(Poem: Suzanne Lorge. Photo: Mayank Dhanawade)
I.
She had cancelled her cable subscription six years earlier.
For three nights in a row,
she had watched the same episode of the same true crime story,
a suspenseful tale about a woman
who had spontaneously combusted while asleep on the couch.
Each time she had thought,
“Perhaps now they know what happened.”
They didn’t.
Without cable, TV reception was spotty.
Finally, she put the TV out on the curb,
removed the shelf on which it had rested,
spackled the holes left behind,
and painted the wall a pale ecru.
She stared at the space for a long time.
“A painting would look nice there,” she decided.
II.
Inspired, she made her first trip to an art gallery,
a local place that featured disquieting, oversized paintings of feral animals.
She would have stopped at that point,
but a wordless imperative urged her to persist.
And so she did.
III.
One day she stumbled upon an austere one-room gallery
in an industrial part of town that she had no reason to visit.
There she saw colors and lines all in a tangle,
pieces of metal coaxed into unnatural positions,
spirits loosed from hunks of obstinate wood.
Unfamiliar thoughts crowded out her mundane concerns.
She bought a painting there,
at a price roughly equivalent to six years’ worth of cable television bills.
As she handed over the check, her fingers began to tingle.
IV.
That night she lay looking at the painting,
imagining its many-colored trajectories skyrocketing into the beyond.
The tingling was growing intense,
more insistent even than the drone of talk radio in the other room.
She lay there,
hearing first some jangly, top-of-the-hour music,
then some talking,
then a weird, vibrating screech, as from an animal caught in a trap.
“Artists must suffer,” she heard a man say above the din, to someone.
“Oh, not that old saw…” A woman replied.
The weird, vibrating screech stopped.
“Well, I’d have played the new saw,”
(the man said, defensive)
“but it’s in the shop. It’s missing some teeth.”
“You’ll be missing some teeth if you don’t stop that noise.
Artists might have to suffer, but must the audience as well?”
Tinny laughter followed and faded.
She was desperate to get up and turn off the radio,
but she could not.
V.
The tingling had consumed her limbs,
pain shooting along her every nerve,
ricocheting about her skull and
down through the cavity of her body.
So immobilized,
she continued to stare at the painting,
with its promise of infinity.
“What will happen to me if I cannot gaze on this anymore?”
she wondered,
now deaf with pain,
her eyesight beginning to blur.
At the thought,
a tear seeped out of the corner of her eye
and dribbled down her cheek,
into her neck.
VI.
Soon, the tingling stopped
and she felt her senses begin to return,
enough so that she could raise a trembling hand to her face.
She touched her cheek but did not clear it.
That tear,
she knew,
was the only thing
that had kept her from bursting into flame.
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