Sanded Down

She had been killing for as long as she’d been able to hold things.

Her first was a mess of soap, warm with summer and malleable between her fingers. The soapy model killed her cousin. He was beyond saving the moment she drew the curve of his eyeball with her fingernail. She had not meant to. Then- five years old- she didn’t have the grace or precision to make anything but horrible Picasso-likenesses. It only barely looked like her cousin, to her, but she’d been proud of herself for picking up the soap in the first place and seeing a face in it. Two days later, her cousin had died.

Several more deaths, and a few years later, she went to the Mandel. The Mandel was a house as out of the way as could be when you were near the centre of the city. There was a lot to get accustomed to in the house. The roof was one, because it was constantly there, above her. The floorboards were another, because they were constantly under her feet. She thought she might singlehandedly wear the entire floor to a soft pulpy blanket with her pacing. She wanted out, badly. But not badly enough to kill people.

She lost both parents to it, and it was only because her aunt was estranged and had not seen her since she was an infant and too young to retain her aunt’s image, that she did not kill her aunt. Third time’s the charm, her aunt had told her, through a crack in the door. She stood on the opposite side of the room while her aunt held the door nearly shut and explained that it was clear now what was happening. The faces were to be removed. From pictures, from streets, from sight. There were to be no more faces in the world. There was a window with a sheet of film over it to keep the faces outside hidden. When she squinted through it she could only see the diffused colours that made up trees and joggers and bikers. Some days she squinted at the diffused colour spots until her vision went blurry and the spots reminded her of streetlights in the rain, with the light striking outward like starspray.

She hesitated to call the Mandel a prison, though by her seventeenth year, she could not remember whether or not she had agreed to the Mandel house. She didn’t think it mattered, as she agreed now. There were boxes of soapstone in the Mandel, and it was a lump from one of these boxes that she sanded when Andrew McKinnon arrived. He knocked first, to warn her of his presence, but he didn’t need to. She’d had the mask over her eyes the moment she heard footsteps on the stairs.

The mask revealed only his appearance from the knees down. He wore dark pinstriped slacks and dress shoes with green embroidery around them, as though the brogue patterns was not enough. He was interesting by virtue of non-matching socks with patterns of fruit on them. Watermelons on his left foot, and the makings of a disappointing fruit salad on his right. This seemed the most important detail, though she knew it was not; his feet faced her. It was brave of him to look her head on. She could easily remove her eye mask before he had the chance to hide his face.

“Good evening,” he said. She blinked, because it must have been later than she’d thought. She blinked a second time because her brain had only just caught up with the sound of his voice. She knew that voice. Responsible for some of the most precise sculptures in the world, and for the most intricately balanced Inukshuks in Canada. He was a boy-wonder. Michelangelo’s legacy at nine years old. Her mother, in fit of maternal interest, had delivered an article about him once to her.

“You sculpted a boar’s head two months ago, didn’t you?” Andrew said. The door closed behind him. He walked over. She tried to follow his brogues, tucking her chin against her chest to keep from seeing too much through the slit under the eye mask. “It was lovely. It could use some improvement, if you’re interested.”

“In, sculpting?” I repeated.

Andrew tapped something with his hand. His forehead or nose. “You’ve got it. Impressive. But really, are you interested? I don’t teach those who aren’t.”

He taught others who appeared on daytime television or did not have to live on the money made at seasonal conventions. “If you are interested, then really,” Andrew said to my glare. “Just sculpting. You would be great.”

“At sculpting,” she said.

She could hear the smile in his voice, just as she could see the restless shift of his feet.

The summer equinox crept in on the weekend, which usually meant it would creep in when Andrew was absent. The weekends were for pacing without the eyemask. She organized her soapstone people into lines on the side table. They were all done to resemble the senseless drawings of children. It was dissatisfying to file and pick out faces from the stone that might not exist in the world. She was just copying someone else’s work, she figured. She disliked watching Andrew’s brogues and mismatched socks disappear outside the door. She imagined he took off those socks and walked barefoot on sand some days, or he wore shorts instead of his slacks and walked beneath the sun and burned and felt the wind.

Her fingers were bored of sculpting. They would not stop sculpting.

She knocked her soapstone people to the ground. Only two of them chipped. Parts of them broke off into chunks and small slivers. She looked away from the film on the window and went about picking up the larger chunks. The other parts looked to her like the slivers of a piece of ice, and she liked seeing them on the floor somehow. She imagined she could use the sharp edge of one to scrape away some of the film on the window.

No one came to ask her if she was still all right staying in the Mandel or if she’d changed her mind since moving in.

Andrew joined her the next day and sat on a stool while she sat on the edge of her bed. She held the sliced away bottom of a cardboard box on her knees to catch the shavings. She tried to mimic what he’d shown her with his hands, another part of him that she could see. The file paid attention to his movements, and now she forced it to pay attention to hers. When the dust became too much, she wet the stone. The room smelled like polish, though she wasn’t anywhere close to polishing this figure yet.

“You don’t do any animals,” McKinnon complained. He smelled like coffee and yogurt. She was fairly certain he lived on yogurt. Like a fancy car, or a purebred animal, there was only one thing that could go into him if what you wanted out of him was art. Perhaps food other than yogurt foiled his talent.

“I don’t do planets either,” she said to him. “I thought you knew what I sculpted?”

“I had, but that didn’t prepare me for the possibility that that was all I had to look forward to. I’d thought you might branch out. My optimism runs on a separate track than the rest of me. Watch that edge.”

“What edge,” she said, feeling it. He wasn’t wrong; the edge was too severe.

“The one beneath your fingers. The one you’re trying to make sharp enough to cut yourself. Think of beach glass.”

She felt bitter, thinking of beach glass. Reluctantly, she filed away the sharp edge until it felt like it had been shaped by time and water instead of her hands. She heard McKinnon shift on the stool. His disappointment was just as evident in his voice as a smile. “That’s it?” he said.

“What’s it?” She turned her head toward him, but she didn’t tilt it.

“That. Your argument. You didn’t have to file it down.” He tapped the soapstone creature. His hands were long-fingered, with dusty finger pads. The smell of dust was almost as strong as the smell of yogurt. “It’s your piece.”

“You told me to file it down. You, my mentor,” she replied. “Acknowledged and famous sculptor. Prize-winning artist. Mentor to a murderer.”

“My god, the drama,” McKinnon said. “And none of those things makes me inherently right. Argue once in a while.” His hand disappeared, then his feet. The stool screeched against the floor as he stood.

“It’s over?” The clock was invisible with the eye mask, but it didn’t feel like he’d even been here two hours. The rest of the hours of the day seemed longer without him here to fill them with talking and advising and company.

“My optimism has been dented by all these figures,” he said. He gathered his bag and his sanding materials. She held the soapstone figure in her hand and filed half-heartedly. She would continue filing when he was gone, because her hands would not rest, and she would make a face out of a child’s drawing and hope that it resembled no one real. She still was not sure if he was leaving for a day or a week or forever. He had only been gone for three days at a time since he’d begun tutoring her, but it occurred to her that he could not return, and he could not return and not explain the not returning.

She couldn’t think of something to say to make him stay, because she wasn’t entirely sure why he was there in the first place.

When his steps descended the staircase, she took off the eye mask. The figure was smooth in her hand. It had chubby cheeks and eyes shaped like upside down moons. She hoped no one’s days had just become numbered. Through the film she watched McKinnon’s blurred shape disappear into the blurred shape of a car. Then the shape streaked away. Her hands were filing before she even looked at the figure again.

“If you want to know someone,” McKinnon had said, “show them a picture of themselves. A painting or a sketch or a sculpture. Their reaction will tell you what they think of their own image. If they think your image of them doesn’t do them justice, or makes them prettier or more fanciful than they are. Someone’s reaction to your own eye will tell you more than any self-portrait.”

“You like to be wise,” she’d said, “don’t you?”

She couldn’t see his expression, but he turned on the stool to face her, and she could almost feel his attention on her. He said, sunnily, “It’s nice to have my efforts recognized once in a while.” His voice so clearly held a smile that she felt it in her spine. Thinking about it made her skin prickle now.

Her skin prickled so much that she remembered, viscerally and strongly, wind on her skin, cold and wetness, and the elements. She remembered it all so strongly that the strength of it carried her up and out the door. Her eyemask, tucked into her belt, bouncing against her hip as she crashed down the stairs. She hadn’t been to the back door in some time. She didn’t know if there was still a grassy slope, a riverbank, an enclosure of trees, outside the door. Shoes? she wondered. No shoes, she decided. Just her feet in the grass, even if it was wet. There would be no shoeprints to tell anyone what a risk she’d taken.

It was by hitting McKinnon with the door that she did not see his face. She stumbled back as he clutched at his face. She saw his hand fly up and by the time she’d reflexively looked up he had his blazer pulled across his face with one hand. The other hand had shocked her, grabbing her about the arm to keep her from falling straight back.

“Don’t let me see you!” she ordered.

“Are you going somewhere?”

“I’m being-“ she hesitated. “I’m staging a revolution.” She pulled out of his arm, because it was now distracting her more than balancing her.

“Viva la revolucion,” McKinnon intoned. “I’ll join you. Where to?”

He wasn’t about to drag her back inside. He still had his blazer covering part of his face, but he hadn’t told her to put on her eyemask. She described the riverbank.

He said, “onward”.

She hesitated. Her soapstone was upstairs. There was dirt, but she hadn’t sculpted something so soft in a long time. “My stuff is up-”

“I’m sure it is. But you don’t need it.” There was a pause. “I did say onward, didn’t I? I remember my mouth saying it. Let’s go, while the mystery sets in.”

The riverbank was green and yellow all over. It was a buttery, summery yellow. No autumn touched the trees here. The dirt outside the tree cover was baked. Beneath the tree cover it was just barely dry. She rolled up the cuffs of her pants and put her feet over the edge of the riverbank. Tree roots climbed from the soft wall of the river into the water, like mangroves. She’d seen pictures of mangroves before.  

She leaned back on her hands, then her elbows, then lay on the bank. Grass prickled her ears. The wind pushed her hair into her eyes and mouth. Her fingers remembered the textures of the real world. Her skin was beginning to remember there was more than soapstone out here.

Beside her, McKinnon was sitting with his back to her, but it was clear he was removing a lump of soapstone from his bag.

“I don’t see any animals here,” she said. “There’s nothing to make-” She waved lazily around, senselessly happy that there was so much to wave at – “except trees.”

McKinnon turned so she could see the slice of his earlobe but not his face. “I sculpt people as well.”

She shifted. “I’ll have to keep my eyes closed.”

“That would be preferable,” McKinnon said. “Please do, and I’ll try to finish this quickly.”

She put an arm across her face. This might interrupt his attempt to sculpt her, but he had seen her face many times before, and if she did not keep her arm there, then her eyes would betray them both. She felt the springy grass beneath her begin to yield and accept its new shape. She opened one eye very carefully for a few seconds to look at the overlapping pattern of leaves in the trees above them. She looked out beneath her arm, like she did with her eyemask, and saw McKinnon’s brogues, and his socks with tangerines and radishes on them. She heard him filing and sanding. There was a lot of sanding involved. 

When the productive noisiness ceased, she sat up. She looked up slowly, but this only meant that he had the time to hide the figure as well as his face by the time she got there. She could see a small rounded portion of soapstone between his fingers.

“I feel like I have a right to see it, as the model,” she said.

The smile was gone from his voice. “You know I wouldn’t show you your own face.”

Her tears sprung up quickly. They were of the variety that didn’t exist until they were already tumbling down your cheeks, so she took an embarrassing moment to wipe them away. She was only glad he wasn’t looking because she didn’t want him to see her tears or die, but she was ashamed the tears had happened at all. She stood up. “This was a good field trip.”

McKinnon stood up slowly, but he walked quickly up the riverbank, and hooked two fingers around the inside of her elbow. He smelled of yogurt and river mud. “So much drama. No one’s died today.”

She closed her eyes so he could kiss her cheek. She though of turning her head, but he’d already pulled away. She could not find his lips without opening her eyes.

“This isn’t a permanent solution,” McKinnon said. “You wouldn’t tear apart a mountain just because it avalanches now and again. You just keep people off the pass.”

“It’s a large pass to keep people off of,” she said. She felt jittery and alive with the kiss.

“There are ways,” McKinnon insisted.

She let him steer her back to the door while she looked at the sky and the grass and everywhere but him. Everything was sharper without the film over it. She remembered this too: the day getting colder and darker.

“It’s your turn again tomorrow,” McKinnon said. “A day off isn’t a day wasted, but two days off definitely is.”

She let herself smile. They parted ways at the door. She could see his car, clearly, for the first time, on the street. She knew he was going to walk to it and put his sculpture and tools in the backseat before he sat in the front. She knew because she has seen him bustle around the car many times before, through the film. She knew the feeling in the pit of her stomach, terrible and murderous without meaning to be. Her eyes were uncovered. She was too intrigued by the new sharpness of the world not to look.

He fell into the driver’s side. He had an ordinary face. His nose was long, his brows low, his mouth a little amused by everything he saw. The longer she looked at his expression, the expression he wore when he was thinking of nothing in particular, the easier it was to see his face emerging from a lump of soapstone.

Her fingers itched.

Her father had lasted the longest, at six days. She’d sculpted his face from play dough. He had been the last straw.

McKinnon must have climbed all the way up the stairs before he discovered she was no longer there. She wondered if he was out of breath because he’d hurried down to the riverbank to try to find her. She lay along the edge of the riverbank this time, stretched out as though she could role right into it. She held one hand in the water, so the water could soften and clean and polish.

“Revolutionizing again?” McKinnon said.

“The revolution is dying.”

“You have drama in spades,” McKinnon said, because he hand was still in the water.

She shook off the small sculpture before she lifted it out of the water. She cracked her eyes open and saw his face, saw his eyes sweep down her arm to the sculpture of her own face. Water ran down from her stone eyes.

The water hadn’t truly had time to soften, but she’d sanded it for a while.

Art by Ngyuen Thanh Nhan

Text by Lucie MacAulay