The Fiction of Owen Thomas

Still Life

A Short Story

Excerpt A

Mrs. Foves quite resented the look.

Even when he was not in her sight, she felt him from the corner of the gallery.  Felt his unapologetic appraisal. Felt his wariness. 

Such suspicion in those eyes, she thought.  As if she was a saboteur of the order.  As if, at any moment, she might act upon some grandly irrational impulse. 

She stole a glance at him as she turned from Mona Lisa to consider Whistler’s Mother.  His eyes were dark and soft in the center, like something primal and molten, rimmed with a pure, bloodless white.  It occurred to her that the eyes were a reflection of the man himself, black as midnight and wrapped in the starched white uniform of the museum. 

That he thought her capable was incomprehensible. That she might desecrate some masterpiece as this one or that one, or mark upon the marbled walls or take a hunting knife to the glossy floors; that she might suddenly regress into the shape of some beast given to howling and clawing at the peace and grandeur, struck her as preposterous. 
But the eyes did not see it that way.

Mrs. Foves tried to remember the name of this place, but could not.  She had seen it chiseled above the entrance, but that must have been a very long time ago, or, at least, she supposed it had been a very long time since she now had no recollection of ever crossing the threshold. 

She knew that the name of the museum had been stenciled in a thin, slanted looping script into a small rectangular plaque and pinned to the uniform of the security guard who still looked at her from the only shadow of the gallery.  Another hard look at him and she might remember.

But she quickly thought better of it.  She did not wish to deliberately encounter the appalling suggestion in those eyes.

It seemed to her that they were the only souls in the place and it unnerved her to be alone. She walked along the polished floor, which seemed to flow from gallery to gallery like a river of wood, and her heels made sounds like the knocking of stones beneath the water.  She adjusted her handbag and smoothed her dress against the tops of her legs in a way that would have betrayed her discomfort had there been anyone else to see it.  She stepped calmly out of the room, and across the hall.

Here was an entirely different gallery.  Mrs. Foves was surprised to find the walls were bare and, by what must have been a trick of poor lighting, they seemed to pucker and bow in random splotches of darkness.  She turned and looked intently, knowing that she had surely missed something.

When she had come nearly full around, she saw that the black man in his white uniform and his invasive, uncompromising eyes, was in the corner. The sight of him surprised her, since she had not heard a sound of his moving so quickly.  She continued to turn in a casual manner, as if his presence was of no particular consequence.  She did not want him to have the power of knowing her discomfort. 

Never let them see you stirring, is what Robert had always told her.  And she would follow his advice, as always, even now.

But she was stirring.  In spite of herself, she was stirring. She could feel it.  Deep in the bottom of a place she could not name, something was turning over. 

It was certainly time to be leaving.  Time to be moving on.

She gripped the strap of her handbag on her shoulder as though clutching the railing of a ship in heavy seas.  But as she turned, Mrs. Foves realized that she did not know her way.  She could not recall the direction from which she had entered this dismally empty gallery and, now that she looked with a sharper focus, she could not discern any doors at all. 

But that cannot be, she thought, fighting a rising tide of concern and trying her best not to look into the darkened corner.  Surely there is a door.  Surely. Come now!
 
And, indeed, there was a door.  She realized that she had missed it quite foolishly in her state of needless worry about the security guard who was, after all, merely doing his job. 

She made her way with a brisk step and, as she approached the adjoining gallery, found further consolation when her eyes caught a glimpse of her dining table.  And not just the table, after all, but the entire room, with the grandfather clock that Robert liked to wind with such precision and the lavender draperies that had been too bold for his taste but which he had endured for her sake.  And there, too, behind the table, was the heavy oak buffet that held the good china and, on the table, the arrangement of dried lilies in the vase painted the color of a field.

And wasn’t it all now ever so much better? 

She quickened her step towards the gallery that contained her dining room, which, it turned out, was much farther away than she had first believed. She walked and walked and walked and suddenly she was there, one hand resting upon the smooth mahogany scroll of a chair and the other reaching over the table to fuss with the dried lilies in the way that Robert liked to roll his eyes about.

At first she thought him her father.  He had the same posture; the same presence.  But then she realized that she did not actually know the man sitting at the head of the table.  Nevertheless, it seemed natural that he should be there and Mrs. Foves was unconcerned.  Perhaps it was the expensive dark suit that put her at ease, or the shine on his shoes.  The tie was like a crisp blue stream through a bright green valley.  She thought it was only proper to ask if she might bring him some tea or a light lunch, but she could not find her kitchen.  A red fruit sat on the table before him, an apple she thought, and he rolled it slowly from one hand to the next.

A large black dog entered the gallery, his eyes flashing white and his nails clicking on the glossy floor.  This gave Mrs. Foves some pause, for she had never seen a dog in a museum gallery, or in her dining room, and she did not know what to think.  His mouth hung open and the flesh inside was brightly sanguine in its prison of bleached bone.  The dog, which was very large indeed now that she looked at him, paid her no mind and he curled up at the feet of the man like a pool of cooling lava.

Something pulled her at attention.  The pulling came from the wall behind the buffet.  From the wall itself it seemed, which was not the yellowing white she expected, but blue.  And not just any blue, she saw, but the coming of night while the day is everywhere still melting from memory into dream. 

She saw that the wall stretched upward from behind the buffet for a very long way into blackness.  In the blue ink of dusk was the sprawling silhouette of a man, as though cut from the blackness above, tumbling down, down, down through a constellation of exploding yellow light, like solar munitions, and a burning red in the center of his chest, like a flaming seed, where the stars had finally found their mark. 

Mrs. Foves could feel the burning hole in her own chest now.  The tears came and she let them fall.  She reached up to the sprawling, tumbling man, her entire hand the size of his flaming heart, and she knew that this was Icarus.  At least, that was the name in her head.  She looked at the man sitting at her table and he moved his head in a slow nod. Then he spoke her name, but Mrs. Foves did not recognize it.  She could see now that he sported a trim gray beard over a weathering face much older than her own.  His pink lips moved with a smile.

Qu’avez-vous dit?, she asked, surprised to hear a language she did not speak.

Vous êtes si jeune pour mourir, the man replied, patting the large dog on his head.  Vous brûlez à l’intérieur.

He looked at her directly now, for the first time, and with such intensity that a lily stem snapped between her fingers. She looked down at the broken stem in horror, and then back at him.  His eyes glowed a deep red and he held up the fruit by the tips of his fingers.  It burst into flame and he smiled. 

Brûlure, Amelie. Brûlure!