The Cherubim of Still Fruit Finger Tips A Synopsis of the Feast of Crows and the Followers of Carrion

THE CHERUBIM OF STILL FRUIT

Femke Huis

The painter cleans his worn-out brush and covers it in old oils left in a broken coffee cup. Using his lips as a comb, he presses down the hair of his old gristle bristled brush bringing it to a fine point. He pulls out a half-empty brown paper bag. Removing from it a bottle of fine red wine, a bundle of yellow bananas, an apple, and a single grape he plucked from the vine without the store clerk noticing. He pulls out an uneven stool, placing it in the center of the room, and ornates it with a flower embroidered tea cloth. Then he pours himself a glass of wine, sips it, and lets the oils on his lips stick to the rim of the glass. He then places it on the stool with the wine bottle behind it. He takes the grape, cuts halfway through it, places it on the rim of the glass ensuring not to obscure his lip’s markings. He takes the bananas, rips off two, and places them on the stool with the ends just barely touching the stem of the glass. He then takes the apple, cuts two slices, eats one, and places the apple and remaining slice on the stool in front of everything else. He takes out his easel and canvas, measures the scene with his paintbrush, and closes his eyes. Flies appear in the darkness behind his eyelids Cherubim of heavenly stars shooting stars through the skies beckoned by the sweet smell of fresh fruit. He imagines the chalk drawings made on uneven pavement and watches as it is washed away by rain. He waltzes through his childhood memories as he learned to shave and then learned to shave again when his face started to sag. He watched as all his loved one decayed. He opens his eyes the bananas had browned the apple had withered the grape and fallen, one half floating in the wine the other staining the tea cloth A fruit fly perches itself on the apple slice and lifts its leg like a ballerina. He begins to paint.

Femke Huis is an Albertan-based artist and graduate of the Alberta University of the Arts. They are a mixed media visual artist and writer focusing on themes of transference, environmental justice, science fiction, and narrative. Femke has a community base focus seeking to use their practice to build community and bring the community together through the mean of expression and vulnerability. Their work can be found at www.femkehuis.com

A Synopsis of the Feast of Crows and the Followers of Carrion

Femke Huis

Carrion: the dead petrifying fl esh usually of an animal. Carrion crows, vultures, and even some carnivorous animals all have the unique ability to consume, digest, and sometimes subsist on carrion. They who straddle the line of life and death and through consumption, siphon the strength of the slow decay of all things and in that act, morph death into a momentary prolonging of subtle falls until the hunger calls once more. Once more, they must straddle the back of the unmoving corpse, Bite down hard, and pull off the fl esh. snapping sinew, squelching skin, and brittle bone all shifting under the weight of gnawing gnashing teeth. Death to be churned in their acidic stomachs and burned into life. These followers of carrion are acolytes of transference, of dead things to individual life Of the slow end of an old song into the crescendo of a new one. A ruin into budding trees and a picturesque world with life, but without corpses At least until the life transfers to corpses. The defi nition of a corpse is a factor of relative perspective. The vulture sees the garden of Eden in mass graves, the body becomes the soil for sprouting seeds the moment its life-giving functions end To allow the fl ies to plant their crop. Everlasting cityscapes and strange shapes With every little-death that it takes to perpetuate it is as dead as it is alive And the corpse of a place is a ruin the folks of places become scavengers everything that once stood tall becomes a fi ction of its own time, a story, a tale, a rhyme an imagined history for us to read to aspire to be. A ruin into carrion. and with snapping sinew, squelching skin, brittle bone, and tales as old as lies recycled. But there is a point where everything becomes unusable And intangible Where our feasts slip through our hands like Water Sand Wind Love Time Life Death And we become Carrion.