Wednesday, November 8, 2017 // The Statement
4B
Wednesday, November 8, 2017 // The Statement 
 
5B

Autumn’s Dying Women

Short Fiction

b y Z o y a G u r m, LSA Junior

T

he only member of my fam-
ily who ever believed in souls 
was my aunt. “Bless your 
soul,” she wrote every year in 

her sloppy and smudged cursive, directly 
under the pre-printed birthday message. 
She died late-summer, a lonely and child-
less death, colored like deep pink wild-
flowers and her un-beating heart. I don’t 
know how she died, I never asked. I just 
knew I had to start believing in souls.

***
This past autumn was desolate. My 

mother was depressed after her sister’s 
untimely death. I hadn’t reconnected 
with any friends I had fallen out of con-
tact with in the summertime; their lives 
progressed without wondering about me. 
I spent most of my day sleeping and rare-
ly attended class. I lived in my own two-
room apartment and, with the supplies 
my aunt had willed to me, used one room 
as a studio. I slept in the kitchen, read 
in the empty bathtub and left the heater 
buzzing as days grew colder and colder.

I can’t pretend like I’ve ever known 

how to paint. I seldom used the studio 
for anything but sitting and staring, at 
blank canvas or out the small window. 
When I felt most alone I’d bring a boy 
to my apartment and we’d use the stu-
dio couch because my bed in the kitchen 
smelled like oil and cheese. Any time I’d 
try to paint I’d abandon the canvas for 
other pursuits. I’d stare at the unfinished 
work until it drove me mad and I hated 
each stitch of it, and then I’d dispose of it, 
burn it or throw it into the dumpster and 
watch it sink between bags of trash, soak-
ing up the most disdainful smells.

I called home less and less because I 

couldn’t handle the long silences from my 
mother. She must’ve thought I was get-
ting busier, if she thought of me at all. I 
wasn’t sad. I was feeling something new.

Now, the days are shorter like my 

prayers are being answered — I sleep 
more and time has the illusion of pass-
ing quickly. I’ve stopped bringing people 
home, I’ve stopped staring at unpainted 
canvases. I feel such hostility from the 
studio door that I won’t even enter.

My mother has filled the spaces my 

aunt and I held in her calculated life. I 
imagine the conversations she must have 
about me at her office parties or with our 
distant relatives. I imagine her thin smile 
and uniform responses, her insistence 
that everything is and has always been 

OK.

I failed half of my exams and have been 

wondering how ashamed she would be 
if I dropped out altogether; I could find 
someone to marry and live off love, or I 
could stay in this adamant apartment for 
the rest of time.

There are worse things I could do to 

her. I could die.

***
My aunt’s funeral was daunting. It was 

held in a wide wooden room, only four 
of 50 seats filled: one for me, one for my 
mother, one for her work colleague — 
an uncomfortable woman who sweated 
right through her tight black dress, who 
despite her grieving gestures and pious 
tongue was the first to rush out the door 
— and one for a man whom I had never 
seen before — who shed a single tear and 
spoke to the casket with a heavy foreign 
tongue, a one-sided conversation that 
whispered through the wooden room 
like poetry. My mother had thrown the 
funeral and invited plenty — none had 
shown except the woman. The man had 
not been invited. My mother said a few 
words. I said a few to the room and cried 
only because the empty chairs sang my 
speech back to me. The man shook my 
hand at the service, after the woman had 
left and while my mother spoke to those 
who worked at the home. We said noth-
ing, but we meant a lot. I don’t think he 
was fluent in English, but he understood 
enough.

***
A week ago, I received a complaint 

that the stenches of my apartment have 
begun to seep through the walls and into 
my neighbor’s rooms. The smell must’ve 
come from my kitchen, where unwashed 
dishes rattled against one another in the 
sink. Old milk and crumbs from weeks of 
breakfasts, lunches and dinners formed 
a thin film at the bottom. When I heard 
that the landlord was coming to inspect 
the source of the apparently repugnant 
smell, I scrubbed the kitchen counters 
and threw out any expired food, spraying 
old perfumes my mother had given me 
three Christmases ago to stifle the scent. 
I’m not sure whether it worked.

My landlord is a thin, lanky man who 

wears navy leather shoes. His apart-
ments are not high-end by any means, but 
he makes a steady living ripping off stu-
dents desperate for a place to stay. He’s 
not a bad man. Sometimes I see him as he 

steps outside to smoke, and we have brief 
conversations. He barely remembers my 
name but often hands out advice, wheez-
ing between drags.

“You paint?” he asks me, his long neck 

craned through the doorframe of my stu-
dio. I haven’t been in there for weeks. 
The smells of oil paint and sloppy sex 
have been brewing for months and now 
all hit at once.

“When I have the time.”
“Yeah, I’m sure this is the culprit.” 

He inhales deeply to prove a point. The 
wooden floorboards creak underneath 
his pacing.

The smell makes me nauseated and 

nostalgic and I want him to leave. He 
begins poking through the unpacked 
boxes I have stacked against the wall. 
Some are full of dirty palettes and brush-
es. Others hold unfinished canvases or 
sketches I find too raw and alive to attri-
bute to my aunt. I can’t bring myself to 
look at them. He leafs through them with 
his skinny fingers, decorated with silver 
rings of varying thickness.

“You did these?”
I nod.
He pulls one from the stack to exam-

ine. I’m uncomfortable that he’s looking 
through my aunt’s work — his prying eyes 
are capturing the single lifeline I still 
have to her. I start to say something, but 
the painting he chooses is one I’ve never 
seen before; it’s a deep and vibrant pink, 
abstract and unfinished. The colors are 
concentrated to the sides of the paint-
ing, but they lean toward the center, as 
if the intention was to move in. The first 
moment I see its riveting texture, under 
the impure light of the small studio 
window, with the uncovered stitches of 
off-white canvas shining through, sten-
ciled with light pencil marks so crisp 
and intentional that I can picture the 
crease between my aunt’s thick, arched 
eyebrows as she made them, my eyes fill 
with tears. I have never seen my aunt as 
an artist — I’d never seen her studio or 
her work — but this painting evokes such 
a recognition of her, the little bits that 
I saw. I feel as though I’m looking at a 
portrait of the artist herself. In a quiet, 
persistent voice, I ask my landlord if he is 
ready to leave.

On his way out, he suggests wash-

ing the supplies or opening some more 
windows, but can’t reprimand me — I’m 
allowed to have my makeshift studio, and 

the smell, albeit greasy, isn’t particularly 
discerning.

***
My aunt was my mother’s only sibling. 

She rarely visited us though she lived 
nearby. My mother always told me she 
was a busy woman, between her jobs and 
hobbies and brief but invested relation-
ships.

Though I seldom saw or heard from 

her directly, she was constantly a pres-
ence in our home. On any given day, my 
mother would spend hours on our land-
line, deep in discussion with my aunt as 
if some new event of great importance 
had occurred every 24 hours. I’d return 
home from school and shut the door qui-
etly to not disturb their long, endless 
talks. My mother would press our chunky 
home phone to her ear as she cooked or 
cleaned or sat on the bottom step of our 
carpeted staircase. In our echoing house 
I would hear her laugh and curse; her 
tense shoulders would relax each time 
our home phone began to ring. I imag-
ined my aunt on the other side of the 
line. I used the short, dashing details of 
her life my mother would recount to me; 
I understood that my aunt was an eccen-
tric woman, picking up painting and 
sketching after a messy divorce with a 
man she had married far too quickly. She 
was attractive in her youth and carried 
her beauty as she aged. My mother had 
been jealous of her as a child.

I could picture my aunt’s manicured 

fingers clutching her steering wheel, a 
cigarette in one hand and her cellphone 
sandwiched between her shoulder and 
chin. Maybe she called from her apart-
ment in the center of town, lounging 
on her plush sofa, flipping through a 
magazine. Or perhaps she called from 
different places every time, like the bath-
rooms of brief lovers or hotel lobbies as 
she traveled to art shows in small cities, 
attracting crowds of connoisseurs and 
eagle-eyed critics alike. But these were 
all fantasies. I didn’t know if she was a 
smoker or if her work was ever displayed 
in any shows, I just liked the thought of 
it.

***
I enter the studio. It’s evening. The 

end of sunset pours through the win-
dow. When I went to class this morning, 
for one of the first times this week, I let 
my apartment air out, following my land-
lord’s advice. It still smells foul, so foul.

Last night I laid my aunt’s unfinished 

pink painting on my studio couch before I 
went to bed. It’s still here. The colors are 
warmer under the evening sunlight, the 
white space is whiter than I remember it 
being yesterday. It’s a compelling paint-
ing. It has the color and texture of my 
mother’s voice as she spoke to my aunt on 
the phone. It has a wholesomeness that 
has been on my mind the whole day — it 
has a life so colorful that it can talk for 
hours and hours. It has stirred up a faint 
regret. I never heard those stories, even 
when I had the chance.

I pace the room. Autumn has ended. 

Winter is sharp outside my window. 
I miss my aunt and I miss my mother. 
They left my life together, I can feel them 
somewhere in this color.

My aunt’s oil paints 

are stacked in white 
cardboard 
boxes, 

torn and stamped and 
labeled by the U.S. 
Postal Service. The 
orange ones are on 
top. I reach for them. 
I don’t know how to 
compare brushes, so 
I just take a medium-
sized one. There is 
masking tape around 
the handle. The bris-
tles are glued together 
with purplish paint.

My floor is surpris-

ingly cold when I press 
my thighs against it. I 
lay the canvas flat in 
front of me. I scruti-
nize the pencil marks, 
where they have been 
erased, where they are 
the darkest. I squeeze 
a pea-sized drop of 
paint onto a heavily 
used palette.

The painting before 

me is unfinished, but 
I know what it is. It 
has the character my 
mother forbade from our home — a pro-
vocative swing of the hips, a womanly 
tenderness. I begin to paint, adding more 
and more to my palette as I go, oranges 
then pinks then reds and blacks. I start 
cautious, within a dead woman’s lines. I 
want to do her justice. I am painting her 
soul.

***
I wasn’t sure what to say to my moth-

er when I saw her the morning after the 
funeral. Her eyes were bloodshot and her 
cold, veiny hands clenched around our 
home phone. There was no one to call. 
She looked up at me. Her eyes dripped 
streams, reddish against her discolored 
skin.

Growing up, my mother never let me 

see her cry. Too many emotions were 
distracting, she taught me. I have vivid 
memories of her turning away, sheltering 
her aging face. She’d lock her bedroom 

door with a sharp, metallic click, and I’d 
stand in front of it, in anguish. She was on 
one side and I was on another. That’s how 
it would always be. It was like that when 
she separated from my father. It was like 
that when my father’s truck flipped over, 
his abusive neck cracked against the 
asphalt. It was like that at the end of any 
sad movie.

I dropped my eyes to the floor and 

retreated from the room, not one word 
of comfort or empathy from my chapped 
lips.

We didn’t speak that day or that week. 

She fixed me meals but rarely ate any-
thing herself. Our home was dead silent, 
she would sob at the calls of telemarket-
ers.

***

It was early autumn when my mother 

began to ship boxes to me. The will had 
been read a month before, but my mother 
was reluctant. My aunt’s paintings were 
masks for promiscuity, for unconven-
tionality. I was promised my aunt had 
not always been that way — it was a turn 
in her life, one that I had not seen either 
side of. Could my mother damn me to 
that? After a cold month of debating, the 
boxes came in, one by one. My mother 
grew thinner.

The boxes lined the walls of my apart-

ment, the empty room that would become 
my studio. Supplies littered the kitchen 
counter, unfinished artwork remained 
packed away. Caterpillars ate through 
stitches of blank canvas like leaves. I 
didn’t mind.

The end of September, I would call my 

mother daily, just to be silent with her. I 
could picture her curling up in her bed-

room, her weak fingers holding a phone 
with no one to call or love. I would some-
times talk to her, about my life as it was, 
but would receive no response.

It was October when I realized how 

alone I was. My routines withered. My 
studio became a haven for sorrow and 
detachment, for boys from classes I didn’t 
attend and ugly portraits of women I used 
to admire. I was promiscuous, unconven-
tional.

In November, my mother’s phone calls 

became unbearable. I shouted at her to 
respond to me but only received silence.

Winter began to roll in. I decided I 

couldn’t enter my studio anymore. Spite 
piled against the door. Caterpillars died in 
their brown cocoons. My mother discon-
nected our home phone.

I’ve spent most of the evenings this week 

in the studio.

I don’t always paint. Sometimes I look 

deep into the colors my aunt painted and 
think of her soft skin. Her heart-shaped 
face grew a pink-brown when she spoke. 
She wore lipstick the color of her natural 
lips. I look into the colors I’ve painted too — 
they’re darker, like the cold foreign eyes of 
the man at the funeral, like the heavy gray 
skin my mother wore those last days of sum-
mer.

When I do paint, time passes with ease. 

It never stutters. It is articulate. I feel more 
alive behind those studio doors than I have 
with any of those boys on my couch. My soul 
loosens in my body. The cold of the floor still 
stings my legs when I first sit, but by the 
time I’m done, there is warmth in the walls, 
warmth through the light fixtures, warmth 
in my fingertips. My arms and legs carry 
their own colors. I take long showers and 

watch the paints fuse together as they wash 
down the drain.

Souls have wants, souls have needs. I 

think about my aunt as an entity, some-
where wide and unreachable. I figure that’s 
how she’d want to be remembered. Deep 
pink, orange, tender. My aunt’s soul was 
never clear to me when she was alive but 
she’s here, in the studio lights and the dried 
paint that cakes the hair on my arms. I try to 
picture how my soul looks, how it accumu-
lates in colors and textures.

My mother wouldn’t believe in things 

like these. In grief, she is certain not to 
pour herself into spirituality. She’s afraid 
of her own emotions, her vulnerability. 
I’m sure she knows the empty relation-
ships my aunt left won’t be filled with 
new people, sharing wine at dinner par-

ties or on dirty couches. 
She needs something 
else that will fill the 
gap my aunt has left in 
her — a storyteller, a 
friend, the subject of 
jealousy and discipline.

My mind is consumed 

with the painting and 
contemplations. I think 
about the oil paint as it 
glistens under different 
lights in my apartment. 
I 
don’t 
know 
much 

about the anatomy of 
souls, but in those col-
ors, as they stack on 
one another, inside her 
pencil lines or deliber-
ately outside, I know 
mine and my aunt’s are 
similar.

***
I’ve been in the car 

for five hours. I bor-
rowed a GPS from my 
landlord 
because 
my 

car doesn’t have one 
built in. He charged me 
a couple of dollars for 
it, but I didn’t mind. My 
car is mostly empty. My 

backpack is in my trunk. I didn’t pack any 
clothes. The finished painting is in the pas-
senger seat.

When I finished it, when it sat flat on 

the floor of a concrete studio, when the 
boxes of bug carcasses rattled with in the 
light breeze, my apartment had never felt 
so silent and empty. I sat with the soul of a 
woman echoing off my floor. Her flesh and 
blood were buried that summer but what 
was left was there, flat and rectangular. I 
knew I had to share my resurrection with 
the one woman who needed to feel my aunt 
again.

I drive down the street I was raised on. 

I turn into the driveway of my childhood 
home, I come to a gentle stop. I watch my 
mother stir behind the curtains of the liv-
ing room. She’s not expecting me. I turn off 
the car. With the finished painting in one 
arm and an autumn of words on my lips, I 
approach the front door.

ILLUSTRATION BY EMILY HARDIE

