Part 1 of 2

“They ought to put out the eyes of painters as they do goldfinches in order that they can sing better.”

- Pablo Picasso

Sara had her hands inside the bowels of the printer, like a doctor handling the heart of a surgery patient with blood-slippery fingers. The jammed cartridge was drooling gobs of ink and her palms felt warm and tacky. Like flypaper dangling from awnings on a summer afternoon.

The machine seemed to groan softly.

A surgery patient waking up.

Shedding sleep like onionskins.

Beside her, Lucas was shaking his head and fingering a stack of papers in his hand. “I can't believe we're still usin' paper and ink and crap-pigs like this. It's as if the Hierarchy is completely ignoring our department. We say we need an extra allowance and they say that 'God'll provide' and 'Be steadfast and patient'. Citizen, you got no idea how many times a week things like this happen.”

Lucas ran a hand through his hair. Flakes of dead skin fluttered around his head for a moment like gnats and Sara returned his limp looking smile; fluorescent lights sketching a tired halo around his head and shuddering at her from the basement ceiling like children watching a public execution. The air tasted like reams and reams of paper and had a thick, melted styrofoam humidity.

And the smell of ink was invading lungs.

It made her brain feel like a dead jellyfish.

“I suppose it's for the best,” she said.

“I guess. Although they need our department up and running as much as any other. There's a war going on, for God's sake! And if they want the public in the know, they gotta keep us in workin' order.”

“You're preaching the choir, Citizen.”

Lucas nodded and glanced away. “How's it look down there?”

Sara didn't respond. Gritting her teeth, she twisted the cartridge and it popped out like a wine cork.

Fresh ink gushed out as if she had torn some sort of artery, as if she had rammed a pair of scissors into the throat of a pig and washed her hands in it's blood like water from a faucet.

She offered the cartridge to Lucas with a smile.

Making a face, he shook his head and tossed her a paper towel.

***

The clouds were bruised knees. And in places the sullen gray soup opened up, revealing watered down blue scars like a burlesque queen inching up her skirt. Sara thought that the holes looked like exit wounds where dead people had punctured through on their way up to heaven.

It was cold outside.

She walked with her hands tucked in her pockets and her lower face buried in her jacket. This kept her eyes on the pavement leading to her apartment complex, whose cracks and wrinkles she had memorized like the dried-up-river-bed lines of her palms. Which were probably still stained with ink. The resistance of the stuff reminded her of engine grease.

And the ink smelled like Lucas, too.

His body odor was the scent of an office supply store.

The cold air nailed icicles through her ears like iron spikes through Christ's palms.

As soon as she got home, Sara would have to undress, take a shower, and head straight to Service, which was held in a slumped, arthritic-looking church – no time for rest. It was a twentieth century style fire-trap with pews as hard as bible covers and a cross mounted on its peak like a hood ornament. The paint on the building was all curled up and peeled and Sara was pretty sure that she could scrape off an entire side with just her fingernail. The peeled paint made the church look like it had varicose veins.

The priest was just as old.

And when he died, the church would die a little too. Rot a little more, shrivel a little more. Until it was a raisin of a building.

Lucas's question returned to mind. Why couldn't the Hierarchy increase allowances? Just a little anyway. For a new printing machine or a second coat of paint. All the pamphlets depicted the country as a breadbasket of wealth, a pot-bellied friar with cheeks like wax apples and chins that sagged like vacuum bags. That wasn't what it looked like here. To Sara, anyway. When Sara made the effort to look around, all she saw were buildings that looked like homeless men squatting on street corners with chimneys like crooked cigarettes. The expressions on the faces of the people at work and the people she passed on the street were puffy and had a mortuary corpse appearance to their skin color.

The Hierarchy was saying that when it rained, dimes and nickels and quarters rattled off of the roofs from heaven.

But Sara was nearly positive she wouldn't be able to find a dime even in the cracks of her couch cushions.

Her nose was running.

It made slug-trails on the inside of her jacket collar.

Up ahead, there was a sound of shattering glass, tinkling to the concrete like an old wind-up music box. There was shouting, too. Sara looked up and saw a man with hard, oil-shale eyes and hair that looked as if he had greased it with petroleum jelly struggling with two police men, screaming curses and every so often dissolving into French like a pentecostal speaking in tongues. He spat words and kicked his legs and lashed out with his elbows at the faces of the officers.

His face was feral.

“You bastards! You're all bastards! Can't you see yourselves? Have you looked in the mirror recently? Mon dieu, you're all a bunch of whores for the Hierarchy! Mindless whores!”

One of the police officers swore and punched the Frenchman in the face. His head clacked against the wall like dice rolling across marble floors. The man slumped. Now he looked like one of the surrounding buildings.

The police hooked their hands around his arms and dragged away, along the pavement.

His head lolled.

Sara hadn't realized she had stopped to watch the ordeal. Her nose and mouth were dentist-chair numb and she had to work them – massage them – back to life like new modeling clay. Rubbing her hands together, too, Sara glanced at the shop window the man had shattered and beside it in massive, lazy, slurring cursive letters was a sentence in French.

Ce temp est une invention des gens incapable d'aimer.

This time is an invention of people incapable of love.

Of love.

Already, the police officers were back, this time with a can of white paint and two brushes. Quickly, wordlessly, they began erasing the statement like the nub of a pencil squeaking across a piece of lined paper. They baptized the wall faithfully.

Sara knew – everyone on the street who had been watching knew – that the Frenchman had just spent his life on an idea. An idea that was like a soap bubble. It had the lifespan of a puff of breath or an old man lying in a hospital with his lungs filling up with water.

Plop.

That was the sound his head would make when it hit the ground.

Sara shuddered and kept walking.

Part 2 of 2

Sara was sitting at the desk in her basement, a scrap of paper torn from a propaganda pamphlet lying in front of her. She was biting her lip and tapping frantic Morse code on the edge of the desk with a pen. Written on the slip of paper was a single statement:

This time is an invention of people incapable of love.

It was printed neatly, words strung together like graffiti-sprayed boxcars, and the letters were crouched rebelliously.

Spiderwebs strung up like little Cat's Cradles between invisible fingers in the ceiling corners were as still as veils draped over the faces of a corpses, even though at the moment Sara felt that her breathing was so heavy it could bend palm trees like coat-hangar wires. She wondered again what had compelled her to write the statement down, to carefully spell out her own suicide like the Frenchman with his head plopping onto the streets once it was removed from his neck.

She wondered how her head would sound when it hit the street side.

She wondered how long it would take for her retinas to stop picking up little shards of light as her brain began slowing down, neurons popping off and on and off again like frazzled spark plugs.

Half of her sopped up the wonderful quiet rebellion of the written statement, while the other half of her screamed for her fingers to tear the incriminating piece of paper into a million little spits of idealism and then burn them one by one, so that they erupted like stars shuffling their way out of supernova cocoons.

Sara could only see the stars if she was at least ten miles from a city.

Streetlights were like smokestacks.

They smudged out starlight like a thumb smashing ants.

She wondered if, after she had her head decapitated by the Hierarchy, if God would let her sit with the stars for a while and watch the Solar System Ballet Troupe make pirouettes around the sun.

Probably not. Sara was pretty sure God was on the Hierarchy's side. She was pretty sure that Satan would use this little piece of paper – written on it: her eulogy – to kindle the fire that would constantly be melting the skin off of her feet once she was punted down to Hell by an indignant Lord of Hosts.

Now she was holding the pen with both hands, bending it as she stared at her feet.

No one really knew what the Hierarchy did with thought criminals. Sara just liked to think that their heads were cut off. It was an image of revolutionary France and guillotines and baskets filled with straw catching heads like baseballs and common citizens wrapping themselves in their country's flag like pinched-mouth black widows mummifying flies in spider silk. It was a romantic image. It was exciting. The guillotine probably cut a stunning figure standing their in city squares, cradling victims like a nursing mother, dressing herself in summer dresses of blood, slender and humble.

The blade would go:

Schlip!

Her head would go:

Plop!

Just like the Frenchman's once they found her slip of paper.

Trembling, cinching her eyes shut, Sara tightened her grip on her pen.

And it snapped.

Ink lactated from the pen and spattered the paper on her desk in black Rorschach figure-blobs. It also threw up all over her fingertips and chin; flecking them like a Catholic priest would baptize a newborn child. She swore and threw the husk of the pen as hard as she could at the opposite wall.

Once again, she had ink all over her hands.

The smell tickled the inside of her nose like a burning feather duster.

Sara bit her lip and closed her eyes and was careful to keep her shoe-polish black fingertips away from the desk and her clothing. She tried not to cry. She tried to remain absolutely silent and dissolve for a moment out of her body, out of the basement, out of the city; to float heavenward like a dead fish belly-up in a fishbowl. Choking as unborn sobs clotted her throat, Sara tried to remain in control.

Like a tea-kettle whistle, a gasp escaped from between her teeth.

Sara clenched her fists.

She opened her eyes.

Before her, the blobs of ink on the scrap of paper were gargoyles hunched on the ledge of a Gothic cathedral. They looked like little bits and pieces of her mood torn out of her chest and then laid like pressed-page blossoms before her. They looked like a dance troupe of black women contorted in two dimensions.

And above the blobs of ink:

This time is an invention of those incapable of love.

Her teeth were making spider-bite nicks in her lip, she was biting it so hard. Slowly, Sara dipped her finger in a glistening, syrupy inkstain and made a smaller dab next to it. And then another. And another. Until the hunched black dancer – an ultrasound fetus – was surrounded by little ink dots. Little children.

Little stars.

Stars that had been pinched out by the fingers of the Hierarchy.

She realized suddenly what she was doing.

She was drawing.

This was art.

The dancers on the paper stared up at her with anarchical smiles, fashioned so sloppily that they could have been scribbled by a child. To someone else – to anyone else – the pictures looked as if a butchered squid had bled them out, coughed them out. But to Sara, they hid little spore seeds of hate and rebellion and tiny bits and pieces of free thought. Spattered on the paper, was the blood of the Frenchman. As black as the wrinkled raisin souls of the Hierarchy priests.

Sara folded the scrap into fourths and slipped it down her blouse.

And against her chest, black dancers squirmed.