Inga the Supernova

In a galaxy far, far away-it seems that's where her head is at these days. Or maybe it's with her twin brother in the wormy soil. She sits stooped in the shade of the tree at a park near campus, the lunch Vaso made sat in her lap half eaten even when it wasn't a big portion. It is half of what Vaso usually makes for himself. Vaso meets her under the tree, squatting next to her, eyeing the lunchbox and then her with thin lips. 

"No appetite again?" Vaso asked.

"I've no appetite for anything, really. Everything disgusts me." Inga didn't mean the food, Vaso knew that. She's those Fine Arts types: brooding. Does nothing but ruminate. Declares the artistic merit of random things. Vaso, on the other hand, took accounting. It's all no nonsense until you try to cook the book. Something like that. Inga's insipid little jokes where her eyes kind of crinkle into a smile but not really.

Vaso sits beside her, trying to coax another piece of chicken into her mouth with the fork. He had thought fried chicken would work, Inga likes fried chicken. The chicken squishes against her lips but is refused  entry. Vaso pokes the chicken at her mouth again and again until he relents and eats it himself. It was an unproblematic tasting chicken. It tasted pretty good for something sitting in a lunchbox for only a few hours.

"Well you should really reconsider the topic for your assignment. It's only going to put you off your food even more." Inga had an elaborate art project going on in their living room. She had sat her untouched portion of their 5 year anniversary dinner as a centerpiece amongst fresh produce and flowers on a banquet table. She had seemed happy seeing Vaso's effort, but she hadn't touched a bite, murmuring in her usual manner "I don't feel hungry." Vaso was perplexed but though he understood when he saw the still life-esque arrangement. It had seemed very grand, like a shrine to food. He had been a bit flattered it was his cooking. He thought she was going to paint it. Instead, she had set up a time-lapse, and she would take photos of it every few days to document the condition of her arrangement as it started to wilt and sag, and then rot over the past two weeks. However her prints and videos would never be able to capture the putrid smell of rot or deal with the infestation of bugs Vaso had been diligently attempting to keep at bay.

Of course they had fought. On the fourth day:

Vaso: "I really must insist you put a stop to this project soon. It's going to smell if you keep this up any longer."

Inga: "Let's break up."

Vaso: "Inga!"

Inga: "If you can't bear this, let's break up anyway."

Vaso: "You're being silly. I won't. But this is quite disgusting. Please stop."

Inga: "..."

Vaso: "It's not good to be so preoccupied with decay. Please stop darling. We'll never get rid of the smell if this goes on. It's going to get on the carpet."

But Vaso bore it. Vaso now temporary lives at a friend's place, while Inga photographs the putrefying banquet table in their living room. She still sleeps in the same house, spends hours observing it if Vaso didn't drag her out the house, or if she didn't have classes. When the smell got unbearable, Vaso goes to the house every few days in gloves and mask, battling the new residents of the place flying and scuttling about. When Inga was at class, he would gas the house with pesticide and air out the space. He would try feed and water Inga, and continue his attempts to cajole/persuade/beg her into ending this new fixation.

Is it no wonder she's put off food? If she wasn't on campus, or generally out and about, she would be home, herself rotting with that festering banquet table as though she herself was another squash or sunflower liquefying or shriveling in that living room. 

Vaso chalked it up to her coping with depression. Artistic self-expression. For her last project, she had painted glossy sardines in acrylic. Sardines lying in their flat rectangular tins, but instead of the silvery fish being beheaded and gutted, the whole fish with their milky, oily eyes stare uncannily at you when you stand at the right vantage point, their flesh on their delicate bodies ruptured from either being mishandled or having been overcooked. Vaso couldn't understand why sardines, or why the painting was so big. It was nearly as tall as her. Before that (and as a warm-up?), studies in anchovies. Preserved in their jars, picked apart, dried. Hung from the ceiling like an elaborate hanging garden. For that installation, Vaso had at least convinced Inga to at least embalm the dried fish in some sort of coating. Inga had dipped the strings of anchovies like fishy fairy lights in epoxy and hung them to dry (thankfully) in the university studio area. The other students would complain if Inga had done the banquet table timelapse there.

Vaso should have convinced her to set up her little art project in an abandoned building or the middle of the woods somewhere. If they tried to move the table now, something would quiver and burst, like maybe the squash. When he checked on it yesterday, it had sagged concerningly under its own weight like a deflated tyre. He had doused the table with more pesticide hoping the food on the table would be rendered inhospitable to future generations of unwelcome housemates. Vaso clamps his eyes shut and takes a fortifying breath through his nose. He imagines finally being given permission to clean away the mess. He imagines burning the goddamn table. As they say, if you can't beat them…

"Inga darling, have you given your project a name?"

She pushed the lunchbox to Vaso, to get him to finish eating it. "Five Year Anniversary," she says and gives him a little smile. He smiles back, perplexed. "Well you'll have to explain it a little more to an accounting student like me."

"The banquet. I saved up the dinner you made for this piece."

"Yes, I know. And then you watch it…decay?" His smile edges on the territory of a grimace. "I don't really understand. Are you that unhappy? With me?" Not that Vaso ever understood Inga. In fact he had made peace with it. On some days he believed it was just her depression talking. Her depression talked on most days. Some days she would look light and unburdened. He knew she liked looking pretty, and enjoyed wearing delicate things. Most days she brooded, and when he asked why, she shook her head: unable to describe, unable to confess. Before they dated, her mother had said offhandedly about Inga she's going to be a heartbreaker, that girl. Inga's mother's comment would drift into his consciousness sometimes and he would find himself surprised at the small swell of bittersweetness that followed. Inga had simply said yes when he asked her out. He had asked her out nonchalantly and she had replied the same way. If he had asked her out with more enthusiasm, and promised her the world and a sea of stars, would she have responded back matching his enthusiasm? He suspects they would have been different people entirely.

"No, not unhappy with you at all," Inga murmured, giving him a little smile. It seemed like there was more to decipher but Vaso, as usual, never has the right tools for it. "Maybe too happy."

Inga's earlier works had been portraits, before the subject of her art turned to food, and then putrescence. Her first notable work had been of her twin brother, of him laid in his casket, a sort of serene, glowing piece. Inga had said she was jealous of her twin brother, of his peace, of the permanence. A sleeping youth with an indecipherable smile, the luster of his face incandescent ivory and pink. Ethereal. If Inga closed her eyes, her face would have held an uncanny similarity to the painting of her twin. No, he couldn't understand. But he could bear it.

"Then marry me?" It isn't the first time Vaso brought it up. Neither is it insensible. Five years. He isn't asking her to marry him instantly, not even soon. Just, eventually. "Marry me someday."

"I want you to remember me at my best, Vaso." She cups his face with both hands, looking into him like she's admiring a particularly stunning piece of porcelain. She also likes those a lot. Big white fragile vases or teacups. "I do wish my best was better. I should put on a vitamin C mask tonight."

Vaso kisses her forehead. "You're being silly again. I love all of you. Why do you think I haven't stopped you from ruining our home with that elaborate anniversary dinner piece?"

Inga frowns and pushes away from him. "That's because you're a silly man yourself. Silly if you believe we can still enjoy each other as we do now. We're all -" She waves her hand about in frustration, faced again with her inability to describe, her inability to confess. Perhaps to herself.

"Wont you love me when I'm old and wrinkly?" he asks her playfully, leaning in. "What's so bad about a noble dream to grow old and senile together?"

Inga had earned a slap from her mother over sketching her twin, where she had stayed at his side obsessively at the funeral home. After Inga's portrait of her brother, her portraits turned exclusively to women. It started with her mother, her aunts, her grandmother. You're sick for spending so much time with the dead. This isn't grieving, Inga. This is morbid. If you want to paint, paint the living. She had obliged, painting rather uninspired, but slightly off portraits of her family. The pallor of their skin held an uncanny tinge, a hyper-fixation of hyperrealism, women ageing like how squashes liquefy in their skin. She painted the dead like they had transcended, and the living like the dead, perhaps rebelliously. Her professor had chuckled and commenting about it being Freudian. Vaso guessed it was a compliment.

Inga's chin pushes her lip into a pout and she turned her head even further away from Vaso. "That sounds horrible. I hate it. I love you, but I hate it!"

Vaso sighs in frustration. "Then what would you rather do, Inga my love?"

"We count each of the anniversaries we have together until we get bored of each other and we break up. And we celebrate them, for each happy year we get. Then we can break up knowing we gave each other our best years, nothing more, nothing less." The very awful thing is that Inga sincerely means each and every word. Vaso buries face into Inga's shoulder, his eyes stinging, his breathing growing harsh. He waits for his own breathing to even out.

"Then I'll make you so many celebrate so many anniversaries until you get sick of me you'll be begging me to let you go. And then when I die I'll haunt you and annoy you-" He sucks in a ragged breath. "You're unbearably cruel Inga." Unlike Inga, Vaso was a man with a poor imagination, and embarrassingly simple dreams. If he is to become an accountant, then, even if Inga was to be locked up in her own convoluted mind, depressed for the rest of time, he could offer her stability. Feed her and water her. But she, she's wound up so tight in his cupped hands, he had been afraid that if he let go, she would eject with the force of a supernova. No, he had a wild imagination, it just wasn't the sort he wanted to see expressed in reality. His imagination orbiting Inga horrified him as much as perhaps Inga's own existence horrified herself. "Don't leave me."

Inga pets Vaso's hair, feeling uncomfortable in her skin. "Oh, did I mention?" Inga blinks suddenly. "The banquet piece. Five Year Anniversary. It's a portrait of me. The rest of me. Don't I turn twenty-five tomorrow?"

Vaso suspects Inga is having a quarter-life crisis.