sarah. Not even you.”
“I think they like me,” I said.
“You’re delusional,” he said.

As we wander around the area, there are similar paintings. Braque, Gris, all of Picasso’s contemporaries.

I see the style in those, too. It was a movement. Picasso wasn’t the only cubist.

She keeps her arms crossed like she’s fed up with me. She’s a little like twenty-three-year-old Sarah. Aloof—like she’s better.

I look at her furrowed brow while she sleeps and I feel pain inside of her sleep.

Life is a joust. Recently, I’ve been unhorsed. And yet I don’t feel a thing.

On the mantel there’s a ceramic owl. I made it in the first grade and it’s my favorite thing I ever made even though I’ve made far better things. Dad wouldn’t stop praising me for the owl when I brought it home. It was when it all started—this talk about my talent and my prospects and my dad’s fascination with taking us to the art museum a few times a year.

On the mantel there’s a ceramic owl. I made it in the first grade and it’s my favorite thing I ever made even though I’ve made far better things. Dad wouldn’t stop praising me for the owl when I brought it home. It was when it all started—this talk about my talent and my prospects and my dad’s fascination with taking us to the art museum a few times a year.

He said he liked art, but really he’d just researched it the same way he researches depreciation and deterioration of building structures.

This man—the one who sleeps in the alcove of the boarded-up building four blocks from our house—is white, has a scruffy beard, and is probably crazy.

I’ve been trying not to think about headpieces since the art club fiasco.

He rarely paints forms that people would recognize. Just abstracts.

Vivian and her subtext: You know who you are, you plebeian...

Vivian and her subtext: You know who you are, you plebeian...

Even back then, I knew I was sitting too still to be an artist and I doubted the whole trick. That’s what I saw. A trick. Every time I logged on I felt duped into having to be a snowflake.

I look out to the street and the cars that go by and the people walking with their groceries or their kids and I see the world’s horizon line separating foreground from background.