J. M. Eno

Short Fiction

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I. Mondrian

Kelsey had been thinking of leaving him before he invited her back to the lake house. One more trip, she had thought. It would be their tenth time there, a marker that slightly more than ten years had passed since they had started dating. She had trouble remembering the time before they had been a couple.

The house was a massive, white-concrete compound that hung over the water like a bird searching for prey. In the winter, the icy winds from the lake would blow over its facade, gather in the corners near the support beams, and depart with a low, mournful moan. It was this sound that had given the house its name: The Siren on the Lake.

His father was an art collector, and the interior was packed full of pieces. The first time she visited she spent hours looking at them: Mondrian, Rothko, Pollock. The father had a taste for abstract Modernism, but there was one representative piece, a nude woman from a lesser-known Impressionist. The subject reclined on a rock near the seashore, with her back to the viewer and her head turned coyly. Like so many from similar artists, it straddled the line between art and smut.

They unloaded the groceries and went to separate rooms. How different it had been when they had first come here—they hadn’t been able to keep their hands off of each other, had fallen into bed immediately. 

Charles went to the office to answer emails. He didn’t need to work, but it was frowned upon in his family to be “idle” for too long. He used to say that it was not his money, but his family’s. Now it was mostly our money, though not a single account was in her name.

Kelsey stared at the Mondrian in the living room. It hung opposite the row of windows looking over the lake, and the low evening light softened the harsh geometry of the painting. He had joined her for a swim in the lake once. Ever since, he had come up with excuses: leeches, algae blooms, parasites. She had stopped asking.

The painting was composed of different sizes of squares and rectangles, some in shades of off-white, and others in bright, crisp colors. The last time she had looked at it, none of the rectangles that touched had been the same color. And yet, at the bottom left there were two neighboring rectangles of stark black. Just now she had thought they were one large square, but she could see clearly the line dividing them.

Charles emerged to get a glass of water. 

“Charles, in this Mondrian, have you ever noticed that two of the rectangles are the same color?” she asked.

“Can’t say I have,” he said. He squinted at it for a moment and returned to the office.

That night, they donned their pajamas, undonned them, and had sex. It was the same sort of sex they had been having for years, mechanical and uninteresting, just pleasurable enough that it was worth continuing. Their first trip to the lake house had been the first time she had orgasmed with him. Sometime, a few trips ago, it had been the last.

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II. Rothko

Charles went out for a run the next morning. Was she sure she did not want to accompany him? She was. He must have taken her on a hundred runs in the city. She hated the feeling of it—her feet slapping against the pavement, the moment when she started sweating, not just from her forehead and armpits but from everywhere. They always ran at his pace, which was a quarter-step too fast for her. She could keep up, but by the end she was a quivering mess.

She looked down at her legs and wiggled her toes. Sometimes they felt like they didn’t belong to her, like she had borrowed them from someone else. 

Years ago, she had gotten a caterpillar tattooed on the left side of her lower back, just below the waistline of her jeans. “Why not a butterfly?” her friend Meghan had asked. “A butterfly is just the one butterfly,” Kelsey had said. “But a caterpillar could be any kind of butterfly one day.” Later, she learned that caterpillars did not work quite that way, that each species of caterpillar always transformed into the corresponding species of butterfly. She liked it regardless.

In the study, there was a Rothko. She sat in front of it with a cup of tea. To her right was a photo of Charles and his father on their boat. 

The painting was composed of three horizontal rectangles. Unlike the clear lines of the Mondrian, the shapes here were softer and bled into one another. An orange rectangle took up about the top half of the painting. A thinner, azure one followed. The base was a moderate-sized rectangle the color of seaweed.

It was easy to get lost in the Rothko. The canvas was massive, and it seemed to draw the light away from the other paintings in the room, dimming them.

As she watched, the top rectangle grew fuzzier. It looked as if a poor quality image had been printed onto the canvas. She looked closer, and the orange rectangle began to shift. Its corners were pinched and the rectangle seemed to fold in on itself, revealing a darker brown space behind it. 

She put down her tea and stood up. The rectangle continued to move, and she felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up. 

“Charles!” she shouted but then remembered he was out. She took a picture of the painting with her phone. The orange rectangle returned to its previous shade. 

She called her mother, but it went to voice mail. In the darkened screen of her phone, she saw her reflection for a moment. Her hair was blonde, but the reddish-brown roots were just beginning to show. Had her eyes always been this blue? She could have sworn she had once seen herself with eyes the color of seaglass.

When she sat down, the painting began to move again, but faster. The orange rectangle folded in on itself, then quartered, then eighthed. Finally, it disappeared without a sound, leaving the brown space where it had been.

Charles returned to find her pacing nervously around the study. 

“This used to be orange,” she said. “Right here. And now it’s brown.”

Charles stared at her blankly.

“Why is the art changing, Charles?”

“I don’t…what are you talking about?”

She swiped into her phone, and showed Charles the picture. The square looked oranger on the phone, but not as orange as it had. She turned up the brightness.

“Rothko spent a lot of time mixing his palette. His color composition is really complex,” said Charles.

“Don’t tell me about Rothko’s palette. It was orange!”

“Are you all right?” he said. “I’ve got some Xanax if you want.”

She didn’t. Xanax always made her feel like she was floating, and she just wanted to swim. She made herself another cup of tea and settled onto the couch in the living room. The nude woman looked back at her, unmoving.

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Later, her mother returned her call. Yes, she was doing all right. No, she wouldn’t be able to make it home for Christmas. Yes, again. No, she didn’t think she could ask Charles for another loan. No, it wasn’t any of her business that he would pay for her plastic surgery and not for her mother’s house repairs. Yes, she would think about it.

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III. Pollock

The next morning, it was the Pollock. Charles was out again, seeing to a maintenance issue on the boat. The Pollock, with its bold swirls and splashes always seemed to possess some motion. But this time the paint was actually moving: swirls swirling and drips dripping. Kelsey ran her hand below the painting to see if any paint would fall off, but her hand came back dry.

She called her therapist. By the time the line was connected, the movement had stopped.

“The motion you see could be related to our work,” her therapist said. “Memories can surface in unexpected ways. A visual irregularity, a strange dream, or a familiar scent. Sometimes it can be difficult to tell what actually happened and what our minds have filled in. Do you think we need another session?”

“No, that’s all right,” said Kelsey.

“Of course, it could always be something physical. Laser eye surgery that needs correction? A problem with your contacts?”

No, her vision had been good for as long as she could remember.

“If it happens again, let me know. I’m sorry, but I do have to ask: have you had any more thoughts of harming yourself?”

Kelsey assured her she had not.

She looked up at the Pollock, and it was still.

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IV. Nude

For dinner, Charles brought home salmon fillets. She liked it when the inside was pink and buttery, but he cooked them too long for her liking. The grocer had caught him up on the gossip from the small town nearby, and Charles relayed it.

That night, they fought. It was a familiar fight, about as well-worn as the shortcut from the lake house to the water. Why wasn’t she good enough to marry? Marriage was old fashioned—it was only used to control women. And what was the point if they didn’t want to have children? Still, it was a symbol of her place in the family. They could not just date forever. But of course the pre-nup would be a hassle. Why couldn’t she see how complicated it was to bring another person into the family’s trust structures? And didn’t she know he loved her anyway, now that they had been together so long? 

When they had tired of fighting, they wound down. Charles turned his back to her and fell asleep. Kelsey stayed up to read, but she couldn’t concentrate. She re-read the same page three times before she turned off her light. 

She dreamed she was a mermaid, swimming through the open ocean. When she was hungry, she caught fish and ate her fill. When she was thirsty, she drank from the sea. One day she saw a golden fish, gliding languidly toward the surface, and followed its glimmer upward.

A dark shadow pierced the whitecaps above. She swam down as quickly as she could but found herself being pulled back toward the darkness, and the harder she swam down, the faster she rose. 

Just as she was about to reach the surface, she woke up next to Charles. None of the lights seemed to work, and her phone had died. She felt strange walking around the room instead of gliding through the water.

She roused Charles, and they went into the living room. Charles found a candle and lit it. They sat on the couch in silence.

All around, the paintings were moving, the colors twitching and the brush strokes vellicating. 

“I see it,” said Charles, finally. “The movement in the paintings.”

“Yeah?” said Kelsey.

“Yeah.”

Kelsey put her head on his shoulder and felt safe. She wondered how everything could be so perfect and so broken at the same time.

The woman in the nude sprawled out, ageless. Her hair was blonde, and her eyes were blue. There was a small birthmark in the shape of a worm on her back. Kelsey noticed, perhaps for the first time, how much the woman in the painting resembled her.

As she watched, the nude woman’s legs changed in hue from milk white to olive to emerald. The line between them was swallowed by flesh and then by scales. She slipped off her rock and into the ocean. 

They went back to bed. Kelsey nestled her hands on the inside of her legs and found the long, thin scar that ran down each of them, as if her tail had been peeled apart. She pulled Charles’s arm around her tightly and lost herself in sleep.

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J. M. Eno is a writer of poetry and prose, whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Cobalt Review, House of Zolo’s Journal of Speculative Literature, and other venues. He can be found on New York street corners imploring his intransigent English bulldog to move or on Twitter at @jmenowrites.

Photo Credit: Charles Byrne is a photographer and writer with photos in F-Stop Magazine, Red Booth Review, and Yes, Poetry.