a digression

Painting

Stretching your fingers and curling them until your knuckles turn translucent, the bones aching beneath peeling skin, a length of canvas sighs and buckles over its wooden frame. Then you crash the staple gun into its back. The canvas vibrates, and you think it is fraying a little on the bottom left corner. You turn it towards you. Or rather, you turn toward it. You turn toward the canvas and say, “you nasty little fucker, why can’t you keep it together?” and slam a staple through it.
The canvas is a perfect square, thirty-six by thirty-six inches, and you are wrestling with it in the musky cellar beneath Rowan Tree Pottery. Your friend lives and works there; that is to say, she lives and works among Rowan Tree Pottery. She lives and works among that run-down, barn-like cracked and plastered structure where the air hangs thick with the fog of dusty clay and sand. She has agreed to let you rent the cellar for the summer. Upstairs, her spine is breathing beneath a linen T-shirt that reads ‘Maine, The Way Life Should Be!’ as she hunches over the relentless wheel. Her cups, bowls, plates, creamers, and kettles keep watch like hundreds of fragile sparrows. The flock perches with tail feathers and feet glazed over and abandoned. And here you are, downstairs, trying to rip things apart.
You have concluded that this is not a painting. Ce n'est pas une peinture, and, for the record, you also speak terrible French. Your kneecaps are ashy, and a scar runs down one leg because of that one dumb time you were so high at your little brother’s soccer game. You ran down the gravel path in search of the field and instead came upon a pothole, tripped, dropped your glass bottle of milk into shards on the gravel as your kneecap surged into the puddle. But this is surely not a painting.
In lieu of the thing being a painting, perhaps it is just a thing painted. An obligation. Several other obligations sit in neat stacks along the edge of the left brick wall. You have slicked gesso over most of them. The two finished pieces are coiled and tied with twine. They lie on top of the pile. One is of your friend, upstairs; her hands plunge into a vat of wet clay as she looks downward. You can’t remember what the other is, but you reason that it is finished because it is not stapled and stretched.
Everything else down here looks haphazard. You are working at a once-was circular dining room table otherwise occupied by seven cardboard boxes, one of which is labeled “accoutrements,” a brass lamp, lightbulbess, and a small radio stuck on AM 1430. Some whiskey dragged throaty rumble is filtering through the speakers, and CA-CHINK, you slam another staple.
You put the staple gun on the table and turn off the radio. Upstairs, the wheel is whirring rhythmically, and you feel the compression of her foot against the pedal and the spinning air. Like a foot on your chest. The air in the cellar below Rowan Tree Pottery smells like moss and tobacco, crumpled up and left in the rain. You light a cigarette, anxiously flicking your Zippo as you cast shadows toward the cellar door. Despite the wet pall that seems to send small dribbles of condensation down the walls, the flame hovers triumphantly. Your right hand, holding the Zippo, discovers the latch. With your left hand, you reach toward the wooden cross beam and heave the door open.

Something is silhouetted in the doorframe. At first, you cannot discern what it is that is staring at you. The sunlight pouring in behind it is deafeningly intense; the noise of bright white shakes your body violently. You squint. Instinctually, you move the Zippo toward the silhouette, which does nothing in the pool of white.
It is an animal. And it is moving towards you, for some ungodly reason, into this cellar, which you desperately need to leave. It is a raccoon. And the raccoon jumps down the stairs, between your legs, bounding franticly into the gloom. You shriek.

The whirring upstairs has stopped, but you can hear neither footsteps nor movement above the cellar. Maybe she too has been overtaken by raccoons. You stub your cigarette out on the heel of your right work boot, glance at the open cellar door, and return to the table, to the radio, to the accoutrements. And then you turn the radio back on, and something like Joni Mitchell wails around the cellar as if you think that should coax your raccoon out of hiding. You scan the room nervously. The brick wall, the hot water heater, the tub of white gesso, the pile of obligations. The un-painting.
Something is stirring behind the tub of white gesso. Crouching down on your haunches, you reach up to the radio and gently turn the volume knob as loud as possible. Then you take hold of the staple gun. You want to kill this raccoon.
You know the raccoon is behind the tub of white gesso. You can see the tail, bushy and bristly like a broom, swinging back and forth in the corner near your obligations. He must be terrified of Joni Mitchell. Or you. Or the staple gun. Or the cellar door. Gripping the staple gun in your clammy hands, you rock back and forth on the balls of your feet, and CA-CHINK, you fire a staple into the air.
This sends the raccoon into a frenzy, the metallic shock and crash that has sunk its teeth into the murky cellar air. Knocking the gesso over and splattering its body into the pool, the raccoon writhes in the milky goo, its tiny claws scratching at the cellar floor. You are dumbfounded. As you watch this animal, beady black eyes poking through white matted fur, you begin to feel nauseous. Like the raccoon is squirming through your intestines and up through your throat. You remember your painting. Or your un-painting. You stand up and try to reach for your un-painting, half tacked on to a thirty-six by thirty-six frame and fraying around the edges, but the raccoon gets there first.
The bristly white thing scampers up onto the table, knocks over the lamp, and throws its body onto your un-painting in a desperate attempt to rid itself of the quickly drying gesso. You scuttle backwards, like a crab, and clench your stomach. Soon, the raccoon stops squirming and turns its little face toward you, on the floor, at the edge of the puddle. The radio is still on, knocked over onto its side and muffled.
You put your left hand in the puddle of white gesso, feeling the thick medium ooze between your fingers. Upstairs, the whirring sound begins again, and you think about taking all the staples out and coiling this with twine atop your pile of other obligations. The raccoon lumbers off the table and out of the cellar as you stretch your body across the milky white floor, already beginning to collect a fresh layer of dust that is wafting slowly from the eaves of the ceiling.