DISPATCHES FROM MEMORY PAINTINGS

Cassandra Kesig

I woke up with a sty from Georgia doing my makeup for the party—or from negligence, depending on how you look at it—a pinch-sized polyp opposite my tear duct, pulsing. Through one milky eye, the smeary midmorning light, winds screaming through the live oaks in the court and pulling a big wash of leaves inland, west. I was tired again, or still; nested under a quilt with bits of filth and debris stuck to the soles of my socks that refused to be washed out.

I was feeling raw and erratic and made a list of all my friends in ballpoint pen, then crossed them out. It numbered a modest fourteen and had little tolerance for the mundane. I drew circles around the mosquito bites on my legs, which numbered nineteen. The clouds were antipathetic giants in a feather-light sky, fringed by the pulverized teeth of the mountains and their ash trees angled with wind and their uncanny slopes resembling sleeping men’s profiles. I was in a Land of Giants. I hailed from a Land of Giants also, lobed and fatty with the life of the chaparral like one of Giorgione’s women, and I had made a decadent trade-off to be here that involved some debt with my parents, principled, unflinching people with a low melting point for their youngest daughter, me, and orthodoxy, and Japanese public television. I had left behind a boyfriend with whom I soared above the milquetoast pageantry of all other twenty-first century love affairs. I had sloughed off the benign summer glaze of the Pacific. So this was dispossession.

The sty needed some fresh air so I took it outside. I felt nothing about the bucolic pastures and bees always dying in my too-sugary coffees. Felt nothing about my body, my biology, save the pus-rich deposit affixed to my eye, all of my nerve response leached into that neutron star. I flopped down onto the grass like a disanimated marionette; I thought of my boyfriend, which I often did to conjure a deadened flash of longing. He was the part of me lopped off in the creation myth, I thought, shrouded in rational, mathematical misery. He had left behind a tender and itchy exposure that sometimes flared with misanthropy. Conversations with him were like scaling the Tower of Babel, garrulous. Sex with him was moderate to severe. We wanted to get married, but it was expensive. Sometimes he would sing to me over the phone in a leaden voice that calcified the marshy, disease-prone rot choking the cave of my head—a few wet coughs before the heart attacks.

But I couldn’t hold the feeling close to me long; it squirmed away like a baby wanting its mother, disqualified, dispossessed. Somewhere in a nearby dorm, shrieking chorus: Happy birthday, happy birthday, the day you were born, Gabriel and all the angels did the bump and grind…

The sty demanded my attention. I rubbed it furiously, tried to disband the council of elders in my head, envisioning my physiology as taffy going through the pulling machine, over and under, erudite in its flexibility and always kind and eternal. This is a pretty girl: a mycelium system of cellulite-melting creams and parasite-killing tinctures the scent of molding fruits, absorptive and unabashed like a lipsticked dish sponge. And I wanted to be a pretty girl. I drowned the sty in eye drops that made it redder and angrier and more hateful, and averted my gaze.

The thing about ideas is that I have them, in spades, and feel the need to dispense them in even, exacting numbers, a perfect center part through an oil slick of hair. I’d arrived here, immaculate pasture of dead animals and missing persons, and gone to a party and puked up my ideas in spectacular quantities, which impressed no one but my faraway boyfriend. I required an IV drip of psychotropics and dread. Calamitous, creationist, articulated, thread-waisted collapsing train cars rubbernecking, discothequing, surging around my sick on the lawn in acrylic slips. Georgia was painting my face like a harlequin; my head pounded. I wanted to go home, but couldn’t, and cried fat tears that cloyed around the sty like a caul. I migrated to a mirror with a pair of forceps and worked dutifully at the sty, Puritanically probed its bald head with my mouth agape, eyeballs rolling and shot through with sleeplessness. If only Georgia and Boyfriend could see me now, pretzeled and disemboweled and not knowing any words on the bathroom sink.

The forceps dislodged something that birthed itself through the pore, growing in diameter, evicting itself from the skin, and neatly it came free. Poised on the aluminum arms: a baroque pearl, dimpled and glistening. I would take it to a gem man on my walk into town for kindling, and he would record its ounces and blithely inform me of its worthlessness. Damn it, damn it, I would think, throat scorched from social smoking, Venus in Appalachia.

Kiriakos Tompolidis

Self-portrait mixed media and collage on canvas