The Fiction of Owen Thomas

Still Life

A Short Story

Summary

Mrs. Foves is dreaming. She finds herself alone in a museum, familiar but alien. The maze of galleries, hung with masterpieces, are confusing. The security guard, a black man wrapped in a starched white uniform, follows her suspiciously, as if she were capable of some wild act of desecration. She begins to panic. She cannot find an exit. But then, there, through a previously undetected door, she spies her own dining room. Or, at least, the furniture is hers; the table, the buffet, even the vase of dried lilies that she cannot help but rearrange. On the wall, above the buffet, is painted the silhouette of a man falling through indigo space, the stars around him like exploding munitions to match the bright flame of his heart. Seated at the head of the table is a man wearing a suit and a brilliant blue tie rolling a bright red apple between his hands. He is familiar, but she does not know him. He is not her father, but she thinks of him in that way. The silhouette on the wall is falling and Emily Foves begins to weep for somehow she knows this is Icarus. The man at the table speaks.

“What did you say?” Emily asks in perfect French, surprised to hear a language she does not know. The man tells her that she is so young to die; that she is burning inside. He holds up the apple. It bursts into flame.

“Burn, Emily! Burn!”

Waking is a relief. As the dream fades, Emily Foves reassures herself with the immutable facts of her reality. She is lying still in her own bed, curtains drawn to the hot morning slowly exploding outside her window. The portrait of Robert, her husband, a man of impeccable character still sits quietly across the room on the bureau. The clock still ticks off its time. The world is still at war. She is still a widow. Robert, having bravely leapt from a plane above the Rhone Valley only to be shot through the heart by a German bullet, is still dead.

Emily Foves starts her day like any other. Like every other. She rises, preparing herself for work. She picks at the dried lilies on the table. She takes her medication. She sits in Robert’s favorite chair and eats her egg. She listens to the milkman place the bottles on her stoop as the sun beats against the sitting room curtains. She allows the dream in her head to suffocate and dissolve. She does not realize that she has dreamt a conversation with Henri Matisse, or that his The Fall of Icarus has graced her imagined dining room. Indeed, it is as if all that is artistic within her, including her own prodigious talent, has been suffocated and allowed to dissolve in stillness.

But the day will not end for Emily as it began. Chance encounters will shock her conscience. A private detective, the likes of which she has never before seen or imagined. A young Staff Sergeant back from the war with a show of his portraits hanging in the local museum. And Tom “Bo” Douglas, the black milkman wrapped in a white uniform, who steps into Emily’s home for a surprise that will mark a dramatic change in how each of them sees the still lives they inhabit.

Emily Foves is waking up.