Painted Poetry — galerie WIP
Painted Poetry WIP Gallery
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A very interesting collaboration, but on the darkest side of my work’s spectrum.
It was a cut-out puppet piece created for the WIP Gallery in Montreal. This was for a show featuring collaborations between writers and painters. Through the gallery, i was introduced to Carly Rosalie Vandergrift, who offered the short story copied below.
My process was simple. Most of the words on this page were written across the cardboard cut out forms that created two larger-than-life characters. These big ‘puppets’ were installed on the gallery walls in whatever intriguing configuration felt best at the time.
This was a very small but remarkable adventure in shared creativity. It reflects a powerful social commentary.
SICK FUCk
I. SICK
When she wakes, the room is doubly dark, curtains drawn against the blackness outside. It smells vaguely of piss, or something else. The sourness of a body—probably hers—in the midst of its slow decay.
Turning on a dim lamp, she places herself in front of the porcelain sink and removes her clothes. The first man of the night will be here soon. She studies her naked body in the mirror: her shrinking breasts, the protruding stripes of her ribcage. Oddly, the men don’t seem to notice. Her body is just that to them—a body. Used, then forgotten. She never sees the same man twice, which suits their purposes and hers.
She shifts and twists in front of the mirror, checking her skin. Sores can appear without warning. A scratch from a man with a kink for rough sex might suddenly blossom into a pocket of redness, and then. Though she keeps the room dark, she can’t risk letting one of the men see—our touch—a sore. Whenever she finds one, she calls one of the other girls to take her place.
The other girls are sick, too. They have a name for themselves in their own language: the Dying Fighters. When they feel weak, they repeat a secret mantra. Now, she whispers it into the otherwise silent room: “Transmission is our mission.”
Not long ago, she used to work in a factory in a village by to the sea. On Sunday—her only day off—she would go to the beach with her husband. One night he didn’t come home, and the authorities said he was killed in a car accident. When she asked about his body, they could not produce it. She had wanted a child. Now she is grateful that their child never came. Learning she had the virus was a relief. She had heard about the Dying Fighters, and decided to give herself to the cause. She travelled north, to the border.
It is hard to check the skin on her shoulders and back. She’s always worried she will miss something. For now, she sees nothing and steps back into her dress, sitting down on the bed to wait. The men who visit her from the north were the ones who wanted the Wall. Some even helped build it, brick by brick. Now, they cross it to fuck the poor women of her country, which is something they have been doing for as long as anyone can remember. They pay, yes. But it is not much—little more than a dollar of their own currency.
She straightens, taking a deep breath. It is only a matter of time before the men figure out they are sick. The northern government’s new disdain for science has worked in her country’s favour. Up there, no one is talking about the virus, where it is still a southern disease. A disease for the poor people of her country.
For now, the virus is in the men, but it is sleeping. One day, it will wake, and the symptoms will come. The light-skinned men who have fucked her in this small, dark room will feel what she did. They will vomit bile and blood, and shake with fever. At first, they will think they are sick with something else—something that will go away. But it won’t go away. She will be long dead by the time they realize.
There is the knock. As she stands and moves towards the door, she finds the words again in her mouth, “Transmission is my mission.”
II. FUCK
He hears the bed creak on the other side of the door. Then, footsteps. He hesitates. He could turn, and leave. He could pretend he never set foot in this shit-hole whorehouse, in this shit-hole country. But then the door opens, and a woman is standing in the frame. She is emaciated, almost skeletal. Reminds him of his momma towards the end, the way her clothes hung off her bones. The voice in his head tells him he is sick. And yet, he finds himself stepping inside.
She closes the door behind him. The sick part is that in spite of how feeble she appears, he still finds her attractive, still wants what he came for. She is appealing in the same way that all women from her country are appealing. That is, she is dark-haired and dark-skinned. Different from the women of his own country.
She motions for him to sit down on the bed. He sits, and unties his shoes. Buck-a-fuck. That’s what the boys in his border town call it. As in, “Let’s go down south for a buck-a-fuck this weekend.” When he looks up, she is standing in front of him, naked.
He takes off his shirt, and undoes his belt buckle with a sense of urgency. His momma did not approve of the whole buck-a-fuck thing. She said northerner or southerner, a human being is a human being is a human being. That was before she relapsed. Now that his momma is gone, he feels entitled to something. He feels entitled to this woman.
She moves to straddle him, but he grips her forearm to stop her. If he’s going to do this, he needs to be in control. Isn’t that why he’s here—to prove he’s in control? He moves her onto the bed, and turns her around so that she is bent on her knees, and he doesn’t have to meet her eyes. There is something in them he doesn’t want to see.
He pushes himself inside her, and thrusts forward and back. When he was growing up, he hadn’t thought much about this woman’s people at all. He hadn’t thought about the ways they were the same as him, or the ways they were different. People he knew talked about building a wall to keep them out. His momma said that as far as ideas went, it was a stupid one.
He stares at the woman’s back. His momma was wrong about a lot of things. She was wrong about people from the south. When they crossed the border into his country, they carried with them the drugs that ended up in his momma’s syringes. After the last relapse, she got sick, then sicker. Addicts were a dime a dozen in his border town, and his momma didn’t have insurance. When she died, he couldn’t afford a funeral.
The more he thought about the Wall, the less choice he felt he had in the matter. Now that they’d built it, the border traffic flowed in one direction—the good direction. His gaze returns to the woman’s back, his hurried thrusting. It is dark in her room, but not dark enough that he doesn’t notice the discoloured patch of skin in the middle of the woman’s back. A sores. He is on the cusp of an orgasm, but his mind still makes the connection. His mother’s skin looked like that just before she died.
