Sirens & Muses

by Antonia Angress

She’d chosen an ibis because Grandma had once told her that it symbolized resilience; it was the last animal to take shelter before a hurricane, and the first to reappear after the storm.

Attention was the most valuable resource in the world, more powerful than any drug.

“I’m with them,” she said, the cigarette dangling from the corner of her lips, bobbing as she spoke. “But if what you wanted was a job, you shouldn’t have gone to art school. Anyway…what’s up?”

She’d felt this way about other girls before—brief, confusing infatuations that vacillated between attraction and jealousy, between wanting to touch the girl and wanting to be the girl, to slip inside her skin—but never this intensely.

was as though Louisa had flattened the secret room of her, laying it out in oil and linen for the whole world to see.

Sometimes he felt paralyzed, his whole body contracting with self-doubt.

Was this what life, real life, actually was, just a maze of forking paths and missed opportunities?

She wanted to go home—not home to Karina’s studio, or even to her own apartment, but home home. She wanted to be alone, the kind of alone you could only be out in the middle of Lake Martin.

The caption read: Preston Utley telling art world magnate Brian Parrish to “go fuck [himself] in the ass with a sharpened broomstick.”

Another security guard appeared, armed with a can of Raid. He sprayed a cloud of it into the air—rather ineffectually, as most of the roaches were at ground level—causing people near him to cough and cover their faces.

Even this first step is a long way above the ordinary world.

To have come this far is no small achievement: what you have done already is a glorious thing.”