Spring Thaw
Tim sheds his skin
[Back to Mad Art Project. This story takes place the day after Conjure Man Steals Fairy Woman. Tim and Donovan are riding around looking for Jethra. Need to catch up? Check out the Table of Contents.
I’m sorry this goes on and on. If you look at the first project in The Sanguine Experiment — it’s called Sad Guy on the Bus — you can find a different, and more importantly, complete, weird bloody tale.]
What is desire? It licks over the landscape like fire on the mountain, speeding through the broom grass, torching the scrub cedar, scattering birds, driving does and their fawns out of the bracken.
What is desire? It shoots frost over the surface of your heart, then works inward, aligning molecules into crystalline stillness. You’re paralyzed with longing, yet you can’t name the thing you want, can’t picture it, can’t feel it — I don’t know how to finish that thought. My notions turn to mist when I try.
Until I started telling you this story — you, reader, whoever you are — I never thought about creating any kind of art. Now I’ve begun, I want to give you everything — all. It’s none of your business, and you certainly haven’t deserved it. Yet here we are.
Is creation desire?
I wanted to write about Jethra, but I hadn’t seen her for 24 years, and besides, I don’t think I understood her even back then. That’s the worst about the kind of self-absorption that beset me — the things I missed out on.
Did feel Jethra feel desire for her art, desire to create art?
When we were young together, I saw her mad art project as something between automatic behavior and deliberate trolling. She wanted me, she couldn’t have me, so she expressed herself in monstrous love letters.
I don’t know why I let her continue. It’s not exactly flattering to be courted by a brawny, weird young woman who publicly delivers you love-notes anointed with period blood. But it is … compelling.
Anyhow, after all these years, Jethra’s project had grown far beyond courtship. She left signposts on every iteration of the mad art project, but even though her clues were for me, they didn’t point toward me, if that makes sense. The vicious politics of our times heightened the stakes a bit, and Jethra being Jethra, she leaned in, having one parodic abortion after the next. But it was more than that.
Why? I asked myself, then asked Jethra, wherever she was. Why?
Maybe I was asking a foolish question. Her body couldn’t help bleeding, after all, any more than a spider’s could help making silk. Burdened with a spontaneous eruption of raw material, what else could she do but make art?
At this point I saw in my mind’s eye the high-tension wires over Jethra’s property on top of the ridge cut. I imagined gazing straight overhead, then looking down, dizzily, at the shimmering air, the duns and cedar-green of the low, new-growth forest in autumn. I imagined the last of the summer’s locusts singing.
I imagined Jethra’s powerful, biscuit-brown thighs — you know what the prop does in rugby, right? — and her dusty brown knees in the dirt. I imagined it as if I was Jethra, looking at the world from her point of view. Spinning blue, veering sunshafts, power wires, horizon, treeline, dry grass, knees, thighs, hands on thighs. I imagined Jethra with calluses on her knuckles and the remnants of bubblegum-pink polish on her fingernails.
Still from her point of view, I imagined her reaching a round, brown arm between her thighs to catch a dollop of blood that lands heavy and warm in her hand.
It’s big as a gerbil, 98 degrees Fahrenheit, trailing rivulets of blood that sluice thickly between Jethra’s fingers. She eases it between her legs, leaving a smear, and holds it close to inspect. It’s wine-colored, almost black. She lifts it closer, cupping it carefully in her palm, and sniffs it. It smells earthy, like something dredged up out of a cave and left to congeal in the sun. At the same time there’s something fierce and free to the smell. It reminds her of the way she feels when she stands on the ridge on a January morning, blinking in the bright wind.
Jethra’s skin tingles. She sticks out her tongue to taste the big mass.
Only blood.
She tips the blood clot into a basin and lays a stained tea towel over the top. The towel’s embroidered with Sunbonnet Sue, half of a pair. Somewhere there’s a matching towel with Overall Bill.
Now Jethra has to work fast to prepare the tiny grave.
I supposed she put her shorts back on first. Jethra always wore her shorts too tight. I added to my imagining:
She has to give a hitch and a shimmy to get her shorts over her behind, then another good hard hitch to settle them in place. She buttons them under her belly. She begins to dig. With her trenching tool she only needs to make a couple of powerful thrusts.
But I was imagining Jethra only a few years older than when I knew her, 28, maybe, or 30. By the time she went missing she would have been — how old? — 46 or 47, I guess. By now she would have it down to an art. Whenever her period gave her raw material she made fantastic burials, and, judging by her social media posting history of said fairy funerals, her periods were long, copious, and frequent.
She was also working as a teaching assistant in a classroom for adolescents with developmental disabilities. She was also mother to a frantic toddler, then a restless boy, then a passionate teenager with a loud mouth, a quick temper, and heavy hands. The hills tamed Donovan at last, and Jethra had always been competent at her work, but still. For more than 20 years, dawn to dark and half most nights, she was caring for someone else. Then she had to clean the house, run the tractor over the property to keep the meadow grass from turning into thickets, and, of course, pay the bills. No help, no vacation, very little spare cash.
She needed a bathroom break every hour, sometimes every half hour, which can be inconvenient if you work a direct-support job. Mostly she just wore black pants and squelched.
Men seize the day. Women seize spare moments. The moment might be early morning or noon or after dark. Could be freezing or sweltering out. The moment might last three minutes or 20 if you’re lucky. You can’t be precious — oh, I can’t make art before dawn, I need a beer first, I have to be in the right frame of mind, I should wait for inspiration — none of that. You flick the whip against your thigh. You make your art, you get interrupted, you seize the next moment when it comes. You never stop to notice your monstrous heroism. You just get on with it.
I do despise women — I haven’t lied to you — but not for this. Not for this.
This astounds me.
I imagined it all again, revising my thoughts to picture an older Jethra. When I tried to think of mature Jethra, though, I couldn’t see her face. I imagined her as if I was standing behind her, looking over her shoulder, maybe seeing her features in one-quarter profile, longing for her to turn her head.
She makes short work of her monstrous birth, constructs the wildwood creche with brisk attentiveness, takes her photos, and connects to the spotty internet so she can use her computer to make the post.
“Penelope Moonchild — ”
Her fingers are rusty with blood and red clay. She has white clover wound into her curls. She —
Now this was pure longing. I was dolling her up to feed my nostalgia. Exasperated with myself, I let my imaginings go. Here I am looking for Jethra, I thought, and I don’t even know who I’m looking for.
It’s still true, I suppose. Here I set out to tell you about Jethra, yet how can I do anything but lie?
Meanwhile, Donovan and I had driven Zara T home to Chattanooga and were heading back up and around the mountain. After yesterday’s freeze, Marion County was melting under the spell of a spring thaw. Not that we didn’t shiver every time we opened the windows. It might have been 38 or 40 degrees outside, gusty, with clouds scudding over the sky and bright scraps of sunlight dancing over limestone and new-grass-green fields. Here and there an early-blooming redwood smudged the gray hillside rose-violet.
Donovan, who had rolled the window down to vape, rolled it up again.
“Whoof!” he said. “Colder’n a witch’s titty up here.”
I suppose there’s no school like the old school. “Umph,” I agreed.
Then I thought of something. How recently had Jethra begun arranging her art in concentric circles? When had she made the fairy ring?
“Donovan, when’d you move out from your momma?” I asked.
He thought about it. “Spring of 2017, I reckon.” He nodded. “After high school I trained to do EMT and cave rescue, and I moved down off the ridge when I got my first full-time job.”
So Jethra had lived alone longer than I imagined. Seven years now.
As we drove on, up one mountain and down the next, spitballing where someone could have hidden a full-grown woman — answer: anywhere — I wasn’t any nearer to understanding Jethra.
The only thing I understood was this. Now that Jethra had grown far beyond her ridiculous infatuation with me, I was in love with her.