Owned: A Mafia Menage Romance(133)

“That thing weighs like sixty pounds, doesn’t it?” I muttered, below Melissa’s hearing.

Bridget nodded and sucked her teeth.

“Oh yeah, at least,” she agreed. “And it actually goes on the other wall, over there.”

I turned my back so only Bridget could see my face.

“So she’s not off punishment yet?”

She shrugged. “Practice makes perfect. Did you bring me goodies?”

“Yes,” I nodded. “Can we, uh… Go to the front?”

“Sure. Hey, Melissa? You know what…. I’m thinking this should really go over there.”

Melissa let her forehead thump against the wall, her upper arms visibly jiggling from the strain of holding the piece up.

“OK, Bridget,” she called out meekly as we walked to the front gallery.

“I’m surprised you’re still torturing her,” I said.

“Yeah… It’s losing its zing, but whatever. So what’s in the box?”

“Hornets,” I answered.

“Ooooh!” she cooed, clapping her hands together under her chin. “Let’s see them!”

I snapped open the clips on the crate and pulled out the piece, handling it carefully because it was nowhere near dry.

“OK, OK…” she breathed excitedly, walking carefully toward it on her too-high lucite platform heels and bending at the waist. She peered at it and nodded vigorously, shaking loose a fistful of amethyst curls that looked like they had been candy-coated.

“I like your hair, by the way,” I offered.

“Shh!” she hissed, waving me back with her thickly lacquered nails. “I’m absorbing!”

“OK, OK, absorb all you want,” I muttered and backed away, taking in the whole wall of other works. Though they were mostly highly textured abstracts with some twigs and chicken wire and crap embedded in the troweled surfaces, there was a collection of highly detailed portraits of imaginary monsters to the left, painted in monochrome like Victorian photographs. It was a clever and compelling sort of humanity: the weepy cyclops, the overly excited ghost no one could hear, the grotesquely grinning troll with the lopsided horns sprouting from his forehead. Each character smiled from behind the domed glass as though proudly sitting for a school portrait. They made me wistful. Did they even know they were monsters?

“I love it,” Bridget was saying over and over.

“I’m glad,” I said loudly, trying to see the portrait of the troll a little closer, but my reflection in the glass kept getting in the way. The mid-afternoon sun was bouncing all around the gallery like a rubber ball.

“You see how you interlock now?” she said, squinting at me then back to the painting with her head cocked. I tilted my head to the side and backed up. Taken altogether, yes, I thought I could see what she meant. Though my work was different, it “worked” with the others. We were all distinct, clearly singing out notes that seemed to harmonize in a group.

“Huh,” I responded. “And I didn’t interlock before?”

“No, not really. There wasn’t enough there, there. If you know what I mean.”

“I’m sure I don’t,” I lied. Actually I knew exactly. I was just a little tired of hearing it.

She reached out and poked a corner, flicking at a barely-there hornet that seemed to hover above the painting’s surface.

“There’s something really... menacing about this, Mar,” she breathed.

“Well, hornets are fucking scary,” I responded.

“Yeah, but… Whew. You know?”

She looked at me, her kohl-black eyes blinking meaningfully. I shrugged.

“Like,” she continued, searching for more words, “like a goddamn threat, you know? Like a warning.”

“I guess,” I said, but inside I was both thrilled and a little put off. Was it so easy to read me now? On the one hand, that would be amazing: to assemble seemingly unrelated images to create a clear emotional message. On the other hand, those were my private thoughts and I couldn’t help feeling a little invaded.

“Where did it come from?” she asked, knuckling her chin, careful not to disturb her thick layer of purple lip gloss.

“A dream, I guess.”

“Aw fuck, please, god no,” she drawled.

I winced. “What?”

“Please don’t give me any art-school I saw it in a dream crap…”

“Well, it’s a dream of a real thing though,” I sulked, offended that she would conflate me with those wanna-be imposters. “I think it is, anyway. I don’t know. I sort of remember a party, like a cookout. My mom was there, so I must have been pretty young. Everything seemed totally fine. Everybody was laughing, you know. And at first I remember seeing one or two hornets, no big deal… The party just kept going.”