sunflower writing
Sunflower writing Sunflowers for a Lovely man with Marfan’s Syndrome by Robin Smith
B
radley is checking his body in the mirror and struggling for ways to channel it into art. Catherine is sitting staring at the painting on a postcard that isn’t for her. She looks weary and out of time, engulfed in a sea of white noise separating the world from her and the painting in her hand. Bradley is looking at the hole in his chest. Looks like someone’s dug a trench into him, right between his nipples, but he was born a Cold War baby, so war’s due date is long gone; the trench stays, now, just as a thirty-year old history, a mark of those who died, empty but for the hair of a man just finished being young. A chest hair, a tumbleweed rolling across the dark perimeter of no man’s land. He considered making that a song. ‘No-one’s going to buy that wartime bullshit,’ advised Catherine, but he still liked to play with the analogy from time to time. He’s beautiful, she always tells him, the hole isn’t noticeable, it’s not his fault; funny how even giving it a name is enough to make all those things lies. He’s disgusted by his body, but suitably, he thinks- ‘doesn’t everyone hate their body?’- quite, Catherine remarks of herself when he says this, since it’s a good way to short-circuit his self-loathing. Anyway, she’s full of her own insecurity. ‘They bloody should,’ he mumbles. ‘Quite,’ she manages to send back from the comfort of her armchair. Today she’s a passenger to his maudlin bathroom commentary. There are days when Bradley can’t be shortcircuited so easy; this is one of those days. There are days when Catherine can’t look up from pretty art; this is one of those days. Feeling selfish, he moves toward the living room full of praise for his lady. ‘That for you?’ he says,
hoping she’ll notice him hanging the bath towel around his shoulders like a movie star between scenes. ‘What?!’ and he motions towards the postcard in her hand, knowing, surely, that it isn’t for her. Its backside is covered with sharp, baroque handwriting, which he guesses is what Cursive is. He can’t tell if he doesn’t recognise the name signed or whether he just can’t make it out; never seen handwriting like that, intelligent, they’d call it. ‘Is it for you?’ he says again, breaking her fixation with his ‘famous firm tone’, as she calls it, the sound a performance artist makes to silence a crowd of five hundred. ‘Oh, I wasn’t reading it. Mailman fucked up. Just admiring the painting. It’s “The Convalescent”. Such a beautiful painting. Have you seen it?’ Bradley shakes his head. ‘Do you want a look?’ He knows better than to disrupt the flow of anything in Catherine’s life. She nudges the postcard into his free hand. If you don’t want to know what happens in ‘Bradley meets The Convalescent’, look away now. Bradley starts from the outside because the most striking thing about the painting is the water. Waterfronts have an inherent beauty, which means any river or lake is a ballad, and Scandinavian fjords are swansongs. Water is beauty whether murky, stinking brown or a crystal blue. Bradley thinks the artist has painted a pond, but that it seems elevated, shimmering under stony architecture like no other pond has, what he guesses are Greek arches. These arches aren’t erected for their own beauty, but to make nature grander; they reflect on the pool of water next to the lily pads and surround pots hanging red flowers. It is ultimately serene. Autumn surrounds the water. In fact, autumn is closing in on the painting, the bushes like stone walls and the towering bark tree covering over like a ceiling. The two women at the painting’s forefront, who he has barely noticed, or anyway hasn’t registered for what they are, people, are
the sunflower edition ~ 23