Self-Portrait with Nothing

by Aimee Pokwatka

Ula Frost had a cult following for a reason: her portraits—at least those painted in the last twenty-two years—were said to unlock alternate versions of their subjects from parallel universes, bringing them, somehow, into this world,

When Pepper couldn’t sleep—at least since she was fifteen—she imagined the alternate universes that might be out there if alternate universes really existed. A universe where antibiotics had already stopped working. A universe where cancer had a cure. A universe where that man had never become president and started that war, and all the people who’d died and the cities that’d been destroyed still lived and stood perfectly intact. A universe where she hadn’t met Ike in the hotel lobby of a conference about the evolution of human sexuality. A universe where they’d met but hadn’t skipped out on the conference in favor of drinking hurricanes at the hotel bar and ended up in Ike’s room shortly thereafter. A universe where they’d broken up that time she told him she couldn’t see herself married instead of staying together. A universe where the pregnancy scare had been an actual pregnancy, and now they had a couple of kids, and two dogs and a cat, who was the boss of them all, and it was chaos and she mostly loved it. A universe where a terrorist attack had or hadn’t been successful, a universe where a virus had or hadn’t mutated and spread. A universe where there wasn’t a mass shooting every single day, or a universe where there were even more. A universe where children didn’t drink poisoned water, where hundreds of millions of people didn’t go to bed hungry, where the earth’s temperature wasn’t steadily rising, where solvable problems had been solved. A universe where Annie had...

I live in this world, and I had always been content in it. I inherited my money. I live by the sea. I have friends and lovers. I eat fruit while watching the sun move across the water. I leave my days with salt on my skin.

“It’s a self-portrait,” Iphigenia said. “It’s a portrait of Ula, young, maybe even a teenager, holding an infant. It’s called Self-Portrait with Nothing.”

Pepper had steadied herself during a rough stretch of grad school by memorizing the collective nouns of the animal kingdom. A bloat of hippos, a parliament of owls. What was the appropriate collective noun for an assembly of mothers you never wanted? There was a knock on the room’s door. The Ulas froze. A descent of woodpeckers, a maelstrom of salamanders, a shiver of sharks.

“Self-Portrait with Nothing,” Pepper said. From the Ulas, there was a communal inhalation. Pepper was the nothing, they all knew, and though she didn’t say that out loud, it rang like a goddamn siren in her head.

She was leaving the Ulas behind. Maybe it wasn’t the right thing to do, but she’d spent her entire life fighting an instinct to flee, and now she was embracing it.

“You’re my favorite,” Pepper said. “In case there was any doubt.” “They’re not all bad,” Blue said. “I mean, we’re a real mixed bag of bitches, to be sure. But it’s a miracle any of us manage to function in the first place.”

In the sixteenth century, he’d once told her, the word for bat had been flittermouse.

And in every universe there was still plenty of uncertainty and grief, and kindness and anger and suffering and joy, beautiful things and miracles and tragedies that knocked people on their asses, there were mistakes and forgiveness, second-guessing and the question of what else might be out there—all constants in every universe, all existing at the same time.