Willemina van Gogh Paints Portraits in Reverse
by Phoebe Rodriguez
Image by Ryutaro Tsukata for Pexels
TW: References to mental illness, suicide, sexual violence
“You see for yourself in nature that many a flower is trampled, freezes or is parched...far and away the most grains do not develop but go to the mill — don’t they?”
—Vincent van Gogh, in a letter to his sister Willemina, 1887
“We women are for the most part what men make us.”
— Johanna Bonger, in her diary, 1892
1941
I am the last one.
The last of my siblings, even little Cornelis. He shot himself in 1900. This is how it goes with our family—the oldest and the youngest disappearing in a puff of gunpowder, and all the little lights between snuffing out in their own time. Except for mine.
It is 1941 now, I think. They told me, but I don’t trust them. The secret to my longevity is not knowing. The secret is the drifting. I sit in the ocean tipping, leaning, feeling the force of the moon, riding the strength of the current, finding in the flashes of light and darkness and salt the most vivid dreams.
When I reach the shore, I am always seated in the same chair, facing the same white wall. Except for the times I am on a cold table, choking on a gavage tube. Each time, the smell of decay hangs in the stale air, and it comes from me. I found I have undergone a monstrous transformation. The papery skin of my hands is blue; the edges of my vision are crumbling. The nurses and orderlies taunt me with their taut, rosy skin. They remind me of the “facts” of my life: that it is 1941, that I am seventy-nine years old, that we are in the hospital in Ermelo, as if I can believe that forty years have taken me by surprise and distorted me. As if I can believe that the world could spin that long without my being there.
But I know what I know.
So I always try to escape. I tear at the gavage tube. I slam my head against the white wall, trying to draw blood. I kick and scratch as their arms come after me. I pull at hair and eyeballs and teeth.
My hands don’t obey anymore. Too soon, I sink against the cold floor. My breath comes hot and dry, racing into my lungs against my will. The orderly’s hand, first holding me down, now relaxes and tries to soothe me. Sometimes it happens right then, sometimes it takes days and hours, but somehow, I always find my way back to the drifting.
I know what I know. So let’s start with the end, and go back to the beginning.
1925
The end is something I know happened, but I can’t remember how I know it. It happened while the world was spinning without me. The ending is that Jo dies in 1925, in Laren, twice widowed, mother to one, grandmother to four.
She dies with a stack of letters which don’t belong to her sitting on her desk. The letters are mostly from my brothers, to each other. They talk about our family, about books they enjoy, about the weather in Arles, about the money Vincent is blowing through, but most importantly about his paintings. This is Jo’s interest. The letters are what made the French and the Dutch fall in love with the paintings. But English-speakers aren’t biting, particularly not Americans. It’s all too colorful and unabashed and free to hang in their little colonial houses.
Americans don’t have the letters yet. If she can just put all those years as an English teacher to use and translate them, maybe even hard Yankee hearts can crack and bleed for Vincent. If only he hadn’t written so damn much. When the night takes her, a third of the letters still need to be worked through.
When her son goes to visit her the next morning and finds her cold body, there are letters in the mailbox. Museums in Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, all clamoring for a loan of Vincent’s best works, which she has savvily withheld from buyers. A report from the publisher of Vincent’s letters in the French edition. Collectors dying for even a sketch of The Potato Eaters, which used to hang over her fireplace. Checks for hundreds of guilders.
Only death could stop Johanna Bonger from working on Vincent’s legacy. She worked through her late years and her failing health. She wrote letter after letter to art critics who rolled their eyes at the tiny woman prattling fanatically about a madman’s scribblings. To make them take her seriously, she taught herself her own art course, reading by candlelight while her infant son slept. At the end of her life, she is a success, because Vincent is. She has single-handedly revived a dead man.
1904
The Rotterdam canals are painted an early-evening blue, and the last dry leaves tremble on their twigs. Arnoldus van Wijk enters the police station. He has come to file a missing person’s report for his wife, whom he has not seen in a week. Another man perhaps would not have waited so long, but van Wijk and his wife have never been particularly close, and she has taken to coming and going like a neighborhood stray.
The officer asks a few questions and jots down van Wijk’s answers, then pauses and wrinkles his brow. He tells the man to wait a moment, then returns with a ring and a cap and a shawl. Van Wijk stiffens in his chair.
The ring and the black clothing belong to a corpse buried that morning. The police have it dug up. By this time, the hair has begun to peel from the scalp and the fly-eaten skin to ripple like the pages of a soaked book. But despite the mottling of her face and the buildup of adipocere, he recognizes her. Clasina Maria Hoornik.
The coroner dates her death to November 22nd—six days ago. It must have been at night. In the morning, a park worker found her in a canal just north of Central Station.
On November 10th, a new exhibition opens at Rotterdam’s Oldenzeel gallery. On November 10th, Clasina—Sien, as most people know her—is alive and trying to go about her work. She might have been sewing that day, or scrubbing at shirts, or possibly even waiting on the corner for whoever would take a fifty-three-year-old woman. It is one of thousands of grey days which all blend as murkily as the water in her wash basins. Probably, she had no idea what was going on in the arts district.
But what if she had, somehow? What if in the long walks she takes along the canals, she happens to see people gathered around a poster, and she wonders what everyone is so excited about, and when the crowd dissipates she strains her eyes to read, and she reads his name?
And it isn’t the first time she’s seen the name since she last saw the man. On the contrary, he seems to follow her, despite the fourteen years he’s been in the ground, despite the twenty-one since he held her newborn son who is now a man. It isn’t the first time that she has unexpectedly found herself, decades younger and nude, affixed to a gallery wall. Thousands of people have seen her naked without paying a single guilder, and none of them know it.
Of course, she probably doesn’t know it either. This probably never happened. That there is any connection between the van Gogh exhibit that opened November 10th and the suicide on November 22nd is a romantic notion, much more Vincent’s province than Sien’s or mine.
But still, one wonders.
1901
While I am being admitted to an asylum, Sien Hoornik is being married. Van Wijk is forty, old enough to be bereft of romantic notions, but young enough—younger than Sien, at any rate—for her to have some modicum of faith in him. Most importantly, he has agreed to adopt her children. At nineteen and twenty-four they have little use for a father anymore, and with Sien’s history they have little trust in one, but they have use for his name.
Maria and Willem almost had a name and a father and a home once, years ago. Maria, the elder, can remember the hours she spent in the studio in the Hague, trying not to shiver out of her pose for the red-haired man’s drawings. She can remember baby Willem seated on a pile of blankets, mesmerically watching the strokes of charcoal cross the page.
On the brief occasions when Sien mentions that man, she calls him Willem’s father. This gives Maria a strange, uneven feeling in her stomach, but she has no way of arguing her doubts—she was only five then, and anything could have happened. But the maker of those dark, angular sketches seems a completely different man than the famous painter.
If Sien is going to lie about Willem’s parentage, Maria wonders, why not do so publicly? Certainly it would be more lucrative than washing clothes, and no less honorable than the profession she slips in and out of. But Sien keeps the connection to herself, and this alone makes Maria dare to trust her.
For over ten years now, Maria’s contact with her mother has come in scraps and sudden encounters. Sien has gone from Delft to Antwerp to the Hague to Dordrecht, from housemaid to seamstress to prostitute yet again. Willem has lived with their uncle and Maria with their grandmother, and Sien has been lost to the universe. The news of her mother’s marriage is a hopeful sign to Maria. Maybe, so late in life, she will finally be at peace.
1891
The revival starts with a boarding house in Bussum. This is where Jo chooses to go after her husband’s death. She had moved into the Paris apartment less than two years before, in a dream where she finally got to make the city she had longed for her home. Paris was where the Dutch went to escape the grey and drink the color that oozed out of the stones like wine. It was where radicals plotted revolution over coffee mugs and new books incinerated whoever touched their pages. And she was going to live there with her new husband, this blue-eyed scrap of a man who fought for the newest and bravest artists, who had one such genius for a brother.
That had been the spring of 1889, though. By January of 1891, the luster of the city has been eaten away with Theo. On the 25th he is dead, on the 29th he is buried, and on the 31st her son is one year old.
On that day, she walks through an empty apartment, oddly shrunken with Theo’s absence and stretched from holding her disappointments. She lingers at the crib, the only place that doesn’t appear shrouded in shadow, and fixates on one golden spiderweb of a curl. She looks up towards the wall behind the crib, at the delicate blue painting of almond blossoms. Vincent had painted it for his namesake nephew one year prior.
Jo has met her brother-in-law in person only a few times and exchanged a small parcel of letters. She remembers his schoolboy freckles behind his scruffy beard. She remembers how surprised she had been by his smile and his square shoulders, so different from the invalid Theo described. Only the scars on the left side of his head had told any woeful stories. He didn’t need to tell her anything; she had seen the paintings.
There are two hundred worthless paintings of his in this apartment, and she and Theo have spent hours late into the night examining them, discussing their merits, letting them teach her about this world of art she knows nothing about.
She looks at baby Vincent, and she looks at the almond blossom painting. She looks at the two things Theo left her to protect.
She writes a letter to Émile Bernard, telling him of her plans to move to Bussum and open a boarding house. She poses the question of what to do with all of his dear late friend’s art, though she already has ideas bubbling in the back of her brain. Bernard says to leave them in Paris, where little by little he may be able to sell some and put a few into group exhibitions. The rest, she gathers, will probably stay in Bernard’s closet, as they have lived in hers.
Jo ignores Émile Bernard. She arrives in Bussum at the age of twenty-eight in mourning black with a baby in her arm and a crate of paintings on its way.
1890
On the night of July 27th, a fist pounds on the door of the Paris apartment. It wakes the baby. Jo rises to his call with a groan. Theo goes to the door.
The telegram is urgent. And it’s exactly what they feared. They knew it was only a matter of time before something happened again. But this time it was a gun, and this time there will be no recovery. Theo throws together a suitcase and leaves Jo hopelessly trying to calm the baby when she is not calm herself.
Three days later, Vincent’s lifeless body is in the ground, and Theo’s lifeless body is walking around. The ghost continues to linger for months, flickering on a choice, until January, when he finally makes it. He chooses Vincent over his wife and child.
I’ve worked with the dying enough to declare something like that. Two men can have the same disease, the same intensity, the same complications, the same constitution to fight it, but then one man lets go of the rope and bows his surrender to the chasm below. He does this when he sees he has nothing left to lose.
Jo and the baby weren’t enough to tie Theo here. I would have hated him for it, if I had been his wife. But the miracle of Jo was her seeming incapacity for bitterness. So on that January day, when she looks at the almond blossoms, she trusts that its maker really is worth abandoning everything for.
Jo had known, of course, that Theo was dying. She learned before I did, certainly. But she simply hadn’t imagined it would go so fast, when an illness like his can linger for decades.
What must it have been like, when he sat her down and told her? How could he tell her, when he loved her so much, what it was and where he acquired it? How could he say the name of such a horribly impolite disease to his new wife, who had married a preacher’s son? Promises are made to women who marry preacher’s sons-- promises she realizes, sitting there, that no man can ever keep. She must have sat for a stunned moment, realizing then that this is what happens when one marries into the nightlife of Paris.
Theo tells her, and she stays. She marries him, she has his child, and somehow it doesn’t kill her.
1889
I meet Jo days before her wedding day. I am a mere seven months older than her, having just turned twenty-seven, and what a gap those seven months are. She looks like a porcelain doll newly taken from its box, her hands smooth and her eyes glass-bright. Mine still contain the shards of four years prior, when I watched my father collapse in our entryway.
Her family has seven children to our six, but our delegation looks hopelessly outnumbered with Pa dead, with Vincent still away, with myself still unmarried. Her father, the insurance broker, stands stiff and aloof, rubbing his gloved hands because he has no idea what to do with them. He has no idea what to do with himself, in this place, with this wedding he never asked to be a part of, for his daughter who refuses to make the sensible choice. I can’t help chuckling at him, and that makes me decide that I like Jo.
If Pa were alive, I like to think I would antagonize him with my choice of men. I don’t know why I didn’t when I had the chance. Maybe I am too engrossed in my work at the hospital. Maybe, as much as I would like to raise hell, I am too afraid. I am still living with the splinters Vincent’s many failed love affairs have sent through our family. Pa died having not spoken to his son in years.
Maybe I am still holding on to the painting in my mind of myself at a train station, waiting for my ride to Paris, leaves of a manuscript tucked under my coat to protect them from the rain.
While I’ve been staring into the black pond of my teacup, Theo, Jo, and her brother Andries have been getting more and more animated at the table. Andries is telling her she just doesn’t have the acumen to understand what Toulouse-Lautrec is getting at in the paintings Andries has newly purchased. She tells him something about the composition, then the weight and dynamism of the lines, and how the unconventional use of color creates an otherworldly sense of light that captures a feeling of intoxication. Andries pauses and scowls, and insists she’s only parroting what Theo has told her about it. Their mother, who knows nothing of Lautrec but that he paints prostitutes, blushes.
When Theo proposed to Jo the first time, she refused him. She had only met him twice, and she was entertaining another man then. He told me that when they first met, and the three of them attended the Rijksmuseum, she had hardly looked at him. Now the two of them blush and smile like children sharing a secret.
After the wedding, I will go back to washing the feet of the dying. The porcelain doll will be placed in a new case, shabbier than the one she came from, but perhaps more fitting.
1883
Sien and the children see Vincent off at the train station. He strokes Maria’s hair and fixes a button on her new jacket. He’s had it made for her, and one for Willem, out of old fabric he used to use in the studio. The sound of the locomotive pulling up to the platform makes Willem scream and cover his ears. It’s with this that the artist leaves. He is off to Drenthe, and they are moving to Sien’s mother’s house in the red-light district. The train pulls away and Vincent and Sien watch each other shrink into nothing.
It is September. This is not the last time they will see each other. When he visits in December, he will find them much as he did when they first met, grey and sunken, Maria’s hair cut short against lice. Unlike when they first met, she will not be working the streets.
Sien’s mother and brother have been needling her to get back into the business, and for the last few months of living with Vincent, she seriously considers it. In some ways, it is far easier and more pleasant than trying to sew by candlelight with a baby in her arms.
But she doesn’t go back, after she and Vincent have parted ways and she no longer need worry about wounding his pride. She’s found that the gaze of an artist, a doctor, and a john all feel more or less the same on her skin, heavy and cold as Plaster of Paris.
They part in September, finally laying to rest what has been hemorrhaging since April. In April, he writes to Theo in Paris. He is always writing to Theo, despite the cost of paper and postage. While he used to write long defenses of Sien’s character, now he enumerates her flaws. She has no understanding or interest in art. Her speech is rough, ugly he says, she’s fallen into bad old habits and loses her temper.
What could he have possibly expected? She isn’t one of the noble fallen women he reads of in Hugo and Zola. She likes bitters and cigars. She has scrawled handwriting. She has pockmarks. She has nightmares about her two dead children. She has a disease that sent him to the hospital. Is that not exactly what Theo warned him of when he became involved?
Sien has her own complaints. She watches Vincent pace outside their door. He spots the postman from a block away and races over to accost him, and thank God, there is a letter for him today, and thank God, it’s from Theo. Vincent tears it open, locates the enclosed money, and heads straight for the landlord. She watches this monthly routine and wonders how he can possibly feel above her. If he is her savior, what a pathetic salvation.
Nobody has ever sent an envelope of rent to rescue her, and she has never begged them to. She has taken any job that will take her, and his family faults her for it. She has worked despite her baby nearly killing her.
He has completed fifty drawings of her alone, besides his other subjects, in eighteen months. But he stays up late grumbling that he isn’t producing fast enough, that the children he loves are getting in the way.
Four different men have impregnated Sien and run. Vincent pleads with his family that he cannot abandon her, that she needs him too much. But she knows he already has. He loves the vision of himself pulling her from the mire, and the notion of being a husband and father, but to ever fully step into it would require money, and having money would require him to put down his chalk. Vincent has drawn her fifty times and mentioned her in eighty letters, and she recognizes herself in none of them.
So when Vincent asks her to follow him to Drenthe, where he wants to study the landscape, they both know what she will say before she says it. For almost two years, they have played a game of house. It is time to get back to work.
1882
Sien wakes from a doze. The window of her hospital room is open, letting in sunlight and the scent of fresh growing things. Surprisingly, the baby is silent, but then, what could have woken her? She lifts her millstone head to look at her mother and Maria, and behind them, like a phantom, someone who is not supposed to be there. Vincent, sweating and sallow with fever, comes to her like the glow of the morning, having left his own hospital against orders.
When the doctor allows, she brings her son home to the Hague. She moves into the new studio, where Vincent has prepared her a wicker armchair by the window and a cradle with a green coverlet. The space is cramped with easels and the cupboard has only bread and coffee, but it nearly resembles a home, and they are nearly a family but in one respect.
In early spring, Vincent had promised to marry her. He’d sent a battalion of letters home to his parents protesting that it was his right to do it, that it was morally right to do it, no matter that she is poor and Catholic and a mother. The plan had been to hold the ceremony after the baby came.
Now it is July, and there simply isn’t enough money to get married yet, but as soon as he sells a decent number of drawings, it will happen. And what does it matter what a legal record says, anyway? Vincent certainly isn’t bound by any puritanical ideas. They have committed to each other, so they are married in spirit.
He is only just thirty, and he has such bright blue eyes, and Sien wants desperately to let herself believe him.
1881
After several months away, I visit my parents for Christmas, and the clouds burst as if they were waiting for my appearance. Vincent bursts them, of course. He will not go to church for Christmas Eve. Cornelis and I hide behind a doorway while he and Pa argue.
What will it look like if the pastor’s own son won’t come to the service? Doesn’t he have a shred of respect?
Why are Pa and Ma so obsessed with appearances and propriety? It’s the most dishonest thing in the world, to expect a man to go to church when he’s made it very clear what he thinks of this whole system of religion. Vincent promises, if he’s forced to go to church tonight Pa can be sure he’ll never set foot in such a building again.
I close my eyes and try to close the miles between Etten and Paris with sheer will. If Theo would step through the door, he would stop this.
Instead, Vincent takes his coat and his suitcase and leaves. Pa does not go after him; it would make him late for church.
Vincent spends the rest of December in the Hague. He takes a walk on a freezing night, feeling the entire world is like the black, empty sky above him. He searches through the red-light district for something to sand down the quills that seem to poke through his skin. He passes by Kee Vos—no, he looks again. It isn’t Kee Vos. But it’s a woman Kee’s age, with her brown eyes, and a dress dark as widow’s weeds curving along the slope of a pregnancy. She isn’t one of the young beauties waiting just a few doors down. He meets her desperation like a bird hearing the song of its own kind.
In the summer, when I left home, things had been peaceful. I traded books with Cor and posed for Vincent. I cared for a little boy while his mother, Cousin Kee, went out with Vincent on her elbow. He loved to play the gentlemanly chaperone. I left before Kee’s visit was over, called away to a governess position in Weesp.
I see Vincent again in November, only weeks after following my employers to Haarlem. The first thing he asks is if I have seen Kee lately. I have indeed, being so close to Amsterdam. It had seemed that Kee and her brother and parents were all agitated and distracted by something. Something has happened between Pa and Uncle Johannes, and Ma and Aunt Mina, but none of them would say what.
Vincent was what, of course. He had gotten to know Kee very well over her visit, and it was obvious to him that she needed to be married again, and at the end of the summer he’d proposed this brilliant idea. He had told her, “I love you as I love myself,” and she had replied with “Never.”
I tell him not to be so dejected. There are plenty of widows for him to rescue—he can try my employer. But he isn’t dejected at all, and he is certain that nobody but Kee will suffice for him. She may not love him yet, but she can be made to. All she meant by “never” was that she cannot imagine it, and she cannot imagine it because she still lives in the ancient past of three years ago. If anyone is to bring her back to the land of the living, Vincent thinks, it will be him.
When Kee returns to Amsterdam, the letters follow her. Every day, a new letter repeating what has already been said, regurgitating the same arguments. She doesn’t know what to respond. What does it even matter what she says, when he won’t take the answer? She sends no reply, and in time she lets the envelopes pile up unopened. Then the letters pursue her father, each one followed by an apology from the Reverend van Gogh, who is striving to get his son to drop the matter.
Months go by. Piles of blazing letters fuel their fireplace. Pa is threatening to send Vincent to an institution, and Johannes says he’d better get on with it. Even Kee’s little son seems uneasy. She thinks over those summer weeks looking at every outing, every movement, every word and smile she gave her cousin. If only she had been cold to him. If only she hadn’t shown up at all.
She always wants her husband back, but now she aches for him.
Then in November, unexpectedly, she hears Vincent is in town. Dread sours her stomach. She arranges to stay with a friend, so when Vincent marches in at dinner, she is nowhere to be found. Johannes invites him to a civil, if deathly silent, meal. It is only after the little boy has been put to bed that Johannes, a preacher himself, summons all the rhetorical skill and righteous anger of his profession.
From that dressing-down, Vincent goes almost immediately to me. He assures me, as he did our uncle, that the matter isn’t over. He only needs to recover from the embarrassment and strategize. You’re so close, he tells me, and Etten is so far away, and Kee is being guarded like a crown jewel, won’t you do me a favor? Won’t you keep an eye on her for me?
I say yes. I am looking after five girls. When I don’t bring him any intelligence, I can say quite honestly I’ve been too busy with work. I don’t tell him what I really think of the situation. I don’t step into the tangle, and I don’t risk my brother’s good opinion of me, which at eighteen is still precious.
It all ends up being of no consequence anyway. In December comes the Hague, and in the Hague is Sien.
1877
Cornelia and Christoffel Vos live across from the Westerkerk, the largest Protestant church in the country. Vincent rises early to attend on Sundays, and afterwards stops to lunch with his cousin. He embraces her and calls her Kee. He shakes Christoffel warmly by the hand, frowning to see his cuffs so loose around his wrists and his face white in the summer sun. He stoops to greet their son Jan—their surviving son. When he decided to move to Amsterdam, he had been excited to meet the baby. He had arrived three months too late.
As Kee goes to speak to the cook, she hears her cousin rhapsodizing about the last book he read. He is studying to be a preacher like his father and grandfather, like Kee’s father who instructs him, like Christoffel when his heart was strong. He certainly knows how to speak with conviction. She imagines his long fingers gesticulating over the pulpit, his hair an even more violent shade above his black cassock. She will have to try not to laugh at his sermons, but she lets herself chuckle now.
In the coming years, she will learn to preserve moments like this in amber and treasure them. Already, her lost son is teaching her this. She must remember to notice the cerulean blue above the church steeple, and the glint of it off her husband’s eyes, and Jan’s look of triumph buttoning his shoes alone. When the moment flickers out, the colors will dim to winter-pale and disappear under the enormous shadow of an empty crib.
Vincent leaves in the early evening, by which time Christoffel can do little but lean back against the armchair in their living room. He lets Kee squeeze in beside him and rest her nose against his cheek. They sit together and say nothing, three rising and falling chests the only sounds in the house.
The Ocean
There is a parsonage in Zundzert with a garden in the back, where vines climb up the trellises. There is a milk goat with a bell around her neck and a dog who digs up the radishes. There is a piano where Anna is practicing scales and a chair by the fireplace where Pa reads a sermon. Two boys run in the garden. A girl curls on the sofa, staring at an art print on the wall, making up stories about the ladies inside it.
There is a graveyard outside the church, but people make far too much of it. They imagine Ma cold and hard as the stone that marks where her first little Vincent rested, and assume that is why the second one turned out as he did. But I remember her sitting with him at the dining room table, warmly watching him sketch from a book of Dutch Masters.
In order of birth, we are Ma, Pa, Vincent, Anna, Theo, Lies, Wil, and Cor. In order of death we are Pa, Vincent, Theo, Cor, Ma, Anna, and Lies. But for now we are alive, I remember.
I remember the freezing wind on the deck of the ship to Hertfordshire trying to tear my bonnet off, when I went to study at Anna’s school. I remember how my brief excursions always brought me home.
I remember how Anna found a husband and Lies found a job and I was still tending the garden. I remember letters from Paris and London and Dordrecht and Amsterdam.
I remember half-past seven, waiting for Pa to come home, and the crash of his body against the entryway rug.
I remember sending Vincent my writing, Plants and the Rain, in 1887, sealed with a confession.
It was promising and poetic, if a little trite. It was good for me to want to be an artist, but wanting to take lessons was the wrong way to go about it. I needed to explore life, seek out new things, and that would teach me art. As if I could pack a suitcase and travel alone, as if I had a patron to fund me. Hell, I should take up dancing, I should get married, I should do anything except for exactly what he was doing.
They never found Plants and the Rain after he died.
I move, with Ma, next to a blanket factory. I read the words of Marx on the workers’ grey and weathered foreheads. I manage the National Exhibition of Women's Labor and Pa rolls over, shaking his head.
I put on my white uniform in the morning and scrub red dots off the sleeves at night. I learn to differentiate the smell of sickness from the smell of age from the smell of death. I pull my nephew from his mother’s body.
I receive a letter dated July 14th, 1890. He knows the way melancholy hangs over me at the hospital. Keep working in the little garden, he says, it will do you good. As for himself, he is feeling better than he has in a long time.
I feel a bullet rip through my torso, and I retrace the steps: from the wheat field to the guest house to the doctor’s office to Arles to Paris, all the way back to the parsonage in Zundzert with the vines climbing up the trellis.
I continue. I go to political rallies in-between shifts. I read the awful book Lies writes. I am ripped by another gunshot, and I watch my baby brother descend deep into the soil.
I never marry and I never leave my mother. I forget and am forgotten. I ride a current pulled by the moon.
I drift beyond Kee in the front row of a church, and Jo grading English compositions, and Sien among her nine hungry siblings. I drift beyond my own birth, past Vincent and our stillborn brother and the uncle who gave them their name, beyond time to the first drops of dew upon the grass. I sit in a chair in a hospital in Ermelo, having lived and died and never been born, and it is 1941 and I am the last one and I am ready to go.
Phoebe Rodriguez (she/they), is a writer, theatre artist, and cat enthusiast. Originally from California, she now calls the Twin Cities her home. They have recently been published in The Bitchin’ Kitsch and Sunbow Zine and are currently working on their debut chapbook.
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