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Blogathon Skullz0rz

Aug 302010

This is one of the sponsor paintings I made for Blogathon. I got a little attached to it AND NOW IT’S GONE. I hope my sponsor likes it.

The second time I participated in Blogathon, back in 2007, I decided to bribe people to sponsor me by offering to paint them pictures. I wound up having to churn out nearly 20 paintings on 6×8 canvas board. It was the first time I had painted in YEARS. And it showed. Believe me. (Not that I’m some fucking Picasso now, but still – at least I’ve upgraded from q-tips to brushes.) As crude as my style was, it still made me remember how much fun it was, and how good it was to just lose myself in paint swirls for a little while every day. So I kept doing it. That’s how Somnambulant started three years ago.

I stopped painting a few months ago, with the exception of a few custom cupcake couples here and there. Painting started to have a bad connotation for me. I’d look around my house and see all these old paintings I made that were based on songs Christina and I liked, or a line from a poem she had written about me. It made me not want to ever hold a paintbrush again, like a piece of my mind had petrified.I just felt dead.

Saturday night, as I sat across from my friend Jessy on a bench, she asked in earnest, “What can we do to get you past this? To get you to start loving painting again?”

I’m not sure what that answer is. I know I need to get all these old paintings out of my house. Be it by selling them, burning them, frisbee’ing them over a cliff, I don’t know. But I think the only way is to start fresh. My style is still pretty rudimentary and childish, but that’s how I like it. And apparently, there are other people who like that, as well and it’s been really fun making friends and connections through art. I’ve been missing that part of it. The part where people send me photos of their newly purchased painting hanging on their wall. The part where people take time out of their day to send me convos on Etsy telling me they enjoy the stories that go along with the paintings. I miss that.

I first painted skulls back in May because of that Etsy’s Dark Side birthday swap I’m apart of. The girl I was given to gift loves skulls and I had never really done much with skulls before. Something similar to the above painting is what came of that. And it was sort of fun! Cutting and gluing newsprint teeth proved cathartic. There wasn’t a sadness backing it like so many of my other paintings have (whether you can see it or not, I know it’s there).

I have mini ones on Etsy and I might make more; I’m trying to take baby steps. But these skulls, they’re fun to paint and don’t remind me of heartache. Yet, anyway.

The Best Date, 5:52

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Feb 102010

“I’m telling you, it was the best date of my life,” Billy boasted. “She was gorgeous; had this glow to her like a goddess statue or some shit, unlike any other ghost I ever took out. I’m telling you, it was the best date ever.”

Mason hovered quietly, allowing Billy to divulge the details of the best date ever. He tried to keep his lips in a neutral line, although the corners fought to unfurl.

“She just sat there, right? Just sat there at the table. Didn’t even order anything, cheapest date ever. She just sat there and let me tell her all about my days in the service.” Billy paused to send snot shooting from where his nose once jutted. “Couldn’t get her to come home with me, though. Probably for the best, don’t like to overwhelm the ladies on the first date.” Billy perversely circled his pelvis, causing Mason’s manhood to fall limp.

The afterlife hasn’t refined him one bit, Mason thought disgustedly.

“Christ, she was the best date ever. Shoulda seen the looks we was gettin’, me and that broad. Every dude in that place was taking a bus trip across her with their eyes, man, like she was the freakin’ Eiffel Tower or some shit. And she was there with ME.” Mason puffed out his chest and hitched his thumb at himself. “I owe you one, Mason old pal. Where did you find her anyway?”

“Downtown, 6th and Maple,” Mason replied.

“Oh, that old party store?” Billy deduced, sucking on the tip of a Slim Jim. “Can’t go wrong picking up a chick at the freakin’ party store, am I right?”

Mason nodded. It wasn’t really a lie. That’s where he purchased the clinquant, full-bodied Mylar balloon which he later tied to the chair at Chez Jizz, minutes before Billy’s arrival.

“I’m gonna bang her tonight, old friend, I can just feel it,” Mason predicted on the coattails of a processed-meat belch.

“Oh, I’m sure it will be quite the bang,” Mason agreed.

Katherine's Spot

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Feb 032010

The bristles of his brush ground hard into the nooks, flicking up suds stained with a subtle rouge, but now Norbert needed a break. He had been scrubbing the same spot in the rug with little relenting. Norbert balanced the brush against the lip of the bucket, stood and stretched his arms over his head.

It was a grand room. A deeply stained parquet floor had a chance to peek through where there weren’t expensive European rugs strewn about. Norbert only admired the beer steins and antique piggy banks decorating the fire place mantle for a few brief seconds before his eyes were pulled upward to a portrait of a resplendent woman.

“That’s my Katherine.”

Norbert spun on his heels to find Mister Williams, his barrel chest cloaked in a silk smoking jacket, framing the wide doorway into the parlor. Four thick slabs of fingers casually gripped a rock glass of scotch, which he subconsciously swirled with slight wrist flicks while his pinkie hovered incongruously. In between inappropriate slurps, Mister Williams slurred, “She was the love of my life.”

Norbert wiped his sweaty palms against his sullied coveralls. “I’m sorry, Mister Williams. I didn’t mean to snoop. I just needed to stand up for a moment; there’s one area of the rug over there that’s tougher than a nun’s habit to remove.”

“Beautiful, ain’t she?” Mister Williams continued, as if Norbert hadn’t spoke. He belched without apology.

“Why, yes sir,” Norbert admitted. “She’s stunning.” He looked away, not wanting his admiration of the woman in the portrait to appear salacious.

“She could make Hell feel like home,” Williams whispered, having moved in close enough to stroke Katherine’s oil-painted complexion with his scotch-free pinkie. He was standing close enough now that Norbert gleaned he hadn’t bathed in quite some time. Stale cigar smoke, urine, sweat and a mausoleum-quality musk clung to Williams like a protective wrapping. When Norbert said nothing, Williams asked, “Have you ever really danced on the edge, carpet cleaner?”

Norbert, growing overwrought, shook his head stupidly. “No, but I once had unprotected sex with four and a half Thai prostitutes.”

“Four…and a half?” Williams repeated questioningly, making eye contact with Norbert for the first time. Norbert looked away quickly, embarrassed by the vacancy and loneliness he saw in the gaze.

“Y-yes, sir. You see, there were these Siamese twins, and I, I only did it with the half that had the vagina.”

Williams wasn’t listening. He had set down his crystal rock glass on a chess table and had moved to the other side of the room where he stared catatonically at the wedding ring imprisoned flush against a rheumatic knuckle. “That’s what it felt like to love her: like dancing on the edge. Knowing that at any minute you could fall and nothing would ever be the same again, but the thrill you get? The thrill that tickles the base of your spine and makes your innards feel like they’re on a roller coaster with naked women to Babylon?” Williams put a cork in his monologue long enough to pinch a cat hair from his lapel and take a drowning gulp of scotch. “That thrill is what keeps you from stopping even when it gets dangerous. Love. She was the love of my life,” he repeated robotically.

“What happened, why aren’t you together anymore?” Norbert asked apprehensively.

Williams shot his head back and laughed uproariously. The scotch on the chess table quivered, and somewhere, something dropped from a wall.

Wiping a viscous sluice of drool from his cleft chin, Williams’ face turned stony as he spat, “Because that’s her you’re scrubbing from my Persian, carpet cleaner.”

————–

This is my creaturely ancestor contribution for week 4 of the 52 Weeks Project I joined on Facebook.

How Leticia Turned Pink

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Jan 312010

Leticia loved haunting the Appledale’s farmhouse. It always smelt of blueberry syrup and fresh linen, with a tiny tang of far-off manure to keep it real.

She loved watching the Appledale brothers dig for worms, and later, watching them stuff those worms down their sister Amelda’s cotton blouse.

Leticia loved bobbing invisibly behind Mother Appledale, watching as she darned Papa Appledale’s socks with a slightly arthritic hand. Leticia knew that soon Mother Appledale would “accidentally” be tossed into the combine, but she didn’t try to warn her because it would be handy to have someone like Mother Appledale on the other side; on top of the darning, she made a mean chicken fried steak.

Papa Appledale. Big, overall’d Papa Appledale with the grass stains on his forearms and worn leather belt for whippin’. Leticia generally stayed away from him. He always moved within a flock of pernicious energy which often stunk of cabbaged flatulence.

While Papa Appledale was killing Mother Appledale, the boys were down by the train tracks playing with the box car children, Amelda was at her girlfriend’s house learning about Kegel, and Leticia cowered in the safety of the washing machine.

And that’s where she remained while Papa Appledale lumbered into the laundry room, peeled off his ensanguined murder uniform, and stuffed it into the washing machine, along with Leticia and a handful of sweaty socks unappreciatively marked by Mother Appledale’s handiwork.

“Hey Leticia,” one of her friends taunted back home. “What happened, someone throw you in with the reds?” A bunch of them held their bellies and laughed till they wheezed, all a’shimmer in her God-given pearlescent suits.

“Yep. Something like that,” Leticia muttered, while waiting for Mother Appledale to ladle some gravy on her chicken fried steak.