Angelica at the Rock (After Ingres)

L. Richardson

Angelica is handcuffed to a mountain. Her nipples point in opposite directions like laser lights at a rave. Her fanny-pack fat jiggles when her bare heels hit rock. Around her, a gaggle of footfilled sneakers and heads in baseball caps take illegal photos for Instagram stories. They point at her bulging neck while ogling her cupcake breasts. “Look,” they say, “her body curves in ways that used to be beautiful.”

Angelica’s skin shines the way naked women’s bodies glow in art. It’s not just the Sherwin Williams’ 6523, Olympus White, on the walls around her—Angelica illuminates. “For eternally dry skin,” she recommends, “get abducted by barbarians and shackled to a rock by the sea. As you wait for a monster to devour you, get painted.” Angelica wants you to know she is not only handcuffed to the mountain. She is handcuffed to the edge of the canvas. She is handcuffed to the wall of the museum.

At nineteen, Georges Seurat had a beard like an upside-down witch’s hat, which he once used as a paintbrush—dipping scraggly ends into a pool of linseed-oil beige to dab at Angie’s knees. Seurat pioneered pointillisme—little dots that fade into figures the farther you step away— revealing what Angelica has always known. The closer you get, the more the emptiness emerges. What is keeping it all together? she wonders. And Who decides where it all goes? And What’s a girl gotta do to get off this shithole rock?

In defiance, anguish, or boredom, Angelica has thrown her head back, perpendicular to her body like a serif. Her neck bulges where it bends, like she has swallowed a stick of butter. Like she has not been eating enough salt. Like, 145 years later, she has finally had enough of this shit. The bulge is a breast echo, a third eye. It stares back at us. No one notices when her big toe peels from the canvas, wiggling a glob of paint to the floor.

On another canvas, Ruggiero comes to save Angelica. In fact, she is a “selective reduction,” made to mimic this masterwork by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Covered in golden armor, Ruggiero rides a hippogriff with little wings and a horse’s ass. His lance flosses the sea monster’s fangs. He will be expecting thank-you sex. (He may be in league with the barbarians.) But on Seurat’s canvas, Angelica is alone. Ruggiero is somewhere else—on another wall or in the museum crowds or managing the Sherwin-Williams factory. Angelica’s feet squish in Socialite as Sleepy Hollow, SW 9145, splashes around her calves. She wonders, Where did all these men come from, and why do they get to mix the paint?

Because Angelica has been captured this way before. She is derivative. She is multiple. She is Andromeda waiting for Cetus. Olive Oyl on the train tracks. Mary Jane falling from a skyscraper. Carrie Fisher chained to a giant turd. She has been taken, but someone is coming to take her back. (The museum has her for two more weeks, then she goes on loan to Mississippi.) “These stories that make us up,” she says to a terrified preteen in a pair of retro Jordans, “are painted with the same colors.” When Angelica shakes her gloopy mane (Husky Orange, Saucy Gold), she splashes a colorful crosshatch on the preteen’s face. He mewls, faints. Concerned docents materialize from three directions. Fieldtrip chaperones fan the preteen with explanatory pamphlets. Classmates and other rubberneckers file into the room, following his gaze when he wakes, straight to Angelica. Gasps. Shrieks. Another body tumbles to the floor. At the top of the frame, so high it’s almost hidden, Angelica’s expression succumbs to gravity. Her eyes are rolled so far back into their sockets she is spying on her brain, which is thinking, What a waste of a good hair day. Which is thinking, Isn’t this all so cliche now. And How long did you bozos think I would stand here? Beneath the gaze of two dozen smartphones, her hair is flowing out from the wall now. Watch it.

Bright in this dark ocean, bare feet sliding off this slippery rock, Angelica tells her gawkers to ask Sherwin and Williams what colors she is always feeling. “What names would they call my fear, my rage, my boredom?” she asks. (Kimono Violet, Really Red, Anchors Aweigh.) The linseed-oil sea foams around her ankles. “Do artists have names for the shades they mix, or do the colors just become women?”

Ingres would say, “Her body is the light. It shines so Ruggiero can find her.”

Seurat would say, “She is a pathway to pointillisme.”

Angelica says, “I have been painted this way before.” Solvents run down her elbows as she slips her cuffs (Bohemian Black). The gallery stinks of fresh paint now—volatile organic compounds. Museumgoers cover their mouths, are livestreaming. Everyone screams as she steps from the canvas, large and dripping color, feet squelching on the fancy hardwood. Leaving, she sploshes a slug trail of greens and browns. More slops on the glass front doors as she saunters into the cloudy afternoon.

Angelica is seeping beauty.

Angelica is monstrous.

Angelica is mobile.

She has passed the second Starbucks on the left now. Everybody look.

—

About Author

L. Richardson tends her many philodendra in Houston, TX. Her fiction has been published in Southern Indiana Review and Peatsmoke Journal, and you can find her scholarship in Textual Practice, The Harold Pinter Review, and The Many Facades of Edith Sitwell. She teaches at Rice University.

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