Elvissey Read Free Page A

inevitably
delivered into our world fresh deformities, sometimes quick,
most often dead.
    "One pill at daybreak, sixteen weeks running," an artist
whispered to one of her protegees. Each wore earrings made
of tiny silverplated feet, toes splayed apart by diamond chips.
"Resulting varietals are of nobler invention than thalidomide's."
    "Side effects?" asked a listener. "Yours, meant."
    "Standard."
    Fetal artists conceived as was once the rule, as deliberately
exposing themselves to select media during pregnancy to
most appropriately flesh their concepts, which could live
only after they'd died.
    "Solipsizers," said John, bareglancing, his eyes so deep socketed that, had I not known, I could never have guessed
them to be blue. "Let's shortterm."

    "Hang cool," I said, forever now practicing, in speech, the
rephrasing essentialled for our upcoming travels. "Loose,
rather. Hang loose."
    "Oh, Iz," he said, frowning so that only I would see.
"Straightspeak with me if no other."
    "Forgive," I said; could he? I wondered if for reasons
other than chemical my eyes showed so drawn as his; began
persuing what was displayed. Within each mother's tabled
glass belly floated a freeform manifest, a maternal expression. Some were lava-iit, making the jars' small ones appear
self-luminescent as they drifted amid glowing plasmas,
resembling warning balloons lofted in advance of toxic
clouds, giving all in harmway reason enough to run. Other
babies presented to admirers internal organs origamied outward, or the look of ones dissembled and reconstructed by
mechanics uncertain of the original arrangement.
    "Unoriginal," a critic noted of one who was unlit, and
bore a face emerging direct from a stubbed neck. The baby's
arms drifted through its gel as if it attempted to fly.
    "How so?" asked his accompaniment.
    "Similar seen live, begging on Mercer Street, six months
past."
    In the eyes of some exhibits I saw duped the eyes of lovers
longlost reincarnate, no less painful to stare into now than
they'd been when I'd last taken leave of them. All the jugged
children carried a feel of specimens recovered from those
more distant worlds once imagined extant, far beyond visible stars, stolen from Edens as yet untarnished by the slither
of snakes.
    "Postambient," the holoed gallerist explained, her image
afloat in room's midst. "As cubism rose from trad Afro
styles. Brancusi, exampled. Prim remade proper; rebirth becomes any art."
    The sculptures, I favored; those employed the interior frames so that the design's more profound aspects might be
fully revealed. The ribcage of one draped down over its
femurs. Several small skulls evidenced cyclopean features;
holiday lights were inserted within the expected openings, to
whimsify onlookers. One sculpture, hued waste-green, stood
balanced, seeming weightless upon its fourth foot's third,
longest toe.

    "Iz, I beg-" John murmured. I kissed; calmed, if didn't
settle.
    "Por fav, moment," I said; took his hand in mine, feeling
no feeling. "Let's see who's cookin'."
    'iz"
    "Practice perfects."
    The exhibit's centerpiece was wrought by an artist named
Tanya, a provincial who'd been living in the Bowl, near the
great Indiana dunes; no others so fertiled as she, either in
idea or in technik. Tanya bore a look resembling my husband's, that of one who suffered for their art. Her child,
whom I took to be one of outbodied origin, sat smiling
nearby; she had honey hair, thick and tousled in the back,
and skin so pink as to have been boiled.
    "Wordless," others muttered, eyeing Tanya's bodiwork.
"Doublestunned."
    Half mobile, half collage, the art was contained within two
transparent cones poised tiptipped; the topmost revolved
unceasing by way of the gyroscopic motion of two intertwined catherine-wheels afloat within, both armspoked with
ten bony lengths, digits directed viewer-outward, striking
balance nature neither offered nor intended. In the lower
cone four small ones,