The Art of the Sextons

TW: Implied rape

[I met the artist a few months after the City died. I was told by a few friends of my brother that he lived a few blocks away from the place where we were resting before leaving the City. He was one of the last people I encountered while researching the events surrounding the City’s fall. I found him in, for lack of a better term, his studio working on a sculpture of three kids playing a game of tag. None of the children looked to be relatives to one another, but they had a sibling’s fondness for each other. And yet, there was an air of sadness to the statue, as there was in all of his work. He was taking a short break when I asked if I could interview him for something I was working on. What follows are his predominately words. I have removed myself from the narration as best as possible, though I do make myself known once or twice. His only request was that I not only redact his name, but also all the others involved.]

It was about five years back. Maybe ten. I forget. Time was a bit difficult to parse back in the bad years. I know, I know you think the bad years ended a lot earlier than ten years. It was longer in the City.

I was young when I started. Maybe 10. Maybe 15. I was just about a young adult then, thrust into a world I didn’t quite understand that felt hostility for the way I look. Sometimes I wonder if things would have been better for us if we were white. Probably not, given we still wouldn’t have been the right kind of white.

I buried my mom outside the City.

I had never been outside the City before that day. It was raining softly, like a cool wind on your face when you go to the north side of the City during the fall. The sky was a Technicolor ballet seen behind cloudy fingers. I never knew my dad.

My mom worked on the streets for a living. Better than most people, I suppose. She made enough for the pair of us to live in one of the nicer apartment buildings with actual beds and landlords and cockroaches. I slept on the floor.

I met one of my neighbors once. He was a lean fellow with a gold ball for an eye. He would sneer at me with his white face about not belonging here. He would laugh at his own jokes and get upset when I didn’t. I knew him very well.

I buried my mom outside the City.

I was the only one who was there to bury her. Her parents died before the bad years. Her sister died during them. My sister was gone. I never knew my dad.

People from outside the City saw me bury her. Some offered to help me out. They were odd people, these non-City folk. They were plumper and older, yet younger and healthier. They had smiles on their faces, not because they were happy. They smiled because they wanted me to be happy. A tan hand offered me a shovel and a pale one offered me a rag. I refused both.

The fellow with the gold ball for an eye offered to help me out. He said he felt pity on my mother for having to work such a terrible job with a child all alone. He never said anything about me. I was a prop in my mother’s tragedy, an albatross, an anchor on a ship. A crutch.

I buried my mom outside the City.

When the hole was finished, the sky opened up. There was a rainbow at the heart of it. My mom had a rainbow tattoo on her left shoulder. She said she got it after my sister died. They found her body two weeks after my mother died.

We knew that she was dead. Few people her age survive in the City long on their own. She was just a kid, my mom would say. Just seven years old. They had an argument before she left. It was over a boy she was dating. I never knew him.

They were in love, she said. They were going to be together whether she liked it or not. My mother did not. She howled about the boy being another mouth to feed. About what his father would say. About what his father would do if he approved of their union. My sister looked at my mother with her cold blue eyes and stormed out of our little home.

The apartment was a fine one, though not necessarily the best one in the complex we lived in. It had enough room for two beds and one table, so long as no one slept in both of those beds. I slept on the floor. My sister slept on one of the beds. My mother slept with in other people’s beds.

A man came over to where I lived once. He had a cloth covering one of his eyes. It was still bleeding. He said he was the father of one of the boys in the apartment. He said that a girl had taken the boy from him. He said she stabbed him in the eye and needed some help.

I buried my mom outside the City.

There was to be no marker on her grave. She didn’t have anything that could represent who she was to me. She was the words she spoke, the tone she spoke them in. Even my thoughts of her voice don’t do it justice.

A boy was found in the river a month before my mother died. He was a year younger than I was at the time, a year older than my sister when she ran away four years prior. Was this the boy she ran away with, I wondered? I asked the fellow with a gold ball for an eye if it was, and he said he didn’t have a son. The people who found the body dumped it on the streets with the rest.

My mom worked for most of the time. When she was gone, I’d look for work of my own. In the early days of the bad years, work was easy to find. Steal “X” for “Person,” punch “Y,” burn “house.” All basic stuff. But the bad years in their twilight decade sucked out the possibilities for work. Sucked out the possibilities for anything, for that matter. All there was left was silence.

The factory was not an option.

My mom once told me a story about my dad. It was a lie, so I won’t tell you. But I liked the story and it brought me comfort.

I tried to stay out of the apartment complex when my mom was working. There was a fellow with a golden ball for an eye there.

I overheard my mom talk to the fellow with the golden ball for an eye about shipping me off to the factory. I needed some work under me, and it would remove a mouth to feed. Two mouths are, after all, better than three. I ran away from them as fast as I could.

I stopped on a hill just outside the City. It had a good view of the brutalist grey landscape. The starless sky seemed to fade out perfectly into the sky of the rest of the world like paint on a canvas or blood in a river. They said the boy was murdered. Nobody cared enough to look into it.

My mom would sing to me when I was little. Mostly nonsense words that make sense to a baby and are nostalgic to an adult. I would fall asleep every time she sung to me no matter how uncomfortable the floor was. No matter how many bugs were in the walls. No matter how sad I was feeling.

My mom never knew my dad. He was just another gig.

I returned home to find my mom dead. Her throat had been slit into a weary smile. Her mouth was agape, like a dove’s when it chokes on a nut. The man with a golden ball for an eye was nowhere to be seen.

I buried my mom outside the City. At least, that was the plan. The hill I stood on was a beautiful place where my thought felt clearer, more refined. It was the perfect place to bury her.

The week after my sister ran away, I talked to the man with one eye. He had found a ball painted gold to replace it with. At least, it looked like a ball. It wasn’t a perfect fit, but it did fit.

He smiled at me like he would my mother. They had been talking before my sister ran away, he claimed. He said they were in love. He said a lot of things that weren’t true. The only time he would tell the truth was when he’d sneer at me with his white face, saying I didn’t belong with them. At least that was a half-truth.

The man with a gold ball for an eye held me down.

He…

[The artist has asked me to keep only the implication of this part. He has told me the whole of it: the shame, the denial, the guilt, the anger, the lies told both to himself and to his mother. I understand his reasoning, though I have other reasons for not telling it. There are some stories that I am the only one who can tell, be they my own stories or being ones only I care enough to tell them. But there are others best left to the work of other artists in their preferred form. Ones I lack the experience and understanding to tell fully. When I asked him if he had done art about the subject, he described his second statue. I smiled a sympathetic smile.]

I buried my mom outside the City. At least, that was the plan. When I saw her in the hole I had made, she looked wrong. Her arms were contorted inwardly, like discarded yarn. I couldn’t leave her like that. Nor could I just leave her lying on some street corner waiting to decompose.

It took three days for me to hit upon my revelation. Three days of watching my mom slowly decay while hoping none of the people playing cop saw me. The eternally night sky echoed through the remains of her eyes. The moon looked down upon us like the mirror of an ex-lover who had just escaped a bad relationship. Her throat wouldn’t stop smiling, even when it was closed. The flies were starting to drink from her. I was cold. I couldn’t go back. Wouldn’t go back. We were alone. I barely knew how to live on my own. I was just 10 or 15, just barely an adult living on his own in the City. I missed her so much. I missed my sister. I missed my dad, or at least the dreams I had of him. I wanted to hear my mom’s voice again, that stupid inane song she used to sing to me when I needed to sleep. It was then that the idea came to me.

I took her outside of where I was sleeping and stood her up by the miserable tree. It was sturdy enough to hold her up while I began my design. But even when I moved her away from the tree, she remained upright. Rigor mortis had long since passed. It was as if the universe was being guided by my design.

When I finished, she was no longer my mother. She was an opera singer performing to an audience. A tribute to a world that had died long ago. She was singing an aria from… [He pauses for some time trying to remember his mother’s favorite album, where the aria comes from. He never does.]

Over the next couple of days, people begin talking about the statue I had made. There was an exhilaration to the anonymity. To being known and unknown by everyone. It didn’t solve my homelessness/hunger problems, but it did warm my heart a bit. Shame it couldn’t the rest of my body.

The next statue I made was a bit more… experimental. I decided to use a male form to avoid criticisms of sexism. It was a bit of an angrier, cruder design. Both of his hands were shoved up his butt. I cut off his mouth and parts of his cheeks to give him a terrified smile. I removed his penis and put it into one of his eye sockets, which was previously missing an eye. Also, I cut off his nose and put it into his left pocket.

From there, the designs varied from corpse to corpse. Some were simple parents teaching their children of many skin tones how to count. Others were more complex cut ups. I didn’t do those that often. Most people preferred the former to the latter, myself included.

Not everyone liked it. I remember hearing some rumblings from the “cops” claiming it was a disgrace, especially after the satirical cut up I did of the former commissioner. They always said they were going to hunt me down, but they never even tried to investigate me. Other things must’ve gotten in the way.

A few weeks after everything changed, a nice guy with red hair confronted me. He said he knew I was the one doing the statues, and he wanted to know if I’d be willing to work on some statues for him. Naturally, I said yes.

[I show him an artistic drawing of the remains of employee 7877. He smiles and slightly chuckles at the image.]

Oh yeah, I remember her, one of my more… crude designs. I found her lying on the walls of the factory like an abandoned teddy bear in a train station. Her throat was slit like my mother’s, though unlike her this cut was self-inflicted.

[How could you tell, I asked.]

This was a few years into doing statues. I’ve seen loads of death and brutality and cruelty in that time. I know what a self-inflicted throat slitting looks like. There’s a distinct angle at the end of the cut where the person flicks their wrist go get the knife out that’s different than when it’s done by someone else.

She was already naked when I found her. Some cold girl must have stolen her clothes or something. She was filthy and not even a day dead. Her teeth were yellow with dismay. Her eyes dead longer than she was.

I decided to do something rather crude with her body. This was shortly after I heard about the “police’s” plans to “arrest” me. It was at the right center point between the police station and the miserable tree. One was a landmark of the City, a crooked broken thing that no one cared about. The other was a tree I liked.

I raised her left hand to her face, scrubbing the pores and grime out of it. Her right hand was between her legs, scrubbing down there for more pleasurable reasons. At the time, I thought I was being clever and ironic by having her be aroused by all the awfulness around her. In practice, I was being an ass.

There was one person who it resonated with for reasons besides the crudity. I was lurking some distance away when he approached. He was a lean guy like many of us were back then. He seemed transfixed by the image I had scrawled with her corpse. As if she reminded him of someone he knew.

[I asked the artist if he did know her.]

I don’t know. Didn’t get the chance since I saw a “cop” behind him.  He was holding a gun, so I bolted. I don’t know what happened to either of them since that moment, but I heard gunshots. I have heard rumors that the non-cop was seen running around with a Sasquatch. The world we live in is quite strange.

[One last question, I asked, have you ever done any deer statues?]

Are you fucking nuts? Like I’d want to risk my life over such small time gains. Now then, I know you didn’t come here just to chat. What do you want me to make for you?

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