By: Victoria Bissette
The cold followed Helen home across the dark streets of Chicago to up and outside the apartment she shared with her partner of three years, Eva. The cold was pervasive—a pest infecting buildings, relationships, and her hands. Helen could not escape it. She was infected, and there was no cure. Only slow creeping damage to everything she loved.
Helen caught herself waiting in front of her apartment door. Her body braced for the frigid indifference behind the frame and the person whose warmth had burned to embers months ago. Before Helen could bring herself to slide the key into the lock, the vibrations of her phone shocked the keys from her fingers. Helen turned her back on the door and answered.
“You’ve got a spot at my studio gallery three months from now. All you have to do is say yes. So, I’ll take the yes now. I can send the paperwork and logistics over in the morning, yeah?” A voice crackled through the speaker. Naomi never wasted time on hellos or goodbyes. Pleasantries were a waste of time. For Naomi, time was better spent on closing deals, and she always closed. This call was only a formality.
The ever-present shake of Helen’s hands grew into a full earth-breaking tremor. Helen held her breath momentarily to test if she was still real. That it, her big break, was finally happening.
“The gallery wants to host my art for an exhibition?”
“No, Helen, I called you because they want another artist. Yes, or yes, I haven’t got all night. I do have a life, you know.”
“Yes,” Helen said, even though the words were saccharine on her lips because this was too good, too perfect, to be true—a lifelong dream realized in a forty-second call.
“Perfect.” Naomi clicked, and the line went dead.
Helen clutched the black phone screen tightly in her hands, willing it to still with sheer force, even as her pinkies gave way to a constant dull ache. Excitement tore through her veins and pounded fast in her ears, echoing Naomi’s last words.
The world came crashing in—the noise of cars down the street outside, people talking a floor above, the distant patter of half-frozen snow—it would be spring soon. Hope and change were right around the corner. She’d finally put her degree to use. Her work would hang on a gallery wall in a room full of people who knew what art was and cared because painting wasn’t some ridiculous hobby. Art was life.
When Helen flung open the apartment door, it was welcoming and warm. For the first time since Eva started her master’s program last year, Helen wanted to be home. Beyond the entryway, Eva sat hunched over one leg at her desk, eyes squinted at some new article for her master’s thesis on the screen with the same wireframes she’d had since junior year of undergrad.
The need to share her gallery spot fluttered up Helen’s stomach and into her throat. She wanted to say it out loud. Speak this opportunity into a manifested childhood dream. But the silence of the space leeched away any notion Helen had of sharing her news with Eva. Eva’s practiced dismissal stung Helen’s memory, which sat like lead inside the four corners of her phone, weighed down with a sea of blue texts marked read.
Helen closed the door without so much as a click from the door latch. Habit sent her sneaking into what had been marketed as a dining nook when Helen and Eva toured the apartment three years ago. Helen turned it into a studio while Eva claimed the living room as her part-time office, but it had only gathered dust since their last year of undergrad.
Until now.
Three months was a short time frame to prepare for an exhibition. Moreover, this would be Helen’s first foray as an artist beyond the walls of her alma mater, SAIC, the School of Art Institute of Chicago. This would be her first stake as a professional artist. The art she presented here would define her career or end it before it had begun.
Helen needed new art—better art. A painting that screamed that she knew what she was doing. Art that would show that four years of sleepless nights and deteriorating health wasn’t a waste. She couldn’t show up with only her old, barely-up-to-snuff undergrad paintings unearthed from beneath a mountain of dust and tarp.
Eva had asked about the covered canvases when they’d first moved in together, “Shouldn’t we display them? Make the place feel like ours and not some cheap builder-grade beige death trap?”
Helen had laughed at her. Because Eva had seemed so funny and beautiful and impenetrably perfect, and here—at last—was her flaw. Eva Madden, the blonde straight-A homecoming queen with wealthy parents, didn’t understand good art. Helen had adored her more for it—a single human imperfection to her flawless facade. Helen had hugged her tight and spun them together, and because they were still young and in love, the question lay forgotten beneath kisses and laughter. Eventually, when school started again for Eva, she stopped asking, and Helen ignored the piles of stretched canvas as if they had never existed. Dreams buried in drop cloth.
But with an impending deadline, Helen pulled the stiff tarps loose. Her greatest shame visible to the world once more, Helen was transported back to her college seminars and critiques. How the smallness had engulfed her, as everything she thought she was good at or knew was torn apart in front of an audience of her peers. The criticism that had only ever been a far cry from constructive spotlighting every flaw.
“Your style development has been interesting, and it’s just that I wonder if you understood that this was a master copy exam and not a venture into your own work,” A professor had said, flashing wide-eyed looks between Helen and the canvas.
It wasn’t that the critique had been wrong. It hadn’t been something Helen could explain in words. Believable words, anyway, because Helen had stammered out, “I’m sorry, it’s just that my hands—it’s, well, they. There are these pains. I can’t afford to have it—”
Her professor had cut her off with a hand. “We’re artists, Helen. Your hands are your tools, and it is your responsibility to make sure your tools are present and in order for your exams. I expect better next round.”
That was the last time Helen had tried to explain why colors spasmed over her canvases and why everything was a swirl of irregular lines that occasionally suggested the shape of the image they were meant to represent. How could she make another person understand the way she felt like her hands were bones connected by needles, that she could feel them shifting and prodding at her veins, that once she’d been so sure that bloodletting would be the only way to release the building pressure? No. She didn’t want to be labeled insane alongside her inadequacy.
It was sharp electricity. It was cold fire. It was pain.
The pain only got worse as Helen spent hours bent over paper and canvas alike, with the infectious pain creeping up her hands to her elbows and shoulders, and sitting deep beneath skin and tissue. Pain like Helen’s, chronic nerve pain, and the damage it wrought could only ever be managed. There was no cure. Her tools would never be “in order.” Graduation was a mercy.
Part of Helen wanted to tear the paintings apart. Shred them with a pallet knife or kitchen scissors. Rid herself of the reminder that no one would believe her internal electric fires. Not her professors. Not her doctors. Not Eva, if Helen ever worked up the courage to tell her.
Helen flexed her fingers, each movement a fresh sting, as she set up her workstation on the floor. An old blank canvas splayed out before her. Helen took up her gesso and pried at the cap until it finally relented, and pure white splattered over the naked cloth. It would be smoothed with each brushstroke until it became invisible and indistinguishable from the fabric.
Quickly, Helen kneed over the cloth-covered floors and took hold of one of her old two-inch brushes, thumbing over the bristles. The world dropped away with that feeling, the soft hairs on her skin. Tension slipped from her shoulders with the slight breeze of bristles wafting back into place. The wooden handle slotted into her hand like it had never left.
Helen was an artist. A real bona fide artist who’d secured a gallery spot, not a waiter who did art as some cute hobby. She made art, and it mattered.
“You’re painting again?” Eva called from where she was leaning against the studio’s doorframe.
Helen turned back to reality, tucking her knees close to her chest so she could rest her arms on top of them. She stared at the ceiling as she spoke, “Naomi called. I’ve got a spot at that gallery she works for. An exhibition.”
Eva shifted her weight against the frame. She was the picture of polite interest, her hands clasped limply at her waist, nodding along to the rhythm of Helen’s voice. Though Eva’s eyes were positioned toward Helen, they were distant. It was the look she got when her mind shifted from reality to her research, the numbers and figures of hypotheticals more tangible than the woman in front of her. Helen was unsurprised by Eva’s silence; she’d lost her interest already. Lovers turned strangers.
The only sound came from the paintbrush slowly turning its way over Helen’s fingers.
“I thought you’d, I don’t know, be more excited?” Helen offered.
“I am! I am. I just.” Eva burst and sank back to squeeze herself beneath an oversized sweater, “I thought, maybe you wouldn’t want me to be? Since you never want to talk about your art. Or anything.”
Helen caught the brush mid-turn. “It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Don’t, or won’t.” Eva waved off. It was always one or the other. Like her thesis research, the only answers she recognized bolstered her argument. “You never talk, so I thought…well, what I thought doesn’t matter because this is great! Really, truly, great. You deserve this. We should celebrate. I could make dinner, or we could go somewhere maybe next week?”
Helen tried to find words and failed. This was Eva trying. She waited for Helen’s response with a quiet, knowing smile that said you knew a secret.
“Yeah, thanks,” Helen managed, “That—that sounds great. But for now, I should probably work.”
Eva nodded, still smiling, and left Helen with her paintbrush and the drying gesso. Helen cursed under her breath before desperately attempting to reverse any would-be damage.
In the morning, Helen’s black work clothes from the day before were speckled with white stars. Clothes she’d needed for her next serving shift at the restaurant down the street and did not have time to clean. Her mind was too focused on potential shapes and colors sweeping behind her eyelids to care about the strict tone in her manager’s voice when she called out that day, or the next, and the next.
Instead of working to serve highbrow customers with their polite, pitying smiles, Helen sat, paralyzed, staring at her blank canvases from different spots in her studio. Helen had never been prone to bold brushstrokes. She’d always been methodical and slow, even when her pinky fingers didn’t go numb, and her hand didn’t feel like it was operating around an intrusive needle that nudged against muscle and nerve alike with each flick of her wrist. A slow pace was normal for her. Indecision was not novel, nor was the shake of her hand each time it descended on the canvas.
Every stroke was filled with waves. Never straight. Never perfect. Imperfect little disasters, and they were everywhere. What she’d intended to be the lonesome alley Helen walked down every night from the restaurant turned into a smeared mass of shades of black and white—a spiraling vortex of gray. Everywhere and everything converged into solemn gray as Helen scrubbed away the failure with a rag soaked in paint thinner so strong Helen’s head spun in time with labored breaths.
“This can’t be good for you, Helen,” Eva said from her perch in the doorway, words muffled by the sleeve of her sweatshirt to mask the permeating scent of turpentine. “This fixation is unhealthy.”
“I’m fine,” Helen said.
“Fine. But maybe take a break.”
“Maybe work on your thesis?” Helen snapped back.
“Maybe call your parents?” Eva asked, and at last, her niceties were gone.
Helen wanted to leave, to free herself from where she stood, trapped between judgment and failure and unable to do anything to stop either. She wanted to scream, to break something, to be done with everything consuming her mind. Helen abandoned the paintbrush on the floor. It clattered ungently against the smudged tarp as Helen ripped past Eva toward the bathroom.
It took several tries for her trembling hands to lock the doorknob to isolate her frustration from her pain and the sting of Eva’s lack of faith. Helen’s eyes burned from the force of holding back a flood. Her body was electric—nonstop vibrations, a physical and tangible buzz that pulled Helen’s body to the rigid tile floor.
She should have taken a break. Should have taken a lot of breaks. She should have listened to her body and seen a doctor before the damage had permanently transformed her nerves into needles and knives. She should tell Eva about the pain. Let loose the floodgates, tear down her walls, and be honest in the only home Helen had left. Offer difficult truths to fix what little love was left in this relationship before it, too, was transformed into something sharp and mutually disastrous.
When Helen left the bathroom, her only companion was her newly blank canvas. Eva was gone as she began painting over the white remains of the alley. Each stroke sharpened the pain—real pain, not the soft, aching precursor of numbness and tingles—knifed through her right hand.
Helen struggled with putting feelings into words, so this revised painting was intended to be an apology. A portrait of Eva that Helen would be willing to keep after the gallery show and allow Eva to display next to her books and knick-knacks. After hours of ignoring her manager’s calls from her serving job and Eva’s clamoring return to their apartment, Helen sat back to look at the results of her efforts. She’d focused each stroke with slow, pointed breaths, and when that failed, she gripped one arm with the other and used mahlsticks to steady her hand. In the end, all Helen had to show for her work was something that looked more like she’d painted Eva—sat slightly hunched over her computer and so delicately framed by the soft amber light of her lamps—viewed through a haze of heat. Eva’s features and the setting around her were distorted through waves and too faint to be distinguishable.
She wanted to burn it.
Helen’s body was comprised of distant foreign limbs, pulled by tightrope tendons, snapping with twitching and spasmed movement. The pain was beginning to crawl, wrapping itself around her forearm until it sank into her elbow and threatened to creep ever higher still.
Stop, the pain said, or there will be no recovery from this.
But she’d passed the point of no return years ago. The only thing left was management. Management, or giving up on this dream that was only now becoming clear. They were both a kind of half-death, Helen supposed.
“If you’re done,” Eva called without looking up from her screen, “does this mean we can finally go out?”
Helen flinched her dominant hand into a stretch. “After I fix it.”
“Well, I already made the reservations for Friday. And before you say anything, I will not cancel another dinner because you were too busy. Make time, Helen.”
Helen scorched through the last of her patience. Dinner wasn’t a choice. It was an obligation Eva had created for Helen to comply with. Helen moved to run her fingers through her grease-soaked hair but abandoned the effort and let her arm drop before following it onto the chilled wooden floors.
“Eva, that’s tomorrow. It’s not enough time.”
“Then I guess you’ll be taking a break,” Eva said, her face set in an immovable tight smile—her socially polite order smile. “I suggest it start with a shower.”
Helen did take a shower. The heat of the water stung out some of the aches in her arms and masked her quiet sobs as her body protested every movement from the shower to bed, where Helen remained until Eva pulled her to get ready for their dinner. Despite Eva’s demands, Helen could not hold her makeup brushes or hot iron in her hand long enough to properly prepare for whatever fancy restaurant Eva had decided they needed to “celebrate” in. Not for the first time, Helen had stared at her sullen expression, her flaxen, mousy brown hair, the purple bags that seemed like permanent fixtures beneath her dull eyes. She wondered if any of it still mattered.
Would she be able to open the bottle of Tylenol in the kitchen? Would she be able to hold a paintbrush? Would she be able to live knowing she’d lost the only thing she’d ever loved — without the only person that had ever made her feel loved? Could she choose one over the other?
“Helen?” Eva called. Bright eyes trapped her in the mirror. “At least let me do your hair before we go.”
The fight was drained out of Helen as she watched with childlike wonder the deft precision of Eva’s hands. The perfectly practiced swipe of her wrist was more beautiful than any impressionist could have ever hoped to capture in color or brushstroke. Helen found herself wanting, not for the first time, to know what it would feel like to inhabit that body. To live without the thrum beneath her skin and slip into the silence of someone else’s. To be free of live-in grief for the slow, weaning, tumultuous death of Helen’s artistic dreams.
Helen fantasized about a life she would never be able to live— with painless, warm hands — the entire cab ride to the restaurant.
Their table was as pristine as the fresh winter flurry sinking its teeth back into the Chicago buildings. Spring seemed a long way off now. Eva looked completely at home in the glitz and glamour, the perfect girl next door. She smiled at all the staff as they drifted to and from the table, taking orders and carrying plates back and forth.
“Naomi called me,” Eva said between waitstaff, “she said you won’t answer your phone.”
Helen gave her a look. Eva mirrored it back at her. Helen looked away.
“You’re screening calls now.” Eva let her sentence hang in the air.
Helen did not answer.
Eva rolled her head with her eyes as if one negated the other, “Oh, it’s fine. Just don’t be accommodating to the people who are helping you. Putting themselves, their connections, their reputations, out on the line for you.”
“Eva, please. Just—”
“Thank you.” Eva interrupted, smiling once more, as the waiter appeared to leave their entrees behind. The kind wrinkle of her eyes dropped the moment the suited figure was out of sight. “Just what? Don’t mention it? Don’t be concerned that you’ve moved on to ignoring all the people you know, not just the ones who live with you?”
“Do I complain about how focused you are on your work? When did you last spend more than a night away from your research?”
Eva turned pointedly to the steak steaming in front of her. The scratch of her knife against the porcelain plate shredded Helen’s nerves.
“Low blow for low blow,” Helen said.
The knife stopped, but Eva didn’t meet Helen’s eyes.
“If painting is stressing you out this badly, then maybe you should return Naomi’s calls and thank her, but tell her you just can’t do the exhibition?”
Everything started to blur together in heated, wet swirls of steam. Helen blinked the wet mess gathering in her eyes away rapidly.
“But I do want it, Eva. I do.” A deep, steadying breath. “This is just hard, and with everything else…I just. I want this to go well. So, I am sorry. I admit I have been distant and stressed. I’m working through some stuff.”
Eva’s softened eyes on hers once more, looking at Helen with more emotion than she’d seen in over a year. The look was more effective than any of the paint thinners had been on her canvas. Every mistake washed away in the light of those eyes. Eva reached across the table, her perfect painless hand on Helen’s callused half-dead skin.
“And I’m worried about you! If I had known you would get like this, I would have never asked Naomi to—” Eva sputtered, ripping back her hand and stealing away all the warmth left in Helen’s arms and burying it beneath the white tablecloth. “I mean, I wouldn’t have pushed, or I… I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” Helen asked, but it was rhetorical. Her stomach had already sunk to the floor, weighed down by a confirmed fear of inadequacy and betrayal. Confirmation that her art wasn’t good enough, not on her merit and without connections and friendly bribes.
Eva stared at her steak, cut open and horribly raw inside like a fresh wound.
“No.” Helen said, raising her voice, “For what? What did you do? Tell me.”
Eva glared at her, a warning. “If I tell you, you’ll get angry, and then we are going to fight.”
“We are, Eva.”
“We. Are. Not. Helen.”
Helen raised her eyebrows, waited, then pushed back her chair.
“Oh, fuck off with your silent treatment. Forgive me for caring about you. Forgive me for giving a shit!” Eva hissed in a low whisper.
“You don’t get to guilt me about this,” Helen said, placing her wrinkled napkin atop the snow-fallen thread.
“I wouldn’t have to if you would just talk to me.”
“And say what?” Helen stood. “What do you want me to say, Eva.”
Eva opened her mouth, desperately sucked in a half breath, and trapped whatever she might have said beneath it.
Helen stood waiting for what had felt like a life, three years together, and a shared apartment.
Eva’s words took only seconds, “I think you should go.”
Helen wished she’d known that destroying a life together would only take three seconds. She wouldn’t have spent so much time worrying about the slow death—a dream death—and realized the end they’d both been strangling to fend off was inevitable.
The street outside the restaurant was cold and pervasive, sinking into Helen’s pores through the wetness of her flaming cheeks. The cold spilled down her neck, into her shoulders, and the tips of her ungloved fingers.
Why did holding onto things always hurt? Why was it only Helen who felt the pain? Why was she infected with the vengeful cold of the Midwestern spring?
The sound of water and steps that weren’t hers drew Helen to look up. There was a freshly painted mural dripping slowly down the side of a building, Desolation in the dark of night, and it was angry, screaming out against its annihilation in shades of reds and oranges and yellows that, in turn, fizzled out against shades of purple, black, and white. Anguish and turmoil turned outward to everything and nothing all at once.
Helen meant to keep walking, but it was the first real piece of art she’d seen in person for months—the first creation and destruction she hadn’t wrought through her failing hands. The pain was drawn from outside herself and reflected.
“Do you like it?” A voice called from above.
Helen watched the paint drip over itself, horribly distorting the image. She nodded.
“On a technical level, it’s disastrous at best and garbage at its worst.” The words came unbidden, regurgitated, but turned sharp in her throat as the wall cried tears the color of a muddied rainbow. “But I get it, I think. The emotion of it.”
“Damn.” The voice laughed. “Must’ve been good then.”
It was perfect, even in its half-washed death. Maybe the mural’s partial destruction made it all the better, adding to the piece’s emotional outcry. Perhaps the poor technique helped convey that pain, representing how pain can warp everything, including a person’s perception, manifested in shaky lines. Art might not need the perfect technique to be good art.
“Perfect,” Helen called back into the night.
The word floated in a cloud of heat, and the cold finally took permanent hold. Colorless tears came easily in the dark in the form of deep heaving sobs, drawn forth by the imperfect art of a stranger as they hid their shame beneath a tarp of soap and water.
Victoria Bissette is an English major with a minor in Professional Writing at KSU excited to share her work. Before KSU, Victoria obtained her associate degree in English at Georgia Highlands College and worked as the Entertainment Editor for the GHC student newspaper, The Six Mile Post. Her favorite book genres are horror, magical realism, and fantasy. When she’s not reading or writing, Victoria enjoys oil painting and listening to podcasts.