Bad Stacks Story Collection Box Set (16 page)

And then he wouldn’t finish the painting.

Faces now crowded his painting. They seemed to reach down through the ages. All were dressed in different styles and wardrobes, and Leo thought he might have recognized some of them, but he wasn’t sure. His knowledge of history was really quite scant. He spent his time painting, after all. Not reading history books.

Dinnertime came and went and Leo bled alone with his masterpiece. The phone rang several times throughout the day, but he ignored it. He heard his cell phone vibrating in the next room, as text after text were received—probably from a very concerned and worried Lawrence. Leo left the messages unread.

Blood in the bucket was now at the four-inch mark. A child of five would have had trouble lifting the bucket.

At the five-inch mark, Leo’s whole body began shaking—everything, that is, but his painting hand, which he held steady. He always managed to hold his painting hand steady.

And, later, when the vision suddenly blurred, Leo looked immediately at the gash in his left arm, assuming the wound had congealed over again. But it hadn’t. Indeed, the blood was still dribbling freely, although with less reckless abandon.

What was this?

The visions had only blurred when his flowing blood had been staunched—or when the painting was complete. Neither was the case here. Leo paused briefly and closed his eyes and relaxed his tired lids. Maybe he needed a break. Already he had painted longer and harder than he had for any of his previous paintings.

A moment later, he opened his eyes and the vision was mercifully still there, stronger than ever. Leo smiled. He resumed painting. He just needed to rest.

An hour later, as an exhausted Leo compared the vision to his painting, he saw with elation that the painting was nearly complete.

Nearly.

Still, the apple tree off to the left of the young man in the painting was in sad shape. Leo spent a half an hour on the tree, adding minute changes here and there. And as he was about to add a touch of gator green to some background leaves, his painting hand hand finally began shaking.

Shit.

Never before had he reached the point where his painting hand shook. And as it shook, a voice inside him protested this madness. But not loudly enough. Mostly, the voice was tired and wanted to sleep. A long, long sleep. The big sleep. Still, it begged him to please, please, please look into the bucket, to please look at what he was doing to himself.

So Leo did just that. He forced himself to pause long enough to glance into the mop bucket. It was seven inches full of his precious hemoglobin. If dumped into a bathtub, it would spread over the entire surface and take a minute or two to drain.

I’m killing myself.

Leo closed his eyes and told himself to finish the painting another day; after all, the painting was nearly complete. As it stood now, it was still a masterpiece.

But it’s not finished.

If Leo stopped, the vision would be gone, and the fine details would be lost. In particular, there was one last face to fill in. That of a young man, standing among the other, older men.

The pause did Leo good. His right hand had stopped twitching, albeit briefly, and so he raised the brush, ignored the voice protesting faintly in the back of his skull, and dabbed some color from the palette and proceeded to add the details of the young man’s face. The face looked achingly familiar, but Leo was in no condition to plumb his memory for the reason why.

He continued with the face and, once done, he touched up the rest of the painting here and there, sharpening images, enhancing colors, perfecting his vision.

And then he was done. Or so he thought.

As his heart beat so softly that he wondered if it was beating at all, dark fingers reached from behind his head and slowly covered his eyes. His painting hand dropped to the floor; Leo’s head tilted to one side, and he closed his eyes. Blood still trickled slowly into the bucket.

But the demon muse that lived within him was not done with him. No, not by a long shot. It shone a burning spotlight into his nearly unconscious brain.

It’s still incomplete,
said the voice.
You’re not done!
Wake up! Wake up! You cannot die now with the painting still incomplete!

And with a force of will that surprised even him—for Leo was always one who loved sleep more than life itself—the young painter managed to stir himself awake. He cracked open his heavy eyes and lifted his alabaster white face toward the magnificent painting before him. He spotted immediately what needed to be done. A fallen leaf was missing. A leaf, and no more. And it needed to be placed on the dirt path that led to the jeweled city shining gloriously in the far distance.

And so Leo raised his arm, lifted the tip of the brush to the palette, found the colors he needed, and moved the tip over to the canvas. He flicked his wrist once, twice, and the perfect leaf appeared on the path, gleaming wetly.

But, alas, Leo knew that he was still not done. The devil muse would not let him off that easily. Oh, no. The painting needed one last touch. One last
personal
touch. Leo finally understood.

He commanded the fingers of his cold left hand to work. They ignored him at first, but finally jerked once, then twice. A corpse awakening. Now he commanded his fingers to grip the edge of the nearly full bucket. They did so, albeit clumsily.

Leo stood on shaky legs. Darkness attacked him, like a massive black wave rising up before him. He fought through it. As he stood, lifting the bucket of blood, the painting before him seemed to recede rapidly. To Leo, it now looked like a tiny stamp at the far end of a long, black tunnel.

With his last remaining strength, Leo heaved the contents of the bucket onto his painting. A crimson wave of death
slammed
into the canvas, knocked it over.

Leo lost his balance and fell. The bucket landed on top of him, and the remaining blood spilled out from it and covered his face and mouth and drowned what little breath remained in him.

Leo slept forever.

* * *

In contemporary art history books one might find a sentence or two, perhaps even a whole paragraph, on Leo Dershowitz. In one such textbook, after commenting on Leo’s contribution to contemporary art, it finished with this: “Leo Dershowitz committed suicide soon after creating, arguably, his greatest work, a macabre vision of what many believe to be the afterlife. Populating the piece are many of history’s greatest artists, in which Leo, perhaps egotistically, included himself. In the painting, Leo can be found walking along a wooded, tree-lined path toward a jeweled city in the far distance, a city that many believe to be Heaven. The painting, amazingly, was doused with Leo’s own life blood, perhaps a statement of the price of art, of the sacrifice of art, and of one man’s devotion to his craft.”

THE END

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AFTERWORD: FROM THE ASHES

Looking back over old work is like looking at photographs: you see that younger, more innocent, and more foolish version of yourself and wonder how you ever got this far, and how you never really understood much of what was shaping your life at the time.

Writers love their own words. They have to. They spend much of their time isolated, hunched over a keyboard, squinting at a screen until their eyes burn and their spines scream and their wrists stiffen in protest. And all they have to show for the sacrifice is a scattering of glyphs that sometimes seems to have no meaning in any language. To then assume that barrage of symbols will take on a comprehensive narrative and satisfying arc is truly an act of arrogance.

But writers go one step further–we expect people to not only read the words, to not only piece them together into a coherent story, but we demand adoration for our act. And, occasionally, a little bit of cold coin.

The only time I will voluntarily reread an old story is when I am revising it or proofing it for a book like the one you hold in your hands. Because my first instinct is to correct all the flaws that are now so obvious to the wiser and more battle-scarred version of myself, and the second is to cringe and fling the offensive prose into the recycling heap. Sure, there was youthful vigor aplenty in the tales, a little brashness and vanity, and a barely hidden glee in the process of stacking words as if they were a child’s alphabet blocks. But just as the parent must come in and clean up what the petulant child has kicked over, the writer must look at his older work with nothing less than total dismay.

There is one saving grace, though. These stories saved my life and helped me reach this little scenic turnout in the journey.

I wrote most of these stories when I was struggling with alcoholism, depression, fatherhood, divorce, selfishness, fear, and other personal trauma, all of it self-inflicted. And all I could do was scream onto the page in much the same way pre-morphine amputees screamed into the pillows in the field hospitals of bygone wars. Hear me, don’t hear me.

As a result we have this collection as documentation of that period of my life when I could easily have gone the other way–into the darkness and despair that I so often ridicule others for embracing as
poseur
stage costume. Perhaps there’s a lesson in the cumulative pile of burnt offerings, but that old photograph is as much gray as it is black and white.

So here’s a little color commentary to flesh out the fantasy.

Homecoming
-I don’t know how many different versions of this story I’ve written. It began in a college writing class and was almost universally panned by my fellow students. I knew something was in there, though, something that kept calling me back. I still remember my instructor Jade Hyunh’s words: “You write with feeling. I say go for it.”

The story was originally published in 1998 in
Maelstrom
, a tiny fold-and-staple publication. After the story was published, I found a much longer version in a drawer. Good. Charlie is a man of few words, anyhow.

Haunted
-Written in the summer of 1998, it started with the idea of “What of ghosts  are themselves haunted by the living?” It appeared in the anthology
More Monsters From Memphis
, was first runner-up for the Darrell Award, and received an Honorable Mention in
Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror
.

The Christening—
This story appeared in the summer of 2008 at WrongWorld,
a short-lived publisher who was attempting to sell fiction via compact disc. Probably about eight years too late, and even then, the CD market for fiction would never have been cool because of all the fuss you have to go through. Another “haunted pregnancy” story. You think pregnancy does weird things to a woman, try being a man sometimes . . .