A Grisly Thing

Sibyl drew the portrait above my deathbed. Called it "Centipede Sis'."

Grisly thing.

I sat for a number of artists before, but none captured the burgundy black of my curls like Sibyl - though, any resemblance frayed with the split ends of the subject. 

She wanted my chin pointed towards the ceiling. I held it aloft for four hours. Poised. Obedient. I still feel the crick in my neck whenever the AC works too well. There were phones back then. She could have taken a picture. She refused. Said it was different. Said she needed to get "it" right. 

Imagine my shock when I was permitted a peek. My brows creaked. Stiff as joints.

"What -" I coughed. 

The paradox of choice plagued me. I did not know where to look. Where to start.The watercolor was . . . not bad, but certainly not right. Who was this? What was it?

"What's that around her?" I said, eventually. 

Sibyl sighed. "Not her. You." She picked up a gold tipped brush, its red handle chipped down to pale wood. "It's a centipede.” Her hand hovered above the canvas, sable eyes roaming its woven roads of thread like a drag racer. Our garage, ever shadowed, hungered for daylight. Lord knows why she preferred to work at night, starved of illumination. “You're merging,” she said, her pebble smooth voice like gravel. 

I stared, horrified. "Why would you draw her - me? Why would you draw me like that?"

She flicked the brush between her thumb and forefinger. Countless resplendent dots of yellow splattered the underbelly of the massive invertebrate. Delicate and messy work. The same technique applied in red dotted the creature and my doppelganger, pinpricks where their bodies met. The centipede gathered its body along her arm. Wrapped beneath her breast. Draped about her neck, a noose of forcipules. Red pulled from the side of her mouth. My mouth. It fell, a soft drizzle unto white cotton. 

Satisfied, Sibyl fisted her hand in her apron. She took a step back. "Cancer," she said. 

"What?"

"The centipede represents cancer."

My shoulders itched. "I don't have cancer." 

"You didn't," she said simply.

I was terrified. A wisp. My voice was small too, barely a whisper. “But - but I was joking.” “I didn’t mean, -”

Sibyl reached for another brush, hesitated, then grabbed a pinky thick stick by its yarn-needle end, and plunged it in a jar of gunmetal gray. 

“You can’t do this,” I said. “Please.”

“If you didn’t want the germ to grow, you should not have planted it.” Sibyl’s voice was soft. “You needn't have sowed what you wished never to reap.”

“But, -” It seemed my words had taken cover in darkness. Inky thoughts disordered on black canvas. It is a thing to know what someone may say. Another to hear them say it. Sibyl had all but recited my eulogy while my obituary was still being written. “Can it not be reversed?”

“You told me you wished it was so. Wish granted.”

“No,” I said. “I thought we were talking about someone else. I thought . . .”

Sibyl turned to me, her mouth a hard line. “You thought you could just do what you always have, speak ill of someone. To anyone.”

“I didn’t know.”

Her expression softened. “You were warned.”

My head shook, side to side. Side to side. Side to - “When?”

Sibyl’s smile was sad. “Enough.”

I never knew how to ask for what I wanted, so I asked for what I could have. “Can you explain?”

Sibyl poked her brush at the dress. Depth emerged from the white space with each stormy swipe. “I can try,” she said, her hand a blur of swift motion. 

A ruffle of movement at the hem of my shirt tickled my stomach. I jumped back. I thought I saw a bug, maybe a moth, but there was nothing there. The skin on my abdomen tingled without any discernible cause and yet, my eyes wandered down and then to the painting. To Sibyl’s hand along the belly of the subject who was not, apart from her hair, anything like me. I did not sneer.

Sibyl’s head fell to one side and she leaned into the ginger probes of her brush. “Why did you agree to sit?” 

“That is not an explanation.”

“No, it is not. Why did you agree to sit?”

“Because your kind fascinates me. And I don’t mind being looked at. And I wanted to be,-”

“Centerstage,” Sibyl interrupted. “Most gossipers do love attention.” She looked over her shoulder, eyes on mine and immovable. Her bottom lip caught between her teeth. “Come now, you wanted to be part of the attraction. ‘Freaks,’ all of us. ‘Drawing lives and morbid conclusions,’ am I right?”

My words in her voice sounded hollow. They were funny when I said them. “I only meant that you draw fate. You’re seers. It’s what you're known for!” 

Sibyl cringed.

“You needn’t be loud. You want an explanation, so I will give you one.” She dropped the brush among its horse haired brethren. “You told me seers were freaks. That we kill. Bring disease. Bad luck.” She bore her bottom teeth, clamped them shut, ground her molars audibly, and turned on a heel to look at the trees behind the driveway. “You said you’d rather a cancer crawl into your bones and fester there, than be known for leaving rot around.”

“I didn’t know you were one of them!”

“You did when you agreed to sit.”

“I was trying to be nice.”

“You are not a nice person." The words cut with the finesse of a painter's knife, at once wielded and leveled in her hand. “And your opinion of others is no better than the rot you’d accuse of me and 'my kind.'”

Sibyl cut at the red drip still mid cascade from my muzzle. She ran a finger through it and like lightning in a midnight sky, struck out to mark my chin in the same way. The air crackled in my ears, electricity through peach fuzz covered temples. I was vision and art. Alive and stillness incarnate.

“I’ve done you a kindness,” she said. “No one can ever say that you were always, entirely, speaking out the side of your neck.” 

Funny thing, that. 

No one says anything, anymore. Not about me.

Grisly thing.