The God of Endings

by Jacqueline Holland

Those pitiful beasts, I would think if I were a bird, those poor, sad creatures dragging themselves along the ground, passing their days laboring and fearing and suffering until death. Too clever to live in peace, too stupid to live well. They’re better off in the dirt, finally quiet, finally peaceful.

How curious it is that in nature, the most vibrant colors are those that precede death.

The most buzzingly alive a person will ever be they are at three, four, five years old.

Every child I’ve ever known has been afflicted with a desperate mania for ringing doorbells, pressing elevator buttons, and, if they can reach them, flipping light switches on and off.

“Names are like hats, Anya. You put them on, you take them off. If it’s cold you wear a warm one. Old things will go by many names over time. Do not become attached.”

I’m dreaming, so many years later, but I feel everything I felt as a young girl in Vano’s presence, all the awe and unnameable longing. I want to feel the liquid brown of his eyes in my mouth. I want to bury my face in the velvet of his voice and swim in the warm sienna of his skin, count his beauty like heavy coins, clink, clink, clink.

For myself, nothing can compare to the brilliance of pure, deadly cobalt mixed by hand with linseed oil, and for some reason, it strikes me as fitting that art should cost the artist dearly, that the most beautiful things made by man should also be poisonous. It seems somehow consistent with what I’ve seen of this world and its men.

Painting is a recursive process. You make an attempt, which is almost never it, so you make another attempt right on top of the first. It gets you closer, or it gets you farther. Either way, you attempt again. Somewhere between five and forty attempts, you find it. The shape you were searching for.

The truth is something you work your way steadily toward through trial and error. Mostly error.

Why Americans insist on housing beautiful works of art in such belligerently drab buildings, I’ll never understand,

IT’S a strange thing to suffer in a beautiful city; the beauty of the place is made dark in the mirror of your pain, and your pain is made beautiful in the mirror of the city.

English is an awful language, all knees and elbows. I can still barely get directions in it.”