Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies by Maddie Mortimer

Author:Maddie Mortimer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2022-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

Unlikely Friendship, An Installation

While I am busy planting my little You bombs everywhere, Dove is putting Red to bed after a long day of destruction.

She will never understand him, but she is learning to tolerate. I have learnt that

to tolerate is sometimes the best a bird can do.

Red’s snout is all pink and sore from searching and

Dove looks weary, weak, from all their terrible time spent together.

Instead of a bedtime story, they settle down to watch a rather beautiful installation piece projected on the flat side of her scapula. I am posing as an underpaid gallery assistant. The video features a great deal of guns and bombs and suited stunt spies spitting out from flames cut with fragments of nature documentary, footage of bacteria writhing about a petri dish, Linux code lines and circuit boards, and every so often a beautiful woman will whisper grandiose words like sacrifice from glossy lips so huge they take up the whole frame and though it is all a bit propagandary, I’ll admit it’s nicely edited.

Red watches in awe. He does not blink. Dove nuzzles her head into him so sadly and begins to doze off and it’s nice to see. This unlikely pair. So nice I write a list on the back of my programme

SAMUEL BECKETT

PEANUT BUTTER

SCIENCE

RED

ANDRÉ THE GIANT

JELLY

FAITH

DOVE

You wouldn’t think to put them together. But here they are, remarkably compatible, perfectly providing what the other lacks. The sweetness, the salt, the smoothness, the crunch. You just have to take the first bite.

It is a surprise when more spectators begin to enter the space, but as they circle the bird and the red boy sleeping under the webs and the cells of the shifting light, I realize –

they are the art.

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