Nochita by Dia Felix

Author:Dia Felix
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Published: 2014-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

The Pen

I WAKE UP BECAUSE my face is burning because my sunglasses are melting and burning my face. I swat them off and drag a nearby sweatshirt onto my face instead, leaving my mouth uncovered for breathing.

Buggy’s face floats into view. Buggy’s teeth are gray and brown and come to soft points like candy corns. They are more like teeth-remains than teeth. His lower lip is spotty because he bites it all the time. He’s biting it right now. He holds himself curled forward as if holding an invisible ball with his torso, or trying to hide his too-thin body. He is always squinting, and I wonder what he is thinking about or if he needs glasses. He has two shirts. He is glad he found me, wants to bring me to the Pen, to meet Mother and Dooney and everyone else who is the real deal.

Come in, he says, pushing open a door with a hole where the doorknob would be. I follow his bare feet through a sunless room, across a maze of sleeping bodies, a fungus-dark sailor’s knot, arms into fabric, feet into armpits. The walls are covered in flyers and remnants of things, spraypainted dots, stickers.

Do all these people live here?

He shrugs and nods in a simultaneous gesture, a whole-body wink. His eyes are shifting all around, he smiles a nervous, churchy smile. He nods toward a translucent plastic city teetering on a wooden windowsill, a sculpture of yellowing tubes, does he have pet rats or something in there? A perfume of desiccated grain and urine lifts from it to my nose.

You have a hamster in there or something?

That’s the farm, where I grow the food, he says. I grow sprouts right here. This thing is a true urban farm. I’m going to patent it.

He talks to my shoulder. His nose comes to a sharp point and then a little ball.

These are my friends.

He’s talking about his fish tank, which is decorated with candy-colored pebbles and some pirate things, but I see no fish.

Fish are shy. This is my studio.

He pushes open a styrofoam door to reveal a broom closet with a child’s desk shoved crookedly into it, on this desk is a mess of jars, bottles, brushes, tubes. Covering the side walls of the closet are square wooden panels, a glittering mosaic of minuscule paintings. Each panel depicts a scenario in infinitesimally crisp detail, so much that I have to blink and reorient my eyes many times before reading the images. Trapeze women, clouds with faces, a woman in a skirt that turns into a wedding cake, a cowboy whose forehead has a tiger pushing out of it. There are strokes thinner than hairs, tiny faces with each eyelash and tooth distinct. It takes my breath away.

How do you—

I paint in oils. I use my fingernails. He shakes a glass container of fingernail clippings, some with paint on them, some fresh keratin white. The container was a baby food jar. He holds the fingernail clipping with a pair of tweezers and that’s his tool.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.