PELT by Kristy Bowen

PELT Kristy Bowen

pelt |

Kristy Bowen

pelt dancing girl press, 2021 _____of 100

cover: Lavina Fontana: Mars and Venus

pelt is based on the intersections of Renaissance “dog-girl�

Antoinetta Gonzalez and her portraitist, Lavinia Fontana, one of the first known female painters to paint from live nudes.

By the time the sun has slanted across the floor, you've bathed three times. The thick fur of your forearms glistening beneath the surface of the water, waving slowly. The women rush from room to room in a flurry of white sheets. All of it was so much novelty, the perfect pink cupid's bow of your smile as the men placed their hand on your waist, their palms on your neck in the hallway. Some animal in you they’d never seen. The pink parts your body glistening in lamp light.

Your father was a savage, but he cleaned up pretty well.

Could walk and talk and place his forks neatly next to his plate. Everything was greasy, slick with oil paint. Nothing could hide the scent of his body, nor can you hide yours. Try as you may--perfumes and teacakes. Tiny mints between your teeth. The animal thing that licks its hindquarters in the feather bed and births unhappiness, bloody and mewling.

The dog-girl fidgets against the rose damask. It's all in the rivets, the pivot of her gaze. As children, they ran through poplars and briar, but now the light catches the brown pelt and sings. Singes against the window frame. The master said wait. Wait for the subject to illuminate itself. For the room to ignite. So she waited years. Painted damsels and deer in the woods, but still the master broke her against the light nightly.

Antoinetta smooths her skirt and stares at the tile. Bares her shoulders more. The dark hollows of her eyes a grayness that doesn't exist in nature. But the room, it takes on rain. Soaks the blanket, the chaise, the curtains, through and through.

The best gifts do not know they are gifts. This, the girl with the soft fur, curtsies and sighs like a princess, but there is wildness in the eyes. As if moments before, she was under the table, snatching a bit of bread from the fingers. Lingering in hallways that are all our undoings.

The arches and porticos that empty nowhere but into gilt cages. The tilt of our hips for the portraitist. Lips rouged and faces powdered, we wait our turn for immortality. The swirl of colors cracking on the pallet. We wait in the antechamber for the doves that will be released one by one over the city. Before they’re shot and fall softly to the ground.

By noon, even the chamber pots shined. The wine in the cupboard and the masks unmasked. She liked to spend these hours in the garden, smashing pill bugs one by one between her fingers. The rough feel of her slip scratching her thighs into a frenzy. The man from Avondale, who stuck his fingers inside her no more than a memory, no more than a ghost haunting her dusty hallways. The musk of his body when he opened his pants and took her by the hand. The complications of bodies, all their angles and thrust. Startled when she felt a wetness pooling in her recesses. Breathed "yes" against his coat. How to measure the distance between them fully, the push and pull of desire. The court girls who shimmy themselves into damask and perfume their throats. For the men who only want to take them in their teeth and shake.

In the mountains, we play animal, vegetable, monster. Write our names in the dirt. Flies gather on the tiny cakes, the crinoline spread cross our laps. We tried to make a society of it. Making art and drinking tea in tiny cups.

But the mice kept darting into through our shadows. The pears kept rotting on the trees. We tried to be beautiful, but still we were dying slowly. Our teeth rotting in our mouths as we plied our loves with sweet words and poetry. Shitting in the bushes while the birds sang like they, too, were dying and ants carried the picnic slowly away.

For every open window, she'd trade you a dusty cellar.

Half lit from a lantern. Her fingers against stone feeling out the dark. Her father was a joke, a toy, rolling through courtyards to a polite rise of applause, But it took her tiny waist to become the princess's pet. To sleep with her beneath perfumed sheets. If she wanted to, she could smother her, place a soft furred hand over the rosey lips. Tighten on the slender throat and squeeze.

Having let the animals into your bed, there is no stopping it. How the princess would turn and roll into her. Wrap her arms around and sigh heavily into her shoulder. The breath soft as week-old roses against her skin.

The dog-girl plays croquet in the afternoon. Lays out her skirts on the lawn. At dawn, crawled into this other skin.

Removed the moonlight and replaced it with lace binding.

There was all that time winding, the maids with their whispers. Girls without mothers are windswept, full of cobwebs. Morally ambiguous as frosted cakes growing stale on the plate. The dog-girl tastes them all and licks the sticky icing from her fingers, one by one. It's frightening, how easily she slips into cracks. Just yesterday, a whole day gone and her naked in the woods, sleeping.

How she stood and brushed the leaves from her hair.

Slipped into her crinolines like nothing had happened.

One summer, the mirror in the tower is said to grants wishes. The maidens take turns tossing dried roses into the pond and adjusting their skirts before descending the long staircase into a small room. She'd tried to paint them there, pining and preening, but the light was so bad. She'd scarce render a slant of forehead, a single brown eye, and they'd slip into shadow again. The husbands they fetched from their reflections unknown, but the mirror would catch her own every once in a while, and it startled her. To be this body, this flesh, living in the world and yet not. She'd catch her face, hair loose, cheeks red, and suddenly land back in the bones that bent around the heart. How strange the image released her as hurried from the room. How strange the way her pulse raced as she descended the stairs.

The fur on her belly is lighter shade. A fade of brown to cream. A mean soft wandering down to the split of her legs. In summer, she’d grow itchy and hot beneath brocade. Long to crawl out of her skin and into the pond at the lip of the woods. Sunbathe, otter-like, on a bank until dusk. Sometimes the painter would join her, her fingers long, but her body smooth nearly top to bottom and startlingly white. Even her lines lithe and unblemished. Her own, a rough miscalculation of skin and sinew. The wide set of her hips . In the water, they'd float.

The painter would reflect light, blinding the water around them. How it burned the lake and the landscape all at once.

It is difficult to approximate the body without the body.

Light dapples the thighs of the king's mistress, but it goes uncaptured. Instead she's left with memory, the feel of her fingers over her own ribs and belly. The court women as they pull themselves into their slips. Shoulders and breasts and thighs impossible to remember the intricacies of. The women in paintings are too long in the torso, too squinched in the neck. Too absent in the eyes. One after the other fiddling with their hair. Later she'd rip every canvas from its frame and start over fresh. Fingers and toes and rouged lips. Too long, too short, or way too red.

In the antechambers, the maids line up like cows to the slaughter. This one the daughter of fortune. This one the daughter of decay. The way the light paints them, you would think they were royalty. The gowns placed on their bodies, a fiction, a fraud. How she’d reach out to wipe the smudge of ash from their cheeks.

It'd been weeks since she'd had a moment to herself.

Her paints. But still she approximated their likeness, not in the moment, but later, by candlelight. The frightened, frantic way they removed quickly from the room like a flurry of birds when she was done.

At night, she itches in her bed. Not beneath the fur, but inside the skin. Moonlight hits the mirror’s dark pool and she pulls herself to the edge of the bed. Belly down, fingers working. How she lurked at the edges of the ballroom and watched the rats crawl along the boards. Watched as the chamber maid straddled the stable boy against the credenza. His thrust and wane. Too much dust gathering over sheets in beds that were never mussed. Remained pure and white but touched with blood. Her mother smooth and seal-like, but her father, the marauding beast..

All that tangling of bodies, and for what? This slow, soft beat under her fingers. Sheets wrinkling in her fists.

It's difficult to approximate the sun without the sun. We gathered our baskets and made for the wood. Like a fairytale, with breadcrumbs, steady wind. Came to the place where the animals sit in a circle and watch as we lay out our task. In the woods, anything goes, everything glows white. Even the stained sheets we wrap around our bodies like a shroud. Sparrows loud and a racket of birdsong erupting from the hedge. We animals that place our cakes neatly on the log. Tidy napkins and lay out forks.

Then smash it all to bits.

Segments in this series have appeared previously in Rogue Agent.

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