I asked Lamar why he paints people without faces. There is, for example, that series of canvases in which the women stand on all fours like dogs and curl their servile tails between their legs. Their heads are flayed to look like vaginas. (His own face, I might add, is ruddy but full of angles, marvelous for sketching.)

Perhaps he found my question impertinent, for he hesitated; really, I think the pause was theatrical. He kneaded his cheek like a piece of dough until his left eye fell out onto the table and rolled toward me and clinked to a stop against my coffee saucer.

The eye was glass, of course, though it took me a horrid moment to grasp that.

“I was twelve,” he said. “I was taking something apart, something I shouldn’t have meddled with. I can still see the rusty screws. They brightened where my screwdriver scarred them. Do you understand? I can sketch it for you. The screwdriver tore their slots, and the metal underneath was bright, but if you looked close, you could see it was scored, tortured by the unscrewing. My memory is particular, because this was practically the last thing I saw with two eyes. 

“My mother called me, and though I might normally have pretended not to hear, might have lingered at my little doings, this time I felt guilty that I was dismantling her alarm clock and immediately sprang up and ran to obey. My dog sprang up too, wagging with excitement, and got in the way. I fell on the screwdriver. I don’t blame you for laughing; I have often laughed about it since, though the humor eluded me for some years. No, don’t apologize. Will you allow me a metaphysical remark? A one-eyed man sees only half of things. I choose the deeper half.” His eyelid lay limp and fringed like a butterfly wing over the absence.

His partner Lena was lean and morose and curtained with oily hair. “He tried to startle you with his eye, I suppose,” she said a few hours later while cooking dinner. “You mustn’t let his antics fool you. He’s real, beneath it all.”

“It did startle me a bit,” I said.

Whatever it was she was cooking burped like the mud around a geyser and splashed the stove with pink. “His life is a series of tricks, but his works are the real subversions. Have you seen his new Elegant Bust series?” Some of the pink stuff oozed onto the burner and crackled and drowned her out. She ignored it, despite the smoke, and when the sound died down she was still speaking:

“—pipe bomb, and his mother’s clock was supposed to be the timer. He’s always been an oaf with mechanical things.”

At dinner he brought out one of the Elegant Busts. He pulled it from a tote bag and put it on the table between the dish of pink stuff and the wooden bowl full of kale and Mandarin oranges. For the second time that day, I felt my gut clench. It was a human head, shaved in back and naked to the bone in front.

“Don’t worry, it’s quite sterile,” he laughed. “Only the skull is real anyway—imported from Germany. The rest I made. Here, touch the stubble; I’m especially pleased with it.” He laid my hand upon it. I recognized the touch of clay beneath the silky fibers, of course; it was a great relief, though I resented the way he’d moved my right hand with his moist left.

“It’s his best work yet, I think, but of course he always has to make women the target,” Lena said.

I expected him to argue, but he was ladling the pink concoction onto his plate; he handled the ladle with grace. “This smells marvelous, darling,” he murmured.

Fireflies looped among the trees. I sat in the dark watching them from the couch where Lena and Lamar had made me a bed—for the Riesling with dinner had left me muzzy, and my hotel was across town, and they’d invited me to stay over. I had seen fireflies before, but not so thick; I could just about trace the serrated edges of leaves by their light. I couldn’t lie back, not yet; my stomach was in a state. A truck eased by, its single headlight momentarily making the fireflies invisible. As soon as it had passed, one firefly, as if to re-assert its authority, splashed audibly on the window, not two feet from my face. The insect ricocheted away at once, but the liquid part of it remained, oozing and luminous. Its blood, I suppose, unless even the feces shines.

“Have you everything you need?” Lena’s voice said from the dark. It took me a moment to locate her in the arch that led into the dining room. I said I was fine. I could only see her in silhouette.

Despite my answer, she came into the room and sat on the opposite end of the couch. Was she nude?

“Do you need to make love?” she said. “I know you’re far from home.”

“My stomach’s a little off,” I said.

“He won’t mind, you know,” she said.

“Won’t he?” To my shame, and despite everything, I began to feel interested.

“His injuries, you know. He still can, but as the years go by, it’s not always worth the pain.”

“Do you often have fireflies like this? I’ve never seen so many.”

“I always think they look like teardrops. As if the trees were weeping.”

She eased closer. I found myself meeting her. Her mouth tasted like mint; her torso felt stronger than I would have suspected. I imagined sketching it, just from the feel. I suppose there’s no need to recount it all; the measures we took were awkward, but sweet enough. When it was over she kissed my forehead, then my lips, and told me she and Lamar were in the habit of brunching rather than rising early.

Afterwards I found the fireflies had diminished; there were perhaps half a dozen, and they seemed to stumble and feel the lateness of the hour. With my finger I sketched a skull in the window’s condensation. Everything seemed stupidly symbolic—death coming on like a case of the flu, and all illumination failing.

I lay back to watch the fireflies. I had no one at home, no reason for the regret I felt. The dew thickened on the window; I felt sleepy, finally.

Had I seen another silhouette at the door, while we were kissing? The thought—almost a memory—startled me awake for a moment.

Green teardrops looped through my dreams. Nausea nearly woke me, but always I sank again without quite reaching the surface. I met Lena on a cobbled street somewhere. She had the wrong color hair, redder and fuller. She took off her skirt, which was white and long, and spread it across the cobbles; the charcoal sketch on it was in my own strokes, though I had no memory of making it. It showed Lucifer himself in three-quarter profile. He seemed infinitely tired and on the verge of speaking, of asking for help.

He had paid me for a portrait, I recalled. The pay came in Canadian dollars, but it would spend. I should be ashamed; I had forgotten to do the work. The hour was disastrously late. This sketch was all I’d managed. The trouble was supplies. You needed brushes made of human hair, and not just any human; you had to know they’d died in fear, though without getting blood on the fibers. You needed to boil fireflies for the colors, and who could find red fireflies? You had to distill the orange kind and hope for purer tones.

But now Lena was entirely naked, and in fact so was I, and things progressed. There was Lamar watching from the doorway (for no longer was it an outdoor scene, no longer was there a sun at all). Under his arm was a human head.

“I’m pregnant,” Lena said. It was true; somehow I could see inside her, to the membranes within which embryos swam and strained to escape. I remembered that we had been careless. Was that in the dream, or otherwise? I woke in a panic.

The morning was misty. On the glass my sketch of a skull had melted into an ugly smudge. I knew how it felt. My stomach turned a bit. It was impossible to tell whether the sun had risen, or was merely lurking below the horizon and irritating the mist into a hint of crimson. I dressed, and then, remembering that my hosts were late sleepers, stood looking out the window with nothing to do. A black mongrel emerged from the mist, sniffed beneath a mailbox leaning into the street, looked up as if it had heard me. Its tail jutted straight behind. It crept forward. Could it see me? I felt, absurdly, as if it meant to attack, but of course I was safe inside.

Nonetheless, I slipped through the arch into the dining room.

On the table was the entire series: six “Elegant Busts,” each a skull clothed in flesh but without a face. One of them had lustrous red hair. The one next to it had long brown hair that seemed familiar. I stroked it and knew for sure; it had the texture of the hair I’d caressed last night, though it was drier and had gone a shade lighter. Lena must at some point have shaved her head for him, but obviously that was long ago; it had grown back.

“We had to go out,” said the note dangling from the mouth of a shaved head—Lamar’s hand, with its studied crudeness of stroke. “Help yourself to breakfast.”

The breakfast lay in the center of the table, inside two heads turned upside down to serve as bowls, each with a gleaming spoon. One held scrambled eggs, still steaming. The other brimmed over with black caviar.

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Gordon Grice’s stories have lately appeared in The Arkansas International, Zone 3, and Concho River Review. They’ve been included on Best of the ‘Net, nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and listed among the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. His nonfiction books include The Red Hourglass and National Geographic’s Shark Attacks. He reads poems on Youtube @DeadlyKingdom and occasionally remembers to post at GordonGrice.com. 

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