The Book

Mother was on the left. She turned the page. I saw a woman standing in the woods, naked, holding a bow, a long, pale dog at her feet. She was smiling. To the left of the woman was a blank strip of white with characters I couldn’t read. My mother said, “This is the School of Fontainebleau.” I looked at that face. “What is the School of Fontainebleau?” “Why isn’t she wearing clothes?” My mother answered. I didn’t ask again.

My hand lay flat on the book. The paper felt cool and threw back a blurred light. My finger moved across the page, slid over her shoulder. I caught a smell, and leaned in a little closer.

Mother was gone. I was alone with the book, and the smell came from inside it. Yellowed canvas. Blurred trees. A dim sky. Vast bathrooms. Luxurious bedrooms. White skin and the two shallow hollows at the lower back. The figures in the paintings looked at me without moving. Their faces were very pale, very bright; behind them everything was dark. Their mouths were lifted at the corners, and I looked back. I kept looking, and everything in the book began to lose its sharpness. It turned slowly, rotated, fused into a green-brown whirl, with black, solid characters floating on top.

I turned another page. The smell was still there. At first I saw a hard patch of white. Then the rest of the picture came into focus: a blue sky, a castle far away on a cliff, woods below it, and a road winding through the distance. In front of the ruins stood an archer. Behind him, a man was tied to a stone column. Sunlight fell across his body. His skin was so bright that it seemed almost separate from everything behind him. Arrows were fixed in his calf, his thigh, and his side, each one sticking out at a different angle. I kept looking. There was no blood.

His arms were pulled behind the column, the ropes pressed into his skin. His brows were drawn together and his mouth was slightly open. He was looking upward. I looked where he was looking. The sky above him was deep blue. After a while I stopped noticing the castle. Then the road and the trees disappeared too. I could see only the column, the arrows, the white of his body, and his face turned toward the sky. The archer was gone.

I was standing below him. The sun was warm on my back. He was still above me, tied to the column. His mouth stayed open, but he made no sound. The clouds did not move. Nothing moved. I stayed there below him.