by Baker T. Beauregard
A Museum Curator takes a seat in the rubble of his Whispering Gallery. He gently lays the frayed half of a painting atop the others. Or he was a Museum Curator. In this war of fractions of centuries he had lived a dozen lives. A Doctor for his readiness with a scalpel, and the way he learned to bite back the bile in his throat at the sight of blood. A Soldier for the half-hearted, half-healed bullet wound in his shoulder. A Father for his nightly reading of story books to the children with faces caked in mud and cut by tears. And now a Search and Rescue man, for how he digs through the rubble of his one love on his hands and on his knees.
His Museum, too, had changed. It was a hospital, then a battleground, then an orphanage, then a refugee camp, and now it was empty and turned to dust. He sits with his legs crossed, and back pressed against the snout of a decapitated stone lion. His name, per the small enamel pin through his knit sweater, is Orest, and he is dying.
There is likely more to be found buried beneath the shrapnel, but his muscles ache for sleep, and his hands refuse to work. They are nearly skinned from the sharp edges of stone and cool grooves of marble. He cannot save it all. He takes a swig of vodka, smiles, and raises what is left of the bottle to the Girl in a Red Hat.
“Budmo,” he grumbles, voice strained and gruff. He had never had the best of lungs, and the dust doesn’t help. He’d taken up smoking young, and had quit late. Well, nearly quit. There was a box of rather old, and rather expensive Montecristos in his desk that he ached for. Of course, this desk lay beneath a mound of rubble. He sighs, and takes another swig.
He is alone now. The others had left days ago. He missed the slow trickle of the families, the weepers, the dishing out of blankets. The Whispering Gallery, where they had each lain was now half-collapsed, its ceiling caved in, but before even this it had been eerily quiet without them. How many had stayed beneath its roof he could not be sure. Some spent the night, the week, others only the hour. He had grown comfortable with the sounds of mourning. Now it was their echo, their lack, that made his skin crawl.
“It’s a lovely morning.” It is. It is rather upsetting, how beautiful the morning is, the sky being such a soft, cloudless blue. If it was up to Orest, it would be raining, and raining quite hard, in huge, bullet-like drops. Many, many clouds. Maybe there would be a bit of lightning, as well, and with it certainly thunder. Good drinking weather.
The Girl in a Red Hat says nothing at first, just stares at him, looking slightly disappointed.
“Day-drinker,” she spits.
Orest scowls and stares back as he swallows down the bottle, licking the rim to relieve it of its last drops.
“There is no day anymore, darling. There are no drinkers either. There’s just time to burn and too much goddamn liquor.”
The Girl in a Red Hat watches Orest warily as he tosses the bottle. It hits the body of the head of the concrete lion he lounges upon maybe twenty feet away, busting into a hundred-or-so odd pieces. He smiles.
“That is hardly an excuse to be an animal, You have so little self respect.”
Orest’s smile fades. He shrugs, and pulls another bottle from where he keeps them wrapped up beneath his old denim coat. It used to be blue, but now it is an awful shade of washed-out gray.
He jealously eyes the soft, thin fabric of The Girl in a Red Hat’s shirt, wrinkling his nose at how untouched it remains amidst the destruction. He smells of blood and of vomit, and she looks as if she stinks of plums and of honey.
He had never liked her bitter, slightly-scared gaze. The look of a doe before you shoot it. Orest assumes so, anyway, as he had never been one for hunting. She looks down upon him with sharp, unforgiving eyes. Maybe he is the doe, then. Either way, it is a gaze filled with mutual guilt.
“At the very least,” she calls in a soft voice, “at the very least, clean up your face, won’t you? They’ll think you're nothing but a walking corpse with the state you're in.”
Orest tugs the cork from the bottle with his teeth and spits it to the ground along with a wad of sticky red. The gums around his left side are swollen, and his teeth have to move carefully to keep from catching the puffed up flesh as he speaks.
“I hate to break it to you, Madam, but I doubt a soul is coming for us. They have much greater priorities than a nutty old man and a little-known painting.”
The Girl in a Red Hat scowls.
“I never said you had to stay. You are free to go.”
Orest chuckles.
“There is nowhere to go. I am too old, and too tired for games. Here–” he gestures vaguely to the carefully stacked paintings, many of which are burnt or torn, then to the suitcase filled with rescued shards of pottery, “–here is where I belong. With the art. I will protect the art.”
“You are a stubborn old man. The art is dead. It is burnt. As am I.”
Orest waves her away, and coughs dryly into his chest.
“Yes. Yes. Tragic, isn't it? Maybe they will paint me a painting. Me laying in the dust, torn up paintings in my lap, one hand up in victory. A flag, maybe, on fire. A Russian flag. We will paint our flag in the sky, the yellow creeping into the blue from the horizon. It would be a rather beautiful painting, wouldn’t you agree?”
The Girl in a Red Hat considers him, looking unimpressed.
“No. You look far too ugly to deserve a painting. You are practically dead there in the dust. It’s your own fault, too. I watched you stand there. You looked so stupid, with your arms by your side, and your jaw locked up. You did not even try to move.”
She was right. He hadn’t. Orest had been the one to step on the sleeping man’s hand. The man had arrived just a few weeks before. He was a single father, he had explained to Orest when he arrived, that is why he did not fight. That is why he was here. He had looked as if he wanted to say more, but Orest didn’t pry, just opened the door a little wider, and tossed him a blanket. He noticed, however, that there was no child, and that the man carried himself as if there was a corpse draped around his neck.
Then, on the man's third night, Orest stepped on his hand. This was no small sin. Sleep in the museum had been so thin, and so rare, only available in the milky hours of the night when the children’s crying finally fell away to echo. When the man stood up, his wide eyes reflected the red sunrise the way the wet eyes of cattle reflected the burn of the poker. Before Orest could apologize, the man had his hand up. There had been a pink stuffed rabbit, a child's rabbit, tucked beneath one of his arms, his other pressed against his chest to protect his trampled hand. When he hit Orest, the rabbit fell to the floor. He had hit him slow, but hard. When Orest woke, lying sideways with his face in a pile of his own sick, he’d peeled himself from the marble, blinked twice at the angry red of the Girl in a Red Hat’s hat, and carried on.
That had been a week ago. The wound had only grown angrier.
“They do little to repay your hospitality.”
Orest shrugs again, and slinks further against the lion’s head. Its ear digs between his shoulder blade at a sharp angle, but he is too tired to care. The man with the rabbit was gone when Orest woke up, but there was a pathetic pile of cash on his desk, pinned beneath a badly chipped sheepsfoot knife. Both, of course, are gone.
“He paid the best he could.”
“You’ve got a hairline fracture in your cheek and another where your temple hit the floor. You're hallucinating. I do not doubt that you will die in your sleep before morning. Your breath, it’ll give out, shut off, like that. Concussions are nasty things that way,” the Girl says matter-of-factly. Orest wishes desperately for a Montecristo. He wants to explain that the rabbit man had taken the grief that ringed his eyes and pressed and rolled it thin in between his knuckles, then sculpted it roughly into jaggedly cut cracks. Orest’s wounds could hold very little grief, but they still ache and sting and weep so loudly he wakes at night shaking and holding the throbbing bone. He is too tired, however, and his thoughts are too muddied to turn to words, so instead he says:
“He needed someone to hit. I can do that. That is A-OK with me.”
“The shrapnel in your legs, that will hurt forever.”
“Not if I die right here, it will not.”
“You inhale the burnt art you love.”
“What better way to appreciate it than to consume it.”
“Soon they will arrive again, and you will not be so lucky. They will shoot you, or worse.”
“I do not doubt that, Madam, but I was lucky the first time. I was lucky the hundred times we opened our doors to the others. Isn’t that enough? They are gone. They are free. They will make it to the border. I have already won.”
“They are not free. I know they are blown to little meat bits, then trampled beneath the treds of tanks. All of them.”
Orest giggles and takes another swig of vodka.
“Yes, but they were free for a moment, eh? I’ll toast to that.”
“He left you beaten and maimed on the floor you let him sleep upon, your head against the blanket you let him borrow.”
“Girl in a Red Hat, love of my life, my morning beauty, he only hit me once. Isn’t that gift enough itself?”
“Everything burns. You are dying. Have you no hate?”
“Oh but it burns, does it not? Isn’t that the most beautiful resistance? Hot, blinding collapse. Someone must paint that too.”
He taps the neck of the vodka bottle to the canvas of The Girl in A Red Hat.
“Budmo!”