Volcanic

VOLCANIC

by Andrew Wilmot

Content Warning: suicide, pain under capitalism

Nora glared in worst-case-scenario. Her eyes were live wires, dancing. A threat of resolution. Acceptance.

Acquiescence.

“You can’t,” Ari said. “Please.”

Nora’s whole body trembled like she’d just been pulled from frozen waters. She can’t know this, Ari thought to themself. She can’t have the faintest idea what she’s suggesting.

“Please, Nor. Don’t.”

“Pop, pop, little bird. See you on the other—”

An explosion—a squelching report like a burst water balloon, and Nora was everywhere: ceiling; floor; the walls of the small twelve-by-twelve studio space she’d rented fifteen months earlier, promising herself one day she’d make use of it, make use of her degree, find her creative centre again.

On Ari, too, who hadn’t time enough to shield their eyes from the blast.

An exothermic reaction not one person alive yet understood, and Nora—all she ever was; all she ever dreamed she could, would, should someday be—painted the space in a stunning spectrum of chromatic gore. The chemical concoction of her hopes and dreams, the ordnance of her mind reduced to shrapnel.

Ari, still shaking from shock, slowly surveyed the room. Among the remains of their oldest friend oozing, clumping down the walls, dripping steadily from the ceiling, they saw fragments—pieces of still lifes and half-imagined portraits like splintered memories seen through fog; post-modernist abstractions that one day might’ve been studied, written about, admired and sought after, had they been allowed to be.

They felt their insides begin to squirm—a slight quake. The tremor started in their left hand and raced all too quickly up their arm, like a heart attack starting in the wrong direction. Immediately, they pulled two Xanax from the bottle they kept in their jacket pocket and dry-swallowed. Shut their eyes.

Prayed.

Gradually, the tremor stilled like a threat without the follow-through. They exhaled. Stood up and looked upon the whole—upon Nora, her personal ground zero.

Ari thought of taking a photo of the space. To commemorate Nora. To show the world what she could’ve been.

But didn’t.

Remembered, in the end, it’s not what Nora would have wanted. Ari had known her their entire life. Nora wasn’t a painting to be suspended in a gallery somewhere and forgotten about. She wasn’t establishment, and she never would have wanted such accreditation, no matter how much Ari believed her to be deserving of it.

She is—was—a disruption. A guerrilla installation erected overnight, under cover of dark. A trespassing. 

Wiping streaks of their friend from their eyes, leaving brush strokes of death and promise on their cheeks, Ari decided: They’d say nothing, do nothing. Leave, now, with Nora as a Joan Mitchell, a beautifully abstract stain upon the world as if paint shotgunned from orbit.

A memory, for someone else to find and deal with.

An artist who should’ve been.

Continued in Augur Magazine Issue 5.2...