Art Show at Redeemer

I wear a windbreaker that makes me feel stupid. It swishes when I walk, and it’s the same rust color as my hair. No one else is dressed for the rain. There’s a lighter in my pocket that I run my fingers over but don’t hold. My sister wears a sundress and the smallest, whitest tennis shoes I’ve ever seen.

“You came!” she says when she sees me. I don’t normally show up, and I’m trying to be better about that. I’m trying to be better about a lot of things. She has a child on her hip and another clinging to her leg. She’s also pushing a stroller. When I hug her, she smells like flowers. I pray I don’t smell like cigarettes. I pray I can make it through the next hour without needing to step outside for a smoke.

“Fowwest!”

This from my oldest nephew who just turned five and still struggles with his Rs. He says my birth name first because Forrest is new. New in the sense that I have always been him. I want to apologize every time Felix says it wrong and winces. He’s unusually sensitive for a little kid. As a former unusually sensitive kid, this worries me. He high-fives me, his ambiguous adult relative person.

We’re at a kids’ art show. The teachers hung up finger-paintings and newspaper collages around the church, which doubles as a preschool and which my sister selected for its proximity to her house and positive reviews on Niche. The mild Christian education is a bonus or an unfortunate sacrifice, depending on which day you ask her and how well her baby slept the night before.

Felix’s class is in the narthex, Ben’s in the fellowship hall. Parents and children mill around and murmur feigned esteem. Screams and sneaker squeaks bounce off the vaulted ceilings. It would be fascinating to take in if the whole scene were overlaid with classical music and a British nature documentary narrator, if one could not be perceived but only perceive, if one didn’t occupy a body. I think about my body and realize I have to pee. I imagine wading through the crowd—alone, childless, genderless, swishing—and decide to hold it.

The adult-to-child ratio in our group is way off. There are three children. Then there’s my sister, her ridiculously fit husband, my parents, my older brother, and me. We all live near my parents because we are each, to varying degrees, needy and guilt-ridden. We shuffle around behind Ben, who shuffles behind Felix, our tour guide. I flick the lighter in my pocket, not giving it enough friction to spark. In the narthex, Felix shows us his self-portrait hung on the wall. He represents his red hair with five straight lines on top of his head.

“Do you think people ever think he’s my kid?” I say, gesturing to the hair, which is the exact same shade as mine. We’re the only two redheads in the family.

My brother looks at me and laughs.

“No, Forrest. I don’t think people look at you and think ‘parent.’”

He’s right, and he’s not trying to be mean, and I still want to punch him in the stomach.

The ridges of the metal dial dig into my thumb, an imprint I’ll study later.

A little girl is trying to touch my sister’s baby. The little girl’s mother is trying to stop her, and my sister’s ridiculously fit husband is trying to tell the mother that it’s okay, really. I’m five feet away from them, but it’s so loud that I can only see their lips moving. The baby seems unbothered. So little bothers the baby: only hunger, as far as I’ve observed, and blunt force trauma, I’d guess.

“How are you doing?” my brother leans down to ask me. He’s so tall, it should be illegal. He looks just like me, only handsome, important, and a little less orange.

Everyone keeps asking me this lately. They say, how are you doing?, and they mean, so are you a girl or a boy or what?

“I’m good,” I say. It’s true. It’s also true that I want to crawl out of my skin for about seventy-two hours out of any given week, which really isn’t that bad, all things considered. I can’t imagine the situation is that different from that of my sister, mother of three at thirty-two. Like her, I’m happy, generally, and it’s this general happiness that prevents me from feeling like I can do anything about the skin-crawling. I’m also twenty-four, and people say your twenties are meant to be terrible, but they also said that about my teens, and my pre-teens, and it feels like I was only allowed to be happy until the age of ten, when I developed lopsided breast buds. The rest is a guided tour we shuffle through, led by a five-year-old with red sticks for hair.

The baby whines. Everyone’s eyes shift to my sister, but she stares ahead, eyes resolute and purple-ringed. When I was Felix’s age, I desperately wanted people to want things from me—I wanted my brother to want to play with me, my mom to want me to find the firmest oranges at the grocery store, my teacher to want my name on her wall in bubble letters. By twelve or thirteen, I didn’t want to be looked at, much last asked of.

My sister is a cornucopia, always gaping and regenerating. Some days, she glows with abundance. Other days, she sags under it.

My mother says her name, her only-ever name, gently. If it had been the ridiculously fit husband, my sister would’ve snapped, but because it’s my mother, she obliges. The baby cries more as she lifts him out of his seat, then less when she sits down with him on a bench along the wall and unfolds her nursing bra, then not at all. My sister watches him drink, smiling faintly like it’s part of the muscle memory.

“I never get used to that,” says my brother, gesturing towards the most fundamental mammalian ritual, toward our sister, who now scrolls through her Instagram explore page as absently as she’d smiled a moment before. Her children are playing some invented game where they try to interlock fingers as awkwardly and intricately as possible. The flexibility of their ligaments is remarkable. Her ridiculously fit husband talks to our dad about being a lawyer, which is what they always talk about, which irritates me in a vague, irrational sort of way. If they tried to explain all the acronyms to me, I’d probably call them chauvinists.

Five minutes later, with the feeding done, Ben sees his teacher across the hall and bursts into a delighted scream. She turns and drops to her knees, arms spread wide. He plays with her earrings—twin rainbows made of modeling clay—while they embrace. Ben squeezes them, watches his thumb print fade away, and presses again. She smiles and asks about the stickers on his shirt. He beams. Do people become parents and preschool teachers because they want to be gods to someone? Pleasing kids always feels like an act. I don’t think I could be good at it if I tried. The only thing I know how to do with my nephews is wrestle. They tackle me and I throw them around, stopping just short of the ground each time so they don’t bump their heads. I palm their rib cages and shake so their laughter vibrates. I bunch their feet together like a bouquet and hammer their toes. They climb my back and I rear around like an angry bull. Every time they see me it’s: “Let’s westle!” Neither can say their Rs quite right. It’s adorable because they are children and their incompetence is a promise of eventual fruition.

“We have to keep going!” Felix shouts as he pulls at the back of his pants like he has to use the bathroom. On cue, my sister leans down and whispers something in his ear, the baby still latched to her chest like a shawl pinned by a brooch. Felix shakes his head, frustrated. Misunderstood. He insists we have to get to the other side of the hall, then the narthex. The order is very important to Felix who, at the age of five, already understands the power of pacing and withholding, the magic of best for last. My sister peels Ben off his teacher with one arm, mumbles something like thank-you-I’m-sorry, and we wade through the crowd.

A quiet awe washes over me as we make our way through Ben’s class. First, there are the butterflies, stamped with non-toxic paint, then folded and unfolded to form perfect symmetry. Upon first glance, without considering the process, I believed these three-year-olds were superhuman. But consider the actual butterfly, how it weaves its wings in its chrysalis with no formal education.

Then there are the starry nights—swaths of sky blotted with stars and slashes of crescent moons. The uneven spread of fingerprints gives the impression of a clouded night, the kind you can only sense in the dark from subtle ribbons of uneven color and the absence of stars in unlucky patches. A pressure builds behind my chest, something hysterical, Victorian in its insistence. I am almost but not quite out of my body. Three year old children made these! With their fingers! Hosanna in the highest!

I think of the scene from Wings of the Dove where Kate, Densher, and Milly go to the National Gallery in London and the tension hums, ultra-charged because of the proximity of great art. In the movie, the three of them line up in front of an oil painting of a naked woman half-folded in bands of gold and violet fabric. I can’t remember if they described it in the book. It might as well have been an empty frame. The love and resentment that pulsed between those three people (and they really were just people—not two women and a man—such was the mess of their feelings) was more important because it would move and change, and the naked woman wouldn’t.

In the fellowship hall at Lutheran Redeemer Church, I feel the opposite. These fingerpainted, scissor-scored, and papier mâché artworks vibrate with the potential energy every sticky little kid holds in them. I, in turn, don’t matter, and this is an enormous relief. If the art was eternal, it would speak to my mortality, which exists too close to the surface of my skin at the moment. Because Ben’s construction paper ladybug will end up in a shoebox in my sister’s basement, its temporal beauty demands my attention without demanding my introspection. Something in me—something metaphysical and blessedly genderless—sings.

Then my dad folds back the corner of one to look for Ben’s name, and I flinch.

“Don’t.” Not yet. My voice, the one in my head and in the open air, comes out sharper and higher than I’d intended. A parent looks at me, not with anger, exactly, but with confusion, which I have found can so quickly morph into rage.

“Sorry,” I say, too quickly. My dad wraps a hand around my shoulder, pulls me into his side, and squeezes. Compressed, there’s less space inside me for all the wrongness. It feels good.

Also, he would only do this to my brother if he had been shot.

“Are you all right?” he asks, a variation of how are you doing?, which, from my father, means, when will you stop doing this to us?

“Fine,” I say. I make a joke about throwing soup as a climate protest. Everyone laughs. The confused parents wander toward the raffle table. Ben reaches for my hand. His is so small, he can only envelop two fingers. I would let him take me anywhere.

“This one’s mine,” he says, tugging, certain without having to see the name.

I know instantly that it’s a dandelion, straight yellow lines stamped from a center point. Green stem, brushstrokes like varnish. The sky is blue. If it’s day in a child’s painting, the sky is blue, always. Ben breathes through his half-stuffed nose, waiting. There’s nothing I could say that wouldn’t sound stilted, even mocking. This is why I’ll never have children. Even as I think that, part of me knows I will have a child, and I’ll fuck it up, and it’ll be the best, most normal thing I ever do. I’ll try to write about it, and it’ll be shit, cliché and overwrought, and it won’t matter because I’ll have my kid. The image of my future, which has the shape of a memory rather than a conception, is so depressing and grounding. It makes me tired in the way being at my parents’ house makes me tired, because I know I’m utterly safe. Even as they think my identity is a mistake that rings with the same pathetic dissonance of an infected septum piercing, I’m safe around them, just as I’m safe in these visions of my thirties and forties. I’m hopeful about my life. That’s the most pathetic part about my anguish—I’m certain it’ll all turn out okay.

The dandelion. Ben stares up at me. He’s so vulnerable. He shouldn’t be allowed to walk around by himself. They should put him in a hamster ball. He’s waiting for me to say something.

“It’s beautiful,” I tell him, my voice high and lilting. It’s enough for him to laugh, not out of amusement so much as an overflowing of glee. There’s so much joy inside of him. This whole church is designed to coax it out into the light where it can be admired and celebrated. This is why people have children, I think: not so they can be gods, but so they can bask. Basking asks so little of you.

I was like this as a kid—the beacon, not the basker. I remember it, an echo of the raw joy, if not exactly the feeling itself. Until the breast buds. Things were so good until the breast buds—flowers that were not flowers that did not promise a spring, at least not one I could tolerate. And yet it will be okay.

What happens next happens quickly.

Felix trips—in the way that kids are susceptible to at any moment, a hazard we just accept because otherwise we would never let our children leave the house—and hits his head on the corner of a table that displays a row of clay bowls, clearly modeled with tiny fingers. The shards—glazed and hardened in a kiln while the kids were on Christmas break—spray across the tile floor. There’s blood, though it’s not clear whether it comes from the impact of the table or a stray piece of one of the bowls. If the latter is the case, there could be a need for extraction. Felix cries quietly. He’s never been prone to panic, but grief comes naturally to him. Even as a baby, his tears felt nuanced. It was never feed me but rather: It is so cruel to have to ask for food from my mother who is also a human being with her own personal needs. Feed me but take your time and ignore the sounds of my anguish, which I can’t help but expel. I don’t know how I heard this from his infant cries, but I did, and I hear the layers again now as his shoulders shake and his eyebrows knit together. His mouth is a meager o-shape, as though to curb the volume and up the resonance. I think of playing the flute in the high school marching band, of the director who told me my instrument required more breath power than a tuba. No one seems to notice the accident except our army of adults, and Ben, who starts crying in the simple way that ordinary children cry. I reach for him, drawn in by his normalcy, by the knowledge that I can give him the fun-size packet of M&Ms in my pocket and he’ll be fine and want to show me the rest of his art while my sister, her ridiculously fit husband, my brother, and my parents fuss over Felix. Instead, though, my hand finds the lighter and the shape feels foreign, so I pull it out. Instinctively, my thumb goes to the metal dial and presses down to feel the friction. Ben is crying, Felix is mourning, my sister coos something comforting, and the flame leaps to life. I’m standing too close to the dandelions. I must have shuffled to get away from Felix, from the shards, from the blood. The fire licks the corner of Ben’s picture, and it goes up in an instant. The flame, unlike the blood, the crowd notices immediately. A woman shrieks. It’s so unnecessary, like when the lights go out. Why are you screaming? What are you afraid of? Whose attention do you need? We all know. We all see it. I’m angry, and the edges of the paper are curling inward, wood whittled away to make something new. I slap it with my bare hand, like an idiot. My mom shouts something, and I don’t know whether she’s telling me to do more or do less, so I just stand there, watching the flames grow and flap at the mercy of the wind caused by rushing bodies. Someone has a fire extinguisher. There’s barely any fire. It’s ridiculous. Later, my dad will say to me, “There’s no little fire in a church full of small children. There’s only fire.” Except that’s not true because the charred dandelion painting is very different from a mass grave.

In high school, I was in a play about a Richmond theater that burned down in the 1800s. I played a musician who got trapped in the pit. Every night, a girl named Vivian caked enough Vaseline onto my face and arms to look like burns leaking pus. She outlined the wounds with pink, red, purple, and orange eyeshadow. She was very good, self-taught from YouTube videos. It was a terror to look at myself in the mirror. My mom came to every performance, but after the first night she told me I had to take off the makeup before I came out to the lobby. It was hard enough to watch me pound against the stage and scream in guttural pain I didn’t understand but imitated from American Horror Story. In retrospect, it was a kind of appropriation. When she was four, my mom got hit by a car that broke both her legs. She never talks about it, but I know she screamed. I know from the way I watched her shrink in the audience while the tech kids cranked up the sound of crackling flames, snapping rafters, bones crushed under stone.

So I both understand and do not understand that there are big and little fires—there are fires that elicit adult agony from small children and fires that elicit childish shrieks from grown women.

It’s ruined, says Ben, whose brother is bleeding.

He’s ruined, says Ben, whose painting is charred.

I can’t decide which would devastate me more.

He doesn’t really say either, just toggles between staring at the glob of sodium bicarbonate on the floor and staring at my sister pressing paper towels to Felix’s skull. I don’t know who brought the paper towels, probably her ridiculously fit husband, who jogs toward the parking lot, phone pressed to his ear, stroller rumbling over the carpet in the entryway. The baby, whom I’d forgotten completely, is fast asleep.

I’m having a hard time remembering which one of these is my fault, Ben’s painting or Felix’s head. My mom hasn’t noticed the painting yet. She’s always moved by blood, which is probably why my stage makeup so unsettled her. The sight of it clicks her maternal instincts into another register. I watch her mother my sister, delivering measured instructions, who mothers Felix, replacing paper towels once they soak through. I watch her mother Felix, who senses his mother’s frenzy and gravitates toward his grandmother’s calm. It’s my mom who carries him outside while my sister dabs his face, doing nothing except sponge more blood across his forehead and the bridge of his nose, but needing to feel useful.

Ben says my birth name, more a question than a chastisement, not because he isn’t angry but because a three-year-old doesn’t have enough power to castigate. He can barely muster the syllables. They’re a last-ditch signal flare. It’s only then that I return to myself and only then that I realize I had left myself at all, and I regret that I hadn’t been conscious enough of the release to relish it. The reconfinement is uncomfortable but there’s more space now, as though a part of me drifted behind my mother and sister, out of the church and into the night, which will no doubt be long and grave. I can already hear sirens in the parking lot. The other adults can’t decide whether or not the fire has ruined the evening. Some shepherd their kids out of the church, hands pressed to tiny backs. Others keep studying the art, murmuring distracted praise. 

“I’m sorry,” I tell Ben. The rest of the dandelions look down on us. His hands are covered in white foam, sodium bicarbonate. A faint voice from outside myself: Don’t let him put his fingers in his mouth.

His voice is quiet and precise: “It’s okay.”

Absolution, he can manage.

WILSON ABBY COMEY

Wilson Abby Comey (he/they) is a trans writer and high-school English teacher in Washington, D.C. His work is featured in a range of publications, including The Massachusetts Review, Laurel Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Variety Pack. He loves fan fiction, Dungeons & Dragons, Taylor Swift, and nature walks.