Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls, a Novel by Lucy Corin

Author:Lucy Corin [Corin, Lucy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Feminism, Fiction, Glbt, Horror, lesbian, Psychological, Suspense, Thriller
ISBN: 9781941088999
Google: URoUx0S-cYEC
Amazon: 1573661120
Publisher: Fiction Collective 2
Published: 2004-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

There’s an Art Nouveau sculpture called La Nature that I think about when I think of buried treasure. It’s sort of the bust of a woman, but it actually includes her bust and continues to her waist. One of those smoothed over, nymphy waifs all those art nouveau guys liked to make. Shiny-shiny silver. She’s life-sized; it’s easy to imagine putting an arm around her shoulder, and when I look at her I can tell that if I could get up close and look her right in her face, right at her closed eyes, which are silver and so shiny, I would see my face reflected on her lids, convex and buglike, my whole head in her oval eyes.

She’s behind glass, though, and set eye-level to a man. It’s as if she’s asleep standing up, or maybe peacefully dead, molded of this solid-looking, liquid-looking silver, or encased in it, seamlessly. Think of dipping baby shoes in bronze—she’s been dipped in silver. Like Venus, she has no arms, but by this time, in 1900, it’s quite on purpose; she never had any arms. Her hair is long, gilt, swirling around her shoulders down to her waist. It encircles her waist and morphs into a corkscrew shape at her trunk. She’s an elaborate stopper for an enormous bottle.

She wears a golden crown, and, like a budding horn in the center of her forehead, a contraption emerges from it. It’s a bracketlike structure, with four knobs that could, it seems, screw in to hold a miniature head, as if gravity alone would not hold one there, as if holding one would require a vice. The punchline is it’s an eggcup, rising from the center of her forehead, and there’s a smooth wooden egg in the eggcup. But you can imagine, if you screwed the screws in, they’d inch right into the wood.

In this depiction, Nature is ostentatious and the egg she holds is wooden.

I am astounded, for one thing, by how identically all the materials are treated. How the wood and the metals end up with the same textural quality—all smoother than life, all idealized, and idealized identically. Nature is made generic, poreless. It’s been civilized. How the egg she holds is both natural and lifeless. How immaculate and cleaned it is, how sterilized. As if the eggs in her womb are wooden, as if they’re beads. Of course, this woman is truncated. She has no womb.

Woman as eggcup. She’s so big she could be a one-man table for him. Can’t you see the guy sitting at her, with his spoon, eating the soft egg from her head? How close he comes to spooning out her brain?

Our minds are buried treasure.

I think about how Black Caesar breaks out of his box, his life in bondage, goes off hacking through bodies, seeking his fortune, gathering treasure from those who enslaved him. Then he buries the treasure and moves along his tangled trail. Egyptians order the treasure from a menu, have it custom-made by slaves, and then they bury themselves along with it.

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