1.
In the end, what did it come down to but blood forced through a screen, one section of life at a time. Not a question, simply a step-by-step process to completion. $800 for a shred of family history that once hung on ______ and ______’s shared bedroom wall. It’s important, their ______ would say. Your ______ made that. They thought it was ugly, but it was an ugliness that refuses to relinquish its place in the head. Was that a boat? Despite living next to a lake, they’d never seen one like that, didn’t recognise where the snow-dusted dock was supposed to be. The men in it had no faces and the colours were dirty in the way the spring snow turned to grey slush in ______, unable or perhaps unwilling to maintain the effort of its winter whiteness.
2.
No one knew what season it was in the print. Coloured in mould green, slate blue, and burnt orange/yellow, it appeared beyond time, irrevocably tainted by some kind of dirt or dust. They tried not to look at where it loomed over the beds like a failed angel, but it nevertheless squatted in their dreams with the unflinching glare of a sodium light. Sometime during the endless anonymity of their youth, it was gone. Returning home after school one afternoon they found ______ kneeling on a bed, scrubbing the black edge of its absence with the cheerful guilt of denial. It had become a bargaining chip in a petty familial argument, the transactional communications of adult relationships. The abducted serigraph made way for juvenile posters which occupied no obtrusive space in the heads of ______ and ______.
3.
Decades later, the ______ broke down the door of the cheap apartment. No one had heard from ______ for days, weeks, but no one had wanted to hear from ______ anymore. On the phone, ______ told ______ and ______ that the body had been found there. No one present was particularly surprised, though it was still horrible to behold; not so much the body but the haphazard remains of a life once ordered by the letter and the law. Mould green, slate blue, burnt orange/yellow reflected in labels of empty bottles; a faceless face no longer able to recognise the serigraph on the unclean wall. They had never been quite sure where or to whom it went, not caring very much as children, as children do. In adulthood, they felt they were establishing the provenance of a poison-embittered family no one wanted to claim.
4.
Colours are forced through a silk mesh stretched over a frame, section by section, with areas to be untouched blocked by a stencil until the image is finished. ______ and ______ started to take apart the print in their dreams. Slate blue: men’s headless bodies, water, sky. Mould green: the hills. Burnt orange/yellow: faces, sails, reflections. On the cusp of daylight hours, they took apart ______’s life. Marriage. Children. Career. Death. Divorce. Unravelling. The fall of a failed angel, irrevocably tainted. The serigraph, now free of its history, appeared on a local gallery’s website. ______, early serigraph print, 1940s. $800, excellent condition. The image of ______ erasing its last traces in the long-shadowed afternoon came back, as bright as the winter snow.
Image (which I've altered): At the Docks by Helmut Summ. Not my image but fuck it, it used to hang in my (and my sister's) bedroom. I'll take it down if they come after me.