[Yikes! Mad Art Project has spawned a second story. Need to catch up? Here’s the first story of Mad Art Project.]
On Cracker Island it was born To the collective of the dawn They were planting seeds at night To grow a made-up paradise —Gorillaz, "Cracker Island"
Under the Snow Moon of February a shoot thrust up through frost-crusted loam. At first it looked like the tight-twisted tip of a tulip, though colorless. White, or rather, translucent wound tight. Over the next nights, as the sprout twined toward the waning moon, you could see that the spiraled sprout-tip was made up of threads fine and pale as corn-silk, almost pink-white.
Not that there was anyone to see.
A bulb followed the sprout. The bulb rose until it became a half moon, until the womb of the earth dilated and the full moon of the head was born.
Shallow nose. Wide round cheeks. Ears in bas-relief. In contrast to the curves of the face, a wee pointed chin. When the head, trailing half-frozen mucous, lolled on half-born shoulders in the reddish loam, the moon calf opened its eyes.
They were peony-red, those great round orbs, wine-red, prick-your-finger red, and they glistened like beads of dew. When the moon calf blinked, they became pink marbles.
As its pale lashes fluttered, the moon calf became aware of perimeters: a forest of scrub cedar from its left shoulder to its right — its head lurched as it looked — an abandoned swing set, a straggling grape arbor twined with leafless vines, high-voltage electrical lines overhead, and the new moon caught in the wires.
Its hands worked out of the earth and flapped at its sides.
The moon calf tumbled forward. Almost before its legs were free of the soil, it began crawling over frost-bitten clover and garlicky sage. The sticky remnants of its caul trailed behind it, collecting splinters and grit. It traveled due east, slightly uphill, toward the new-growth trees along the power line cut.
One tender, marble-white hand landed on the broken stob of a pokeberry plant. The rough points tore though the palm and drove almost out the back of the hand. The moon calf gave a piercing shriek. It rolled back onto its bare bottom. Tears flowed down its face. Left and right hand alike clutched forward as if for succor. It lifted its face to the moon and wailed.
From horizon to horizon, no comfort came. After a while the moon calf righted itself and, whimpering, began crawling east again. Blood trailed from its torn right hand.
Take a couple dozen steps back, Rowan Atkinson says, quoting someone-or-other, and tragedy becomes comedy. A Kewpie doll lurched toward Bethlehem.
Bethlehem, Middle Tennessee, January 2023
The phone rang.
“Tim Tiresias.”
(I know, I know … )
“Afternoon, sir. Afternoon. I’m glad I got hold of you.”
The voluptuous baritone could have echoed from the stage of the Ryman, though I later learned he trained on pulpit oratory. I glanced at my flip phone and saw a local number with one of the old exchange prefixes.
“How may I help you?”
I didn’t have a keyboard handy, but I reached for my notebook and pen. My business card — a blindfolded man carrying a lantern, stylized along the lines of Horace Brodsky — marked the next empty page.
“I hear you find people.” I heard ice swirl in a glass. “I’m looking for Jethra Pauletta Holloway.”
You’ve heard the saying, A goose ran over my grave?
I do find people, from time to time, in a professional capacity, but I’d never been asked to find a long-lost friend. Then again, it had been years since I lived in this hick county. I’d forgotten how small things could be.
I breathed in, then out. “Go on.”
“My name’s Donnie Ross, the Reverend Donnie Ross for the purpose of this conversation.”
I knew the name. I knew he was chairman of the board of Southside Utility, which supplied water to the residents of three counties. I knew he owned the biggest beer distributorship in the same area. I may even had heard he was a preacher in his spare time.
Donnie Ross went on:
“I sometimes help with difficult cases — difficult spiritual cases — as a favor to friends of mine.” He rambled a bit. That mellifluent twang. He came to the point. “Judge Greenbaum asked me to counsel Ms. Holcombe as part of the conditions of her probation. Her case was, in his estimation, outside the experience of any of the county probation officers or clinical social workers. He thought a member of the clergy — asked Bob Meachum first, you know, out of Holiness Temple University — ”
I don’t usually interrupt, but this time I couldn’t help myself.
“What was she charged with?”
“Charged!” He didn’t exactly laugh, but he exhaled as if he’d choked. “She was charged with all kinds of mess. Fourteen counts of manslaughter, fourteen counts of abuse of a corpse — none of that stuck, there were no babies — reduced to charges for false reporting, public nuisance — ”
I won’t bore you with the details, and in any case he got most of them wrong.
Jethra’s mad art project, it seemed, had taken on a life of its own.
Facebook post, now deleted
February 14, 2021
Penelope Moonchild
Daughter of Diotima the Prophetess
Gestational age Infinity
Terrestrial age seven weeks
In the photo, red clay formed a mound maybe the size of a bread pan. The photographer had captured one of her own hands, broad and grubby, pressing a bunch of blue asters into the earth. With some art, she had taken the picture at sunset. Crimson light filtered through the crevices between her cupped fingers.
Dawn, now 53, was in the middle of a stressful divorce when, to her horror, she began to bleed non-stop. “I couldn’t countenance building a new life with this happening as well. I knew it would severely affect my mental health and wellbeing at a fragile time for me.”
Sonia, a 50-year-old university lecturer, was out running in the park when a sudden deluge of blood covered her shorts and legs: “I had to call my partner to pick me up in the car. Fortunately this has never happened to me at work, but I often think about what I would do if it did.”
… Mona, a 46-year-old NHS worker, is relieved her heaviest days have, so far, fallen at weekends: “I think I’d have to call in sick otherwise. I work with quite a lot of men. I couldn’t be in a meeting that would go on for an hour and think: have I leaked? I’m office-based but God knows how people manage through a 12-hour shift.”
— Gaby Hinsliff, “There will be blood,” The Guardian, 2021
I don’t know when she first caught the blood clot as it slithered out of her body, 98.6 degrees and unexpectedly weighty, a handful, a mass of living tissue — I’m imagining — and couldn’t bear to let it go.
I don’t know when she started naming them.
I also don’t know when she became so involved in pro-choice ideology that she decided her best protest was to confound the system by getting arrested and charged for the more-or-less normal process of having periods.
I must say I am so far from possessing anything like Jethra’s mindset that my representation of her thoughts may be laughably wrong. My only excuse is that I’m her only witness, her only historian, her only friend.
You don’t want to hear my analysis — anyhow, my background’s in finance — but it would fall somewhere in the territory of pernicious effect of badly-understood third-wave feminism on an already-fragile female mind.
You’re welcome.
Anyhow, for the sake of the exercise, let’s think about what other pressures Jethra might have faced.
She had half of two fairly rigorous college degrees, a son with severe behavioral problems, a shockingly oppressive custody situation, about 50 pounds of excess weight in a society that would rather see women starved than obese, and a near-minimum-wage job as a teaching assistant for cognitively disabled kids. Thirty-five hours a week, you see — just shy of qualifying for health insurance.
It’s skilled, professional work that takes mental and physical strength as well as intelligence and empathy. But what does the public see? A fat woman hauling dummies around.
But say Jethra gets pregnant. Suddenly she, her second-hand double-wide, her pain prescription for her slipped disc, her older son’s outbursts, and her health insurance situation are on full display.
And she’s still fat.
When I think about the surveillance state, I want to 1. protect myself and 2. dismantle it, in that order. Jethra wanted to be seen. And since she was only ever going to be seen as something grotesque, I think she decided to push the envelope a bit.
Then, too, there were heart-breaking amounts of blood.
Maybe her heart finally broke.
Long before she made that connection, periods and presentation, she started looking for ways to preserve the blood clots that started as guppies, then graduated to goldfish, gerbils, hamsters, double handsful —
Freezing left them dried out and shriveled.
Formaldehyde was too expensive and stank.
She refrigerated them with better results, but that didn’t last long.
So she decided to bury them.
Then she held funerals for them.
After a while she started recording those funerals and posting them online.
Using this logic, police … have repeatedly jailed women for allegedly using drugs ranging from marijuana to meth while pregnant — including women who have claimed that they did not use drugs, and women who turned out not to be pregnant. In 2021, Kim Blalock, a mother of six, was arrested on felony charges after filling a doctor’s prescription during a pregnancy; the state of Alabama decided that it knew better than her doctor, and they could criminalize her for following medical advice.
…
This is not an extreme example: it is the logical conclusion of fetal personhood’s legalization — the surveillance, jailing and draconian monitoring of pregnant women, an exercise in voyeuristic sadism justified by the flimsy pretext that it’s all being done for the good of children. Except there are no children …
— Moira Donegan, “Alabama is using the notion that embryos are people to surveil and harass women,” The Guardian, 2024
At any rate, though the digital panopticon took years longer than she expected, law enforcement became interested in Jethra’s doings at last. By then she had created a flower bed full of mounds adorned with dead posies and the kind of plastic toys you get out of quarter machines. A crime scene unit took over her backyard, dug the tiny graves up, and found, of course, nothing. But they were so overwhelmed with rage — how dare she make art with her own body and post on Facebook about it — they slapped her with several charges she could easily have gotten out of if she had the sense or means. She lost her job. She barely escaped jail, and that only through Donnie Ross’s intervention.
Why he took an interest in Jethra I didn’t know. He’d talked to me for 30 solid minutes and I still hadn’t found out.
She was assigned to pastoral counseling with Donnie as a condition of her probation, as I’ve said, and he more or less blackmailed her into attending his church, Bethel Branch, it was called, out from South Pittsburg a ways. Encouraged, of course, was his word. “She needed a church home.”
She went to Bible study on Wednesday nights at his house, too, with a select group of people. “I was never alone with her, never with any girls I was counseling, wouldn’t be right.”
Jethra, by the way, was only three or four years younger than I am — a 46-year-old girl. But I digress.
One of those evenings, while Jethra and a couple of others knelt on the floor near the coffee table and Donnie Ross sat in his gold-velour-covered armchair near the window, with the evening sun shafting more or less straight past his shoulder and into her face, he noticed the sun poured straight through her.
“She didn’t cast a shadow,” he told me. We were still on the same, interminable phone call. “No, sir. Not at all. Just a glow, you know, like the shadow you sometimes see when the sun falls through steam or crazed glass.”
I knew, well enough. Apparently, according to his yarn, Jethra had been losing weight all that year.
“I think at last she prayed herself away to nothing.” I heard him swirl ice in a glass jar. Ten to one the man was drinking sweet tea. “I believe in the resurrection of the body and its final disposition in Heaven or in Hell, but when there’s no body before death, when the spirit walks alive and naked, what then? She’s lost, prey to all kinds of evil influence. I have to find her so I can save her.” A pause. “Also, you understand, I’ll eventually have to report she’s failed the conditions of her probation. She’s supposed to show up to counseling every week. And Bob Meachum spoke for me. I hate to let him down, or Tom Greenbaum either.”
He went on and on, dropping the name of every bigwig in the county. I began to get the idea he was making fun of me.
“Reverend Ross, I’m a financial investigator, not a psychic.” I was already planning my approach, but I had very little faith in Donnie Ross and no inclination to act in his interest. I hated the thought of him in the same county with Jethra, let alone the same room. “If someone was cheating your company I could help you find out where the money was going. But this is far outside my rather narrow area of expertise. Perhaps you should consult a priest.”
“Oh, I wanted a Christian, not a Catholic ... you are a Christian man, aren’t you?”
I’m an atheist, in fact, but only an idiot admits to being an atheist in a town where he hopes to do business, at least around here. Still, lying about religion gives me a sinking feeling somewhere around my tailbone.
“I’m a Constitutional conservative,” I said, I hoped briskly enough as to end that line of questioning. “What religion was Ms. Holcombe?”
“Well, she was on her way to being baptized as an Independent Pentecostalist, my own congregation, but I’m afraid, sir, she left before she had been confirmed.”
“But her own religion, her beliefs, her philosophy of life — ”
Donnie Ross did not know. He had never asked. Not once.