In time, my eyes adjust to darkness. At first, it’s just this buzzing void I’m wrapped in, this gentle shock of electricity running through the body, tingling, giving notice of my shape. I feel myself, I know I’m present, even though I can’t see or hear or taste. But then slowly, over time, my environment thaws. I hear the distant brook somewhere in the woods. I feel the night air, moist and clean, against my skin. I taste the rain and fresh growth. I see familiar colors and shapes and fears and possibilities. And I know that I am home.
I was raised in this darkness. I learned to walk in it, to speak in it, to navigate feelings within it, and to build a life. A child, a failed relationship, two beautiful homes, a sky lit studio surrounded by my work. I survived decades in this darkness, as much as doctors and friends told me it wasn’t necessary. There were medications, treatments, they told me. I tried them all, to show that I could be a part of their world, but how could I live without my precious darkness? My essential material. It’s where I see shapes and color and possibilities.
And I no longer fear what has been coming for years.
I carry warmth in a thick woolen blanket on my jog from the house to the studio door, careful not to slip on the icy slate path. The studio is always cold in the morning. My breath plumes in front of my face and I pretend I’m a giant walking through the clouds. As if I know there is a world beneath my feet, but it isn’t my world. My world is separate. An outsider world, wrapped in darkness. I rub my hands together, waiting for the potbelly stove to heat up the space. Danny had pushed me to run a gas line from the house, but the stove came with the place and I figured that made for some kind of spiritual connection to my art. Lost items are given new purpose here.
Bins of old parts and trinkets, plastic bottles and bike chains, stuffed animals and kitchen utensils, braided hair and rubber gloves. My dumpster finds, my yard sale discoveries, my raw materials. This is how I reconstruct my past through sculpture. And how I’ll construct this piece. This new one they want to exhibit at some stuffy Norwegian gallery celebrating ‘new work from old masters.’ The old masters. The ones before the trendy robots took over. Before AI art became all the rage and human artists were relegated to antiquity, work collected as novelties, returned unceremoniously to my studio after a lifetime of admiration. Thank you for loaning your beautiful sculpture to our gallery, Eileen. It challenged our emotions in the deepest way, they all say in their stale condolences. My cat eye glasses, my sharp bowl cut now stripped of color, reflecting a face as affectless as the day it was photographed for some ancient gallery magazine. The woman who spent so much of her life in darkness she failed to see the world changing around her. Once masterworks left to rot in the sculpture garden I never imagined hosting.
The past is all I think about these days. Through my tiny studio window, I am the sole benefactor of my art, admiring what others had once spent hours pulling meaning from. A gallery of my life, my memories. Now I spend hours wandering my overgrown half acre lot well past the sun has set and the wind wheezes through worn latex gloves, feeling my creations. Returned to darkness. Memories caked in mud and bird shit.
The Cost #1
Coke bottles, washing machine, acrylic.
83 3/4 x 35 x 17 in. (212.7 x 88.9 x 43.2 cm)
North Kingstown was an unremarkable place to grow up. A suburb of a suburb of a city somewhere up the highway. We had a Pizza Hut with an all-you-can-eat buffet that Dad would take us to once a month if he got his overtime and everything else was paid. Closer to the water was where all the rich people lived, but I was only ever over there because that’s where the high school was. We lived on the other side of town. Might as well have lived in the desert.
Kingstown Mobile Village was behind the bowling alley right off Post Road, the main road running through town. Ours was tucked back a bit, thankfully, but I could still hear the traffic through the screen window at night. I could hear the crack of bowling balls over at the alley and cheers from the league players. I could hear the neighbors arguing after someone got drunk and said something stupid, or lost all their money at the dog track. But mainly, I heard Mom and Dad outside on the porch most nights chatting and laughing or turning the pages of their books, sipping their tea. We were different. People gave us looks because both my parents went to college and we lived here. We didn’t use LookingGlass or Detours or any other AI-supported tech. We lived comfortably in the past. So, naturally, everyone thought we were in witness protection. Or they thought we were cops. But the truth was, we were just people who didn’t belong anywhere. Or maybe we didn’t belong anywhere else.
Dad was a proud man. Prouder than anyone I’ve ever known. He never showed failure. I don’t know that he even believed in it. He always said if you work hard, the universe will give you what you need. I think he got it from a lyric or a slogan or something. But I didn’t really care. It was the sentiment that mattered. A cliche isn’t wrong, it’s just tired from working so hard.
He was laid off from the submarine factory on a Friday along with a bunch of other guys from our park. The government was switching whole shifts over to automation, so a lot of people were out of work all of a sudden. That weekend, I heard them all drinking and complaining in the bowling alley parking lot until late into the night, breaking bottles and shouting, while Dad licked his wounds and mumbled angrily to Mom on the porch.
But Monday morning he was out on the street picking up bottles from the side of Post Road, stuffing them in big garbage bags he’d picked up at Ace. Mom was mortified when she heard about it. A neighbor told her as soon as she got home from work. Dad was out there flaunting our poverty to everyone, she’d hiss under her breath when she thought I couldn’t hear. But Dad would keep that same stoic look on his face he always wore. He’d walk his bags of bottles past his old job, sweating through his shirt, all the way down to the recycling center. He’d change them in for twenty bucks. Sometimes more on the weekend if the bowling alley had a tournament. And he’d pay the bills. Never complained. He did that for six months.
On Fridays, he’d buy himself a bottle of Coke and he’d sit there on the porch and drink it in the dark by himself while Mom watched Wheel of Fortune or something on the television by herself.
That whole summer, while my Dad was out there picking up bottles, I worked at this coffee shop on Post Road. I’d see him out there during my shift and try to ignore it, but then Courtney or Alex would say something like, hey isn’t that your Dad? And someone else would say that guy’s your Dad? Seriously? And my face would redden, not from embarrassment or shame, but because they didn’t know him like I did. They didn’t know he wrote a book in college, or that he rode the railroads like the beat generation. Or that he gave it all up when I was born and got a job welding at the sub base to make ends meet. They didn’t know he was a dreamer who saw possibilities in everyday things. All they saw was some guy picking up bottles off the side of the road and they’d think so sad. What a tragedy.
Around that time, I felt the darkness creeping over me for the first time. It came as a numbness. An uncertainty toward my surroundings. I stayed in my room whenever I wasn’t working and I read or drew pictures or listening to music. I let friendships dry up and I only spoke to Dad and Mom when I needed something, which I tried very hard not to. I felt myself drooling sometimes and I wondered if I’d gone crazy or if I’d forgotten to breathe again. The darkness was restricting and foreign, but comforting, too.
One night after work, sometime toward the end of summer, Alex invited me to come meet some of his friends at the abandoned Navy site down by Allen’s Harbor. I used to ride bikes with Dad down to the Harbor when I was younger to go swimming. So maybe it was that nostalgia, or maybe it’s because I’d never been to a high school party before, but I figured it’d be good to see what it’s all about before I graduated.
Someone had lit a small fire on the concrete before we got there. A group of ten or so kids I recognized from school were huddled around it, shivering and drinking their beers, shifting to one side or the other whenever the wind changed direction of the smoke. I watched their eyes, whipping from one to the other under the stealth protection of the shadows, checking if they’re drinking right, if they’re smiling right, if they’re displaying the necessary amount of cool, flipping through their LookingGlass social feeds, liking each others’ posts. The strange system of social awareness felt like another language to me. Like I was suddenly standing in a foreign country instead of the only town I’d ever known. And I was the only one in my work clothes. My foreigner garb, exotic coffee stained polo and flour-dusted black pants. Alex hadn’t invited me until we were closing and I didn’t think I had time to run home and get changed.
The odor of coffee oil and cleaning supplies were pungent so I stood as close to the fire smoke as I could to mask my own smell. Alex brought his girlfriend over to meet me. She was nice, but none of the others were. Even through the smoke, they picked up on my stench. They snickered and asked if I scavenged old pastries from the dumpster and brought them home to my trailer. Or if Dad made a lot of money picking up trash. Their casual cruelty caught me off guard and I felt my throat twitch. And I missed being alone.
I retreated into the woods, their laughter trailing behind me until I found my darkness again. Their pitiful fire reached weakly across the dead leaves and trash, but I was by myself at least. I walked through salt-hardened pine trees and decaying tufts of heather. Through syringes and empty cigarette packs. Through fast food napkins and bottles. Until I found myself in a clearing. And in the center of the clearing were a half dozen washing machines. It was random and inviting, like I’d been welcomed into some VIP section of the party that no one else knew about. I thought that if these machines worked, I could wash the stench out of my clothes. And when the rest of the party caught wind of this exclusive section, I’d fashion some sort of velvet rope and deny each and every one of them entry.
I walked home along the shoulder of Post Road, the place most people in town figured they’d find a Symonoski. But I didn’t care. I was exhausted. The scent of smoke on my clothes carried the sound of teenage laughter and the darkness tingled against my skin.
I found Dad sitting on the porch by himself, reading a book and nursing his bottle of Coke. And I plopped down in Mom’s chair beside him.
“Make some good tips?” he asked.
I handed him the wad of crusty singles and he counted. “Same as usual,” I told him.
“Why so late?”
“Went to a party with Alex. It was stupid, though.” He nodded, no judgement, no asking about drinking or boys. Just a silent acknowledgement. Maybe he saw the red around my eyes. The red I told myself was from the smoke, and not from the tears I couldn’t choke back in the woods.
“I found something weird though, when I was walking home. I found a bunch of washing machines dumped in the middle of this clearing.”
Dad perked up at that. Something about it felt important. “Washing machines? Where?”
“Down by Allen’s Harbor,” I said.
“Tomorrow, I want you to show me.” He finished off his Coke and smiled at me for a long time, composing his words in his head before loading them and delivering with a boom. “The universe puts things in our path and it’s up to us to pick them up and figure out what they mean. Some are useful. Some weigh you down. It’s your job to figure it out.”
The next day, Dad was hovering over me when I woke up, singing some church song from Godspell, I think. He always sang when he thought I needed to hear a song. He was happy and motivated, shuffling me out the door before I barely had time to brush my teeth.
We stopped at the gas station for some Pop Tarts and coffee and ate on the walk over to Allen’s Harbor. Dad was whistling the whole time. He wasn’t stoic and detached like when he was picking up bottles along the side of Post Road. Now, he was walking like he’d just won the lottery or something. Every half mile or so, he’d put his arm around me and tell me some story about how he tagged along with his Dad on handyman jobs growing up, and how Gramps could fix anything. Anything, he emphasized.
When we got to the clearing, I watched Dad’s face gently shift from excitement to the wonder of this new reality. There were, in fact, a half dozen washing machines dumped in the middle of the woods. It may as well have been a unicorn or an angel.
“Someone must’ve thought it’d be cheaper to just dump them out here instead of paying the recycling center,” he said, examining each one for wear.
“You think you can make money off these things?” I asked.
And he shot me that same hopeful smile he’d worn the night before. “Oh yeah. If I can get these home, fix them up, I can flip them for a hundred bucks apiece.”
“Who’s gonna buy them?” I asked.
“Anyone who doesn’t want to pay Home Depot prices,” he shrugged.
He borrowed a truck from a guy at the trailer park and we drove back down the access road to Allen’s Harbor and weaved stealthily through the trees like whoever dumped those washing machines in the first place. Dad showed me how he could lift each one using a strap and physics. He carried each one up into the bed of the truck like it was nothing, and I remember thinking he was stronger than I thought he was. Or smarter. Or both.
The sun was setting by the time we got home from the last trip out there. Six washing machines lined up beside our trailer in a tidy row. Mom yelled at Dad when we showed up with the first bunch. She glared at him on the second trip. And on the third, she was packing her bags. She said she’d had enough of his bullshit and was going back to Massachusetts for a while to stay with Aunt Kate while Dad sorted out his priorities. That really burst his bubble. He was so happy all day, and all the sudden he’s sitting out there on the porch drinking his tea staring out into the twilight and those damn washing machines like they were just trash again. I took Mom’s seat beside him and kept him company. Finally he said, “she thinks I’m doing all this to hurt her. But I’m not. I’m out there every day doing whatever I can to keep a roof over our heads. And she thinks I enjoy it. Like I don’t feel everyone’s eyes on me. Like I don’t feel their eyes on you and her, too. I know what it costs to be out there everyday. I know what it costs.”
A couple weeks later, Dad got a job at Ace after he sold the manager one of those washing machines. It was the only one he sold. He called up Mom at Aunt Kate’s the day he got hired and she was back on the porch that night, drinking tea with Dad, reading books and laughing quietly while I dozed off in my room. The rest of the washing machines sat out there for God knows how long, and Mom’s nagging to get rid of them became a running gag between them. Once a breaking point in their relationship became a part of their love language. Those things were still there every time I came home from college. They were still there when Mom and Dad moved to a retirement community nearby. They’re probably still there for all I know.
I think about those months when Dad was out of work and still managed to put food on the table and keep the lights on. And he stayed strong for us.
The universe put things in his path and he figured out what they meant.
Every time I come across a bottle on the street, I pick it up and put it in my bag. If I’m out at a restaurant with friends and I have a Coke, or they do, I take the bottle home with me. On the weekends, I take a load down to the recycling center and put my earnings in a jar I keep on top of the fridge in my studio. When it’s full, I stock my mini fridge with bottles of Coke and drink one every Friday night. It’s my way of feeling connected to Dad. Reminding myself how he worked so hard and so quietly to provide for us. And how those washing machines I found really bounced him back to his old self. That man who saw possibilities in the mundane.
For The Cost #1, an old rusted washing machine is surrounded by painted Coke bottles that howl against the wind or rain or when an admirer blows into the piece itself. Whatever tune it made was Dad’s little song I would imagine, sang at the top of those glass lungs for the whole world to hear. And maybe, I hoped, they could hear it all the way back on Post Road.
*
Last week, I got an invite to an art opening for Toby Fishcake, an AI supercomputer hooked up to a massive 3D printer that bills itself as the future of modern sculpture. I don’t know how to feel. Fishcake is famous for building gelatinous masses that connect to a viewer’s neural implant through bluetooth. The mass constructs childhood memories, taken directly from the viewer’s brain and colors them in with some gaudy display of pastels and pleasantries. The art world was up in arms when Fishcake first came to life. There were protests outside of the gallery that showed its work. It isn’t art. It’s manipulating a viewer’s own experiences. It’s projecting lies. Those were the headlines for months. But after awhile, the outrage petered out and people just let it happen. Maybe it was all the shit going on in the world. AI sprouting up all over the place, taking our jobs, our purpose. Manufacturing our experiences. Why not let them dictate our humanity through carefully manipulated art, too. Maybe then we wouldn’t feel so in the dark.
Marionette
Metal key rings, acetate, brass
42 x 42 x 10 in. (106.68 x 106.68 x 25.4 cm)
I met Angus at my friend’s gallery show opening. It was a group show in Providence just after we graduated from RISD and he was in it, as well. He showed me the marionettes he had on display, modeled in papier-mâché from some fancy paper he picked up in Paris. They were incredible, intricate, emotionally charged. Each puppet the likeness of a person who impacted his life. Building them let him take control of difficult moments they had created for him, he admitted in a whisper as I looked over each of them with such interest that time stopped for me that night. This was his biography. And because he wasn’t on socials, his art became the only way to untangle who he really was.
We met for coffee the next day, which felt safe, but we ended up spending the rest of the day and evening together anyway. Talking about our lives, about art, about our futures. Eventually, we went back to the warehouse space he shared with some friends in Olneyville. The place was raw, spray-painted walls, a half-pipe on the cracked concrete floors by the windows. A makeshift kitchen with hotplates and two mini fridges stacked on top of one another.
His room doubled as his studio. Folding tables along three walls, filled with materials and marionettes half built. Others hung from the ceiling. A thick stench of oil paints hung in the air. His bed was an afterthought in the corner. The place where he slept. Where he didn’t bring multiple women back to as conquests, I decided. And where I found love for the first time. Before I left in the morning, he told me he was moving back to Brooklyn at the start of the summer and asked if I would come with him.
I’d never been out of Rhode Island before, except for a couple field trips to Mystic Aquarium and Boston when I was younger. I never even took the train down to New York to wander the art galleries. The truth was, I considered myself an outsider artist. I’d always been an outsider. And for whatever reason, even when I was attending RISD, I never wanted to be influenced by other people’s art. So I stayed put. I stayed in my darkness. But something was pulling me toward Angus. Maybe it was his confidence. The way he spoke without shame or worry of what the response might be. He spoke in truths. Even if they were wrong, they were true for him. And it made me feel secure in my decision to go with him.
That first summer in Brooklyn was profound. We rented this decent-sized warehouse space in Red Hook along with another artist Angus knew from before and we spent our days creating and our nights at gallery openings or talking about art with all of Angus’s Brooklyn friends. We were together all the time those first three months. But then the money started running out and I needed to find a job.
I was able to get a waitressing gig at some trendy bistro in Cobble Hill. The tips were good, but the hours were long and I’d get home around three in the morning and sleep until noon and have to turn around and do it again the next day. Seven days a week, just to pay rent. I had no time for art. No time for a social life. Meanwhile, Angus was living off interest from a trust fund his grandfather had set up for him before he died. So he was able to stay at home and create and go out at night with friends and talk about art, while I served new American cuisine to annoying new families who reeked of old money and didn’t have a wrinkle or grey hair between them. Even their babies were content and beautiful. And I would think, there was no chance those children would have to work hard. Not really. Not in the way poor people have to struggle to make ends meet with no safety net in sight. Sure, they’d convince themselves of their hard work, but privilege is an allusive crutch, and their ignorance only enhances the pity I feel. The whole thing started to make me sick after a while. I was in Mecca, surrounded by pilgrims experiencing the profound at their leisure, while I served and overheard their revelations.
I really only saw Angus outside of our place when he stopped in the restaurant from time to time, claiming to have forgotten his keys, but looking for free food that anyone had sent back to the kitchen. The cooks called him a mooch, which he smiled at proudly, eating his food anyway. He didn’t care. And for a while, neither did I. Until I began imagining Angus’s face on every customer who sat in my section. Every shift. Staring back at me without a care in the world. Memories created in some whimsical gelatinous mass I couldn’t comprehend.
Sometime around Christmas, I had to walk all the way home at three in the morning because the trains were down. Snow was falling wet and hard, and I had my work flats on, no socks. I had rushed out of bed so fast that I hadn’t considered the weather before leaving for my shift. Or I was too tired to care. It was around four when I got back to Red Hook, but as I stepped up to the door, and I reached in my pockets, my stomach dropped. Angus had taken my keys earlier. He’d locked himself out again. I pounded on the door for an hour until my fist lost feeling, but nobody ever came to answer. My feet were bright red and throbbing and nobody cared that I was out there in the cold.
I found a 24 hour coffee shop and sat there thinking for hours. Thinking about what I was doing with my life. About where I wanted to be. About what happiness I wanted and what I deserved. And where I felt safest. And I knew the answer was in my own darkness. That had always been my home. The place that seemed to only linger in the back of my mind those days.
I returned to the warehouse around ten am, and Stacy answered the door. She was groggy and carefree as I pushed past her and marched straight to our bedroom where Angus was still asleep. I grabbed my bag from the closet and packed my things. And I left. He stayed asleep the entire time. Maybe he really was. Maybe he knew this wasn’t working and didn’t want to confront it. I didn’t care. He was already a memory for me, fading into the past.
I took a bus back to Rhode Island that afternoon and crashed with some friends who’d warned me against moving to Brooklyn with Angus. Their I told you so’s were an emotional beating I took with pleasure, if only to burn into my mind the lesson Dad tried so hard to instill when I was younger, Some are useful. Some weigh you down.
What mattered from that point forward was that I was creating. That was my obsession. That was my purpose. I needed the intense selfishness Angus showed me. I needed the quiet resolve Dad gave me. I needed the darkness naturally inside me to slip out and wrap me in shadow so that I could bleed art. I found a studio apartment and, for months, I holed up and built my first solo show. I was selfish. I was cold. I was determined.
I didn't know who invited him, but Angus was there at my opening. I suspected it was because I had joined socials to promote my work, and he secretly joined as well, kept watch of my ad clicks, kept track of what I was up to. He’d come up from Brooklyn, he said because he was proud and wanted to support me, but I knew it was because several galleries were there after I’d gotten a write-up in some prestigious blog. The place was packed. My work was selling. People were complimenting me, and by some secret proxy, they were complimenting my life.
Toward the end of the evening, Angus pulled me aside and in his confident whisper told me he loved me, that he missed me, that he took our relationship for granted. It felt sincere and canned at the same time, like he was borrowing the collective regret of generations of people without the benefit of originality or finesse. But the truth had become painfully obvious, he was boring and unremarkable. The words he opined were ripped from other people’s mouths and for the rest of the night I could only see him as one of his marionettes, reciting what he thought the world wanted to hear. Something literal. Papier-mâché wrapped in an uncomplicated metaphor. But he still had that magnetism. That awful shamelessness that drew me to him on some strange biological level. I couldn’t resist it. I took him back to my place. We spent the night together. In the morning, he convinced me to introduce him to the gallery people I’d met. He made me promise I would. And then he made up some excuse to head back to Brooklyn.
A few weeks later, Dad died and I found out I was pregnant all in the same day. I would’ve gotten an abortion and nobody would’ve known, but there was something about being at Dad’s funeral, looking at him, looking through photo albums of us afterward, him sat out on the porch reading, that filled me with a need to have the child. I told Angus my decision to keep the baby and he took it as well as any young twenty something would, shock at first, and then the first tinge of adult-level responsibility. He asked me to marry him, but he didn’t really mean it. I could tell by the pitch of his voice. It didn’t matter anyway. I didn’t want to get back together. And even though my art was selling and my career was picking up and I was gaining thousands of followers on socials, I needed help, so he needed to get a job and contribute. I told him he could send checks. He wanted to move back to Providence to be there for me and the baby, he said. But the truth was his trust fund had run dry and Brooklyn was too expensive for him now.
He moved into a tiny apartment in Fox Point, and I found a two bedroom nearby in Wayland Square. He’d ride his bike over most days to help me paint and put furniture together and he never asked to stay or introduce him to all the influential art world people I was meeting through my gallery agent or through my ad clicks. I gave him a key so he’d feel like a part of the family we were building, even though he’d always lose it. Apart from that, he was a different person. He got a job at Eastside Market behind the prepared foods counter and would bring me food at the end of his shift. It was always food I could eat, too. Food he read about in pregnancy books. And I always thanked him from a safe distance as my belly grew. He would still make me laugh, but it was a polite laughter now. And I knew he felt sad and lonely when I told him I was tired and wanted to go to sleep.
Danny was born in April. Two weeks later I had a major solo exhibition in New York that would change my life again. My socials had hit a million followers, and we expected a huge opening. So I needed Angus to come with me to take care of Danny as I set up the show and prepared. He smiled through the whole thing, through the interviews, through the late night dinners, but I could tell he was broken inside. Holding our baby, pacing around a hotel room alone, while I was out there living the dream of any artist.
When we got back to Providence, he was different. Distant. Wounded. He still smiled, brought me food, deposited money for Danny. But a part of him was gone. That hope we felt in art school had dried up in him. I could tell. I asked him about his art whenever he came by and he’d just shrug and trail off with some explanation of how he was working through some ideas and he should have something to show soon. But soon never came.
Not for the next thirteen years.
My career grew and I traveled all around the world. I wasn’t rich and famous, I was comfortable and known, which is more than any artist could hope for. When I wasn’t working on my art, my face was in my phone managing socials. Angus stayed home with Danny, still working at Eastside Market, now as a manager. He’d gotten fat around the belly. He was balding and greying. And he’d sold his art supplies years ago. As successful as I felt, I feared his creative muscles had atrophied and that slow death was somehow my responsibility.
In my absence, he and Danny grew closer, and every time I returned from a trip, I felt like an outsider. Their connection was interrupted by my arrival. Their inside jokes grew deeper. They looked at me less, or when they did, it was with some secret judgement. And I was left out in the cold, as if I’d lost the key to my relationships somewhere out there on the road.
I would make it up to Danny at his thirteenth birthday party, I told myself. I had bought a house for us right off Hope Street over the winter, so Danny could stay in the same school district, and we had a big backyard and a separate studio shed for me. Plenty of space for the two of us. I hired an event planner and had the whole yard filled with games and food carts for the day. Streamers and balloons. A DJ playing anything Danny and his friends wanted to hear.
Angus showed up an hour before guests were supposed to arrive. I found him in the backyard taking in the event I had put together. He was holding a bag of balloons in his hand. A birthday cake from the Market sat on the picnic table beside him.
“You’re early,” I said.
“I figured you might need help setting up, but…” he trailed off. “I can come back later.”
“No, stay. I feel like we haven’t talked in a while.” I set my LookingGlass on the table and a silence followed, until I filled it. “What have you been up to?” I asked. And he seemed thrown by the question.
“Working. You know, same old.”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen you.” And that seemed to cut him, even though that wasn’t my intention.
“How was Prague?” he asked more like an accusation than a question.
“Good. I sold everything.” And I knew that would hurt him, but I didn’t care.
“I’m happy for you,” he said. And something snapped in me. The sight of how pitiful he looked standing there with his baggie of balloons.
“No, you’re not.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re not happy for me. In fact, you’re trying to make me feel bad for being happy. But it’s not working. I built the life I want for me and for Danny and I’m not going to apologize for that.” I was convinced he was wrapped so tightly in his manipulation that he couldn’t even see it anymore. It had become his skin, and I imagined him as one of his marionettes again, only now he was pulling his own strings. Showing the world the version of himself he wanted us to see. Pitiful when necessary. Happy when it suited him. Hardworking when he needed to show off. But I saw the truth beneath. He was still that manipulating starving artist from years ago.
“You gave up, Angus. You gave up on your art and you’ve somehow convinced Danny that I’m responsible. I didn’t sell your tools. I didn’t pack away your materials. I didn’t make excuses.”
“You’re right. You put your head down and worked. And the world just worked out for you. Success. Fame. Your work. Your art. Full time,” he seethed, releasing an anger that had been building for years.
“I work hard. I sacrifice everything for my work.”
“You’ve sacrificed your family, Eileen. You’ve sacrificed your relationship with Danny.”
“You’ve poisoned my relationship with Danny.”
He looked around at the workers stealing glances at our argument, and at Danny watching from his second floor bedroom window through the curtains.
“I didn’t give up my art,” he said, “Danny is my art. And he’s a masterpiece.”
I shook my head, not just in anger, but because I had never seen our work together in that light before. Danny was our masterpiece, but I had hardly contributed.
“Danny wants to come live with me,” he said, finally.
“What?”
“He told me that’s all he wants for his birthday.” And he watched me melt as that sunk in. The look on his face was that same pity I must have shown him anytime I asked how he was doing or how his art was coming along. It wasn’t a considered expression. It was primal. The face of a provider testing their counterpart’s resolve. “I told him I would talk to you.”
I sat down at the picnic table and pulled the birthday cake box toward me. Through tears, I read the royal icing spelling out Happy Birthday Danny! and cringed at how cliche the moment felt.
“That’s really what he wants?”
“That’s what he wants. You’re leaving for London next week, right? I can move the rest of his stuff out when you’re gone.”
“Do you still have the key? You didn’t lose it, did you?”
He shook his head, pulled the key ring from his pocket and showed me. I wiped the tears from my eyes and looked at him, searching for sympathy, for understanding, for permission.
“Work is my first child.”
“Work is your only child, Eileen. Let’s just have a good party for Danny, okay?”
Danny left with Angus later that evening. He had already packed a couple bags, and they came and picked the rest of his stuff up when I was away.
The house was silent when I came home from London and I imagined the darkness I wrapped myself in over long hours in the studio. That darkness was everywhere now. In Danny’s empty room. In the kitchen I rarely used. In the television that went unwatched. Danny stopped calling and texting, and I had to rely on Angus for any news. Millions of followers on socials and Danny wasn’t one of them. He wasn't even on there. He hated it.
After a while, the news only came on birthdays and holidays. But that was okay, I told myself. My life was my creations. My work. My art. That’s all I needed. And in that emptiness, I had received permission to wrap myself in darkness.
Marionette is constructed of long strands of key rings, like strings, attached to a larger cluster of key rings forming the shape of a body. The piece suspends from two wooden dowels held together in a cross shape that slowly wobbles and jingles as visitors approach. A way of reminding ourselves that artistic expression demands sacrifice.
*
New work from an old master, they want. A memorial service for an art world that no longer exists. But after a lifetime of recreating memories, what new work could I possibly muster? My mind has become forgetful. Rewritten to justify a darkness I’ve lived in for so long. But the truth is, I’ve hurt many people in pursuit of my immortal work. My work that stands in some back yard in the suburbs of South County, grimaced at by neighbors in minivans driving by on their way to the mall. An eyesore. An afterthought.
Medusa
charred wood, wire, acetate
101 x 143 x 13 in. (256.54 x 363.22 x 33.02 cm)
Those ten years after Danny left, I didn’t produce any new work. I thought I’d be able to distract myself, but instead I sat inside the home I had bought for us to make memories in and I remembered what little fragments of our fleeting time together I could and I waited for the calls or texts to come every few months. When the air inside felt too dusty and stale with old food and sweat-stained sheets, I’d walk along Hope Street, collecting trash or bottles or knick knacks and I’d bring them back to the house to categorize for some future project I hadn’t thought of yet.
My gallery dropped me after they hadn’t heard from me in five years. The checks still came in for the pieces on loan, which was enough to survive, but it wasn’t enough for a new stove or to fix the back deck. So it went to ruin, paint-chipped and slick with green slime. I deactivated my ad clicks and buried my LookingGlass in the backyard. I was done with socials. I was alone, finally.
I stacked the things I accumulated on my walks in columns in every room of the house and they brought with them their own musk and vermin. I’d hear scurrying in the living room while I laid in bed trying to block out my memories of Danny and Angus and Dad and life. The darkness I had wrapped myself in was devouring me. I could hear them chewing downstairs. I was becoming a ghost. A relic to be discovered some day when the neighbors complained about the smell or Angus or Danny came looking for me for one reason or another.
It took a fire to light a new path.
A thunderstorm had been brewing all afternoon. I had planned on washing my hair, but decided to shave it all off instead and save the discarded strands for some future project. After I bagged up my mess, I stood by Danny’s bedroom window and looked out over the backyard as light rain became stronger and the skies screamed and shook the house. The backyard had gone fallow and the games still left out from Danny’s birthday years earlier were caked in moss and mold. The grass was overgrown and sprouting with saplings. And in the corner laid my studio, a place I had been too afraid to venture into. Windows filled with spiderwebs. I watched it for what seemed like an hour, replaying the events that willed it into existence, what it meant to have my own space, what I lost to get it. And without warning, a lightning strike burst through the roof. After a moment, the soft glow of fire took shape through the window.
My studio burned for nearly two hours before someone called 911 and the Fire Department came to put it out. The Police questioned me and looked around my place with the side-eyed concern I didn’t know I needed before that night. They threatened to condemn the property if I didn’t clean it out. They said more fires could catch and what would happen if I was asleep upstairs. What would happen, I thought. To be consumed by my darkness and taken by ship or light to the land of obscurity where I’d be met by tilted glances of vague recognition. You were the famous sculptor who burned up in a fire of her own materials, they’d say. And I would have to nod and accept that truth, while the living flipped through the local newspaper and paused on my obituary. It’d say something about a once-internationally recognized hometown artist who perished in flames. See page nine for details. And they’d make some forced sigh to whoever was standing beside them and say how sad. What a tragedy.
I had no desire for that to be my end.
I paid a company to clean out the house, throw away all my hoarded treasures, and fix whatever needed to be fixed. It took them four days to get all the junk out in a neighborhood-observed display I hadn’t intended. But I was thawing. I’d have to get comfortable in the daylight again. I smiled at my neighbors who were relieved to see the For Sale sign go in. Relieved further when the Sold sign went up.
The charred remains of my studio stayed in the back yard for me. I made a point to clean that up myself. I took my time, loaded several pieces into the station wagon, and shuttled them to the new place. That destruction, the bones of my studio, the only memory worth taking with me.
The South County house, the one I still live in today, was a mess when I bought it. It was a foreclosure property with rotting floorboards, a few holes in the roof, an off-kilter outbuilding. But I needed a project. I couldn’t rebuild myself without getting my hands dirty rebuilding my environment. It’s just the way I understood the world.
I hired contractors for the plumbing and electrical, but I did everything else myself. I patched the roof. I tore out the rotten floorboards, replaced them, and refinished the whole thing. I reinforced the outbuilding with 4x4 lumber but left the tilt intentionally to remind myself that this new studio of mine could fall down at any moment. That it was fragile and needed to be respected and treated gently, like any relationship. I fixed the leak in the skylight and painted the walls white. And I began visiting local dumpsters and abandoned construction sites to gather raw materials. Only this time, I collected with intention. I organized methodically, and only brought into the studio what I intended to work with. Where I once waited for my findings to remind me of memories, I now began with the memory and found the materials to express it.
I was evolving as an artist.
I constructed six pieces in the span of two months and found a small gallery in New York to show them in. The art world found out and an article was published claiming the show as my resurrection, my triumph, my evolution. And they were right. My art was more refined, less chaotic. I was a different person. I imagined that news traveling all the way to Fox Point where Danny still lived with Angus, where it would give them both pause. Maybe they’d share a look over the breakfast table and without words decide to reach out to me. To give me another chance.
I didn’t sell any of those pieces. The initial reviews were positive, but collectors’ appetites were waning from the modern found art movement I was known for. They had begun collecting the work of Ta$kman, or Young Bull, or others like them. AI sculptors with a strange flare for creating work that spoke directly and deeply with specific buyers, as if the work were custom tailored to their moods. Evoking memories so personal that viewing a sculpture from any angle would reveal some freshly unearthed scar within the viewer.
Take Me Home was the first AI sculpture piece to sell for more than a million dollars. Some tech billionaire built his house around the piece, treating it like an anchor to his entire existence. As if every decision he made, everything he stood for, was because of that sculpture. More of those astronomical sales followed. Celebrities, influencers, CEOs, world leaders, all posted images of their newly acquired AI art all over LookingGlass for the whole world to see and appreciate from afar. These computer-generated artists had created something so universally personal that they convinced the world they were a mirror to our experiences. But I knew the truth. Each brushstroke they made was based on a likability factor, each weld based on some cognitive understanding requirement. They were reshaping how we thought about ourselves, how we viewed each other, how we appreciated art as a reflection of our communal cultural experience.
I argued against the rise of AI art to whoever would listen, but the number of ears willing to hear my rants dwindled until the only one left was a mirror hung in my studio. I still produced my work. I still showed it. But sales were rare.
Danny came to visit me when he was twenty eight. He called ahead. I took a shower and stocked the fridge. He looked good, but different. Like a version of himself that I remembered but not fully. His hair was shorter, his face thinned out. He was taller than me now and lean and his voice was deeper and rough-tinged with the realization that life was a bitter grind and happiness was something we had to actively mine.
His visit wasn’t to see me. He made that clear. He planned to ask his girlfriend of a few years to marry him and he wanted to use the ring my Mom had worn throughout her marriage. I made some joke about how I never had any use for it, but he didn’t laugh. My lack of romanticism was probably something Angus discussed with him on many occasions, engraining in him my cold, heartlessness. Instead of admitting the more nuanced truth, that I was most comfortable in my darkness. Alone.
I dug out the ring from an old jewelry box in the closet and handed it to him.
“You’ll have to get a box for it. I don’t have the original,” I said.
“That’s fine.” He looked around the property from the front porch, taking in all my progress or taking in a life unfamiliar to him. I was rusty at reading his expression.
“Do you want to see the studio?” I asked him.
“No.” He let a long pause follow to really let the finality of his word sink in. “You need a path.”
“What?”
“You need some sort of path, from the house to the shed. Otherwise you’re gonna track mud inside either place when it rains or snows or whatever.”
“A path…?”
“I lay brick walkways in the summer when I’m not teaching,” he explained. “I’ve been doing it to make some extra money for a downpayment on a house. For me and Liz.”
“I see.” And I thought about what to say next. “Would you consider…”
He nodded before I had to finish asking and so I trailed off, and the conversation took on the silence of the birds singing in the trees and the distant traffic.
“I can get you a deal on some slate pavers,” he said. “There were some left over from the last job I did. Some of them are broken, but I can lay them so they don’t look too bad.”
“That would be nice. Thank you.”
He showed up around eight am the following Saturday. His truck bed weighted down with a sheet of broken slate pavers, a stamper to level the ground, and some hand tools. I offered to help but he told me it’d be faster if he did it by himself, so I backed off and just watched him from my studio window. He was out there all morning, working in silence, no headphones in his ears, no LookingGlass to distract him. He was anti-tech, like his father. And like my parents before me. A lot of kids his age were rejecting technology. They’d been raised by it, but it left them with fractured emotions, deformed empathy, blunted social skills. They felt less human to themselves and with others. Most people saw it as progress. Some rebelled. Some saw no way out and took their lives.
I was proud of the way Danny turned out. Even without me in the picture, I could see traces of my philosophies, my mannerisms, my history, embedded in him. I was his raw materials, constructed into something to be revered. Sturdy and inspiring.
I offered him lunch when he was finished, but he turned me down. He had plans with Liz, he said. I brushed it off with a smile and found myself walking beside him on the path, testing the pavers for evenness, both of us in silence. He glanced in through the window of my studio and saw the strict order everything was placed in, a marked difference from his childhood. How my trash memories, as he used to call them, were organized in labeled bins as if this place was a mind that had found order and peace. His eyes landed on the blue painted and charred wood of my old studio piled under the window and he stared at it for a long time.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
After a moment, he shrugged, “just surprised you held onto that stuff. Out of everything you could’ve held onto. That.”
“It’s what earned me the money to pay for our life.”
“Your life was anywhere we weren’t.”
I sighed because he was right or because I wanted him to feel like he was right. Like his blows were landing. “Well, it doesn’t matter anymore. I’ve been replaced by AI.”
He studied my face for a long time, then said “Cold, unrelenting, art-creator. Are you really that different?”
He left shortly after and I was alone again. He promised to send an invite to the wedding if Liz said yes. I would’ve hoped to meet her before then, but I didn’t say that. It didn’t feel like my place to ask for too much. Not now. Not yet. Any relationship worth rebuilding takes time and patience and care.
I stayed in the studio for three days arranging and rearranging the charred wood into different shapes, hoping it would show me a reflection of my former self. The self that Danny kept his distance from. The self that pushed the outside world away. If I could see her face, I could take her power away. I would know her shape and I wouldn’t find comfort in darkness anymore.
I built a show around that piece and exhibited it for one weekend in Providence. I had hoped Danny would come by to see it, but he never showed. The art world hated it. They called it derivative. Apparently, an AI sculptor was creating similar work that was more emotionally impactful. The thought made me sick and aimless.
Medusa is a large-scale sculptural interpretation of the artist’s face, held together with wire and presented on a clear acetate stand. It is a self-portrait laid bare through charred remains of a former life. To elicit hope that, through darkness, an ambiguous expression serves to reunify us with those we hold most important. The children we didn’t know we wanted, we needed, until they were all grown up and we were too old to ask for forgiveness.
*
I’ve been wandering the studio lately. Pulling out bin after bin. Bottle tops and stove dials, alarm clocks and driftwood, ceramic shards and upholstery fabric. Searching for a way to express this feeling of obsolescence that’s creeped into my life over these past few years. I’m careful not to make a mess. I pull a bin, I look through it, taking what strikes me, and I put the bin back. And I listen for cars coming up the driveway. If Danny were to visit unannounced, I’d want him not to worry about the state I leave my studio in. I’d want him to know that all the hoarding and manic behavior is in the past. That I was stable now. I walk the short distance from the house to my studio on the slate path he built for me every morning, and I imagine him beside me each time, filling me in on his day. His life. The child he and Liz have now. And every night, on my walk back to the house, he asks about my day. If I’d made any progress. If I’d remembered anything worthy of becoming ‘trash memories.’
At night, I flip through the art world magazines, the few that still print, and I read about the latest trends in AI photography, AI sculpture, AI theatre. I am quietly outraged. But I can’t stop the future. My interpretation of it, what I see that nobody else seems to see or care about — the death of human creativity — doesn’t matter. All I know are the things I’ve collected over the years. The raw materials. The emotions. The lives touched. And the only way I know how to express that life is through those things I’ve gathered along the way.
All I can do now is hope that in time, all eyes adjust to darkness.
The Sculpture Garden
Previous works (see catalogue for descriptions), the artist herself
measurements available in catalogue
It’s late by the time I haul the last of the bins onto the lawn. Light from the studio pours weakly over the grass, but it’s enough to show me what I’m doing. I could construct this in darkness but that wouldn’t seem accurate. I’m in control. I’m lucid. I’m aware.
I spread the contents of each bin in a ring around my sculptures, forming a circle about twenty feet wide. It’s big enough to feel important but tight enough that I feel safe inside. I imagine the sensation of myself entering a womb, the safety of the mother. I stand in the center. Every object surrounding me, every object I ever used as raw material for my art, has been found. This was essential for me. A binding contract. The universe puts things in our path and it’s up to us to pick them up and figure out what they mean. Every object except for one.
The object at my feet.
A gallon jug of water. I did an internet search and found that this is the amount I need to survive for the next few days out here. Until, I hope, someone sees me from the road and gets curious enough to stop and ask what I’m doing sitting on my lawn surrounded by my art. I will tell them that I’m an artist from a long time ago, and that this is my new piece. And in order for my sculpture garden to flourish, it needs to be fed, and I need to be fed with whatever morsels passersby or intentional visitors might bring with them. From this moment until my last breath, I’ll rely solely on my audience to keep my art alive.
The Sculpture Garden chronicles the artist through several pieces constructed over her career. Each piece is built from a memory that, when staged together, reveal a life filled with joys and triumphs, failures and regrets, redemption and resurrection. With the artist discovered in the center by visitors, food and water may be donated to sustain her, so as to illustrate the sacrifices she as a human has made and continues to make in bringing her art into the world. Some were useful. Some weighed her down.
