POTN 8

POETRY  |  FICTION EXCERPT

Warm Red Shadows

by Sonia & Naomi Hughes, art by Michael Kucharski

All you are going to kill me just to protect yourselves.

God, it’s funny. You guys are going to kill me, and I’ve been dead for eight years. You’re going to do it because, all legal euphemisms aside, all of you are afraid. It’s not gonna do a damn bit of good, people. It’s too late.

You want my story? Finally? You promise to listen this time?

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Brenda Page.

Oh God, what a talent. What a mammoth, miserable, flaming genius. If she’d been normal she still would’ve commanded a great deal of respect. I read those reviews which called her "The New Donatello" and described her work as echoing the finest examples of the early Renaissance. You’ve all seen the bronze statue Partisan which was commissions for the Nixon Center, or the Green Oratory series which is currently touring Korea.

And you have seen it. I’ve seen it.

She hasn’t.

Isn’t it the biggest joke you ever heard? Brenda Page: the heiress to the crowns of Rodin, Bourdelle and Manship. The finest sculptress of our time… totally and completely blind.

How about that video: Midnight Touch? The one which detailed her creation of Wagner & Wotan for the Seattle Conservatory? Did you notice the way her hands moved across the clay? Her fingers didn’t look like they were sculpting or carving. They sort of drifted up and down, and life followed their every move. All the time her face would sort of remain distant. Every amount of expression and emotion was focused on those fingers and her face would just hang in the background. The lights were shining on her and she didn’t even notice. She couldn’t. The clay she was working on had more life than her eyes.

Was she a respected artist because she was blind? God, I don’t know. All I know is her blindness made something which passed into her work. You’ve seen her face? You’ve seen the faces of people when they first see Cancer Ward or Synapse or 1959? Try and tell me something didn’t flow directly out of her into her statues.

Naturally I started thinking more about her when Dr. Schaarbeek came with the NEA representative down to our cells. I can remember that bit because it reminded me of a scene in A Clockwork Orange when the prison warden is touring the yard with the experimental scientists who’re looking for a guinea pig to test their treatment on. I should’ve paid more attention.

Schaarbeek told us about the unusual honor which had been bestowed on our section. He told us about the NEA working closely with the University and CDC to assist Brenda Page in a new and mammoth project she was putting together. Her request was completely off the wall, and not particularly liked in some important quarters, but an artist of her reputation wasn’t easily denied. Besides, at the time a lot of talk was being thrown around about how it was all in a good cause.

Brenda Page needed a vampire.

And eventually, through luck or accident, the eyes moved to me.