By Matt Kendrick
It was the first painting we looked at on our visit to the gallery. I said it was kind of beautiful. The tongue had a sensual quality. But Hadley didn’t see it. She said the painting was just plain weird. When I agreed about the weirdness, she asked how the painting could be both beautiful and weird at the same time. So, I told her to look a little closer. I did my best to explain how with a painting there are often hidden layers of meaning. All she had to do was close off her mind and let the painting be her whole world. But she couldn’t do it. She seemed to find the idea of standing still almost impossible. This was a thing with Hadley. She was incapable of stillness. Her days were a beehive of step aerobics by the kitchen counter chopping walnuts for her muesli, doing puzzles on the bus with her earbuds buzzing podcasts on anything from sporting records to the history of watering cans. They were invented in Ancient Egypt, she told me, along with bowling, breath mints and mummification. By this point, we’d moved onto the next painting which depicted a woman with an avocado-green watering can instead of a head. Hadley said she knew how the woman felt. She said she had so much sloshing about between her ears that she often worried all her thoughts, all her random urges would just come gushing out. We’d talked about her urges before. There was one which involved drawing beards on baby’s faces and another which involved translating everything into made-up languages. She never acted on her urges. But she said they sometimes kept her up at night. Like what would happen, she asked as we were standing in front of the watering-can woman, if I were to approach that security guard and boing his badge right off his shirt. I guess he would find it weird, I said. And that was when she moved. The way she leaned towards me was like a birch tree bending in the wind, keeping her spine straight and her legs straight, just hinging at her ankles. Then the lick. Her wet tongue against my ear. And it was weird. Certainly, it was weird. But it was also the most beautiful thing I’ve ever felt.
Matt Kendrick is a writer, editor and teacher based in the East Midlands, UK. His work has been featured in various journals and anthologies including Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, Cheap Pop, Craft Literary, Fractured Lit, Ghost Parachute, and the Wigleaf Top 50. Website: www.mattkendrick.co.uk | BlueSky: @mattkendrick.bsky.social | Twitter: @MkenWrites
MoonPark Review 