What began as curiosity, and boredom (and lack of artistic inspiration), has now, somehow, become just as important as the work itself, as I begin to see patterns, to find things so unusual they are like pieces in a puzzle, evidence of transgressions hidden from human history. I’ve become absorbed, forgetting where I am and what I’m supposed to be doing, and time passes, forgotten, around me. I must look crazy, sitting there surrounded by my own little stacks and piles, breathing in shallow gasps, hair hanging in my face, licking my lips feverishly. I’ve found some odd things tucked in amongst the stacks of musty newspapers and sales receipts. Creepy things. A lock of blond hair taped to a plain cardboard sheet, “Daddy’s little girl,” scrawled shakily beneath the straggling strands. A wooden box carved with some sort of animal with a long body and tiny pointed teeth, a single yellowed molar rattling around inside. A balled up t-shirt stained with blood. A page ripped from a book with colored illustrations of insects. A small card with the words “Is This A Dream?” written on it with a calligraphy quill. A crumpled piece of stationary, still fragrant with perfume, a note begun but never finished: “Dear Mom, The doctors say I may be able to come home soon. They say the air here is doing me some good, but sometimes I wonder. At night I hear things, people talking about me, discussing whether I’m going to live or die. Isn’t that strange? The other day I thought I saw” That was all. The note was dated September 14th, 1944. I found a wooden, handmade advent calendar with little drawers to open for each day in December before Christmas. My grandmother used to get me the ones you can buy at the store made out of cardboard with the chocolates inside when I was a kid. Each compartment on the wooden one I found was stuffed with a different kind of animal hair, red like a fox’s, or brown and coarse like a bear’s. And I found some words scrawled on the back of a handwritten bill of sale for three dozen eggs and a bottle of bleach in thick pencil: “I’m here/Can you hear me?/Please don’t go/The gnomes on the wallpaper are jeering again/He moves under the floorboards.” The bill of sale was from “Joe’s Market,” undated and unsigned. It feels to me like all these things are somehow connected. It feels like if I look hard enough, I’ll discover their secret. I know it sounds crazy--it’s just a bunch of old junk in a basement. But there’s something here, something beneath the surface. And so I keep exploring the basement, looking through boxes, hoping to find inspiration, a clue to Klimt’s intentions, something about the past owner’s of this house, and where all this might have come from.
Hang on. I have to go. Klimt is here to discuss my progress...
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DarkFuse Live Event: I had the hardest time concentrating. Whenever I found a seemingly quiet place to brainstorm, there was always someone around to distract me, women with wrinkled dresses and hairstyles flattened from spending the night over, men with their ties loosened and thrown over their shoulders, always drunk, sometimes laughing. It was as if they followed me, found something to admire in each room I visited--mumbling in groups over a particular painting, then shuffling to the couches to lounge and smile. I had to keep moving. I found the library, where I’d been with Maddie at the party we’d crashed, and thought it was empty, closing the door behind me, sinking gratefully into one of the chairs. But before I could even get my notebook out, the middle-aged man with bottle-cap glasses appeared suddenly from behind a shelf of books and said: ‘The hum? Do you hear the hum?’ I asked him what he was doing there and he said he was hiding from his wife, trying to sober up before he saw her again. ‘Still?’ I asked him, since it had been several days since the party, but he only shook his head and told me he’d been all over the house. I stood, shrugged and left.
Sometimes I’ll open a door and see something crazy. I saw a little girl stacking empty beer bottles all the way to the ceiling once and when she noticed me she put her finger to her mouth to signal I should be quiet and I closed the door. I saw a puddle of blood at the foot of a bed, but when I blinked it was gone. I saw a man wearing some sort of furry animal costume and one of those plain white-plastic masks having sex doggy style with a woman wearing fairy wings. It’s a strange house. I don’t know sometimes if I’m hallucinating or really seeing some of this stuff. It’s like I said: I haven’t been sleeping well. Okay, actually, I haven’t been sleeping at all really. Everything feels surreal when you’re tired enough. So, yeah, this is me reading the first couple chapters of "The New Flesh." Check it out: |
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