#122 Frame

by Helen McClory

It may be unwise to linger here. Her upstairs will be passing by, presently. Which means passing through you, if you’ve taken a fancy to the hall and not gone out towards the extremities, beyond the French windows, into white light. Don’t you notice the silver cast everything has here? Yes if titles are to be trusted you can place yourself in Sussex – what allusions, Sussex? Shakespeare play? Gentle English landscapes? But we all know titles are nothing but surface, and this, dearest, is only three parts surface, more intertitle, a matter of break, in which to recall the potent hue, and light, and wonky confluence, speaking of which, you can feel it, can’t you? The flow at wait, the timeless shimmer of fever.

Look. Her upstairs is whatever monster of light and angularity like a silent German Expressionist film (what do you mean, you haven’t seen one of those? Too late, dearheart). She’s double jointed, raised flickering at the limitrophe of the painting, the other end from what might be the implied garden, safety. This is how we know the place holds monster: hints at a tensile stillness, flimsy guesswork, that class you took in queer theory – this is all it amounts to, until she gets up the whim to crane down through her walls (you noticed, yes, the x-ray stylings of the foreground right) peering into your ringing nervous system and, with her beautifully blacked-out lids widening, swarms, declaiming through a white text on the black:

night

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