Scott & Carpenter – Feb. 11

Dayna Carpenter and Kelly Scott shared their work. Dayna gave Kelly this painting, entitled “The Great Escape”:

In response, Kelly wrote this:

Angelfish

The child watched as her mother scooped the fish from her father’s aquarium, dunking the beer mug into the water and dumping several neon tetra into a pickle bucket by her side. Each swooping movement brought the fish into an electrified frenzy, bits of tail and fin moving across the tank like a storm. The child closed her eyes as one propelled itself from the mug, flopping around on the floor with heavy jerks. She was disturbed by how the air seemed to crush the fish into the wood floor. The child thought she might feel the same way if she were plopped on the top of a mountain, the sky forcing itself onto her, crushing her into the rock until she could no longer breathe.

She opened her eyes to her mother’s tightening voice. “It’s okay sweetie, I have him right here.”  Her mother dangled the fish in front of the child’s face before dropping it into the bucket. “We’re not killing them darling, just teaching Daddy a lesson.”

READ THE FULL STORY HERE

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Kelly gave Dayna this story:

The Viewing

I look across the mess of faces that I only partially recognize, and see my uncle,
who is severely autistic, hovering over my father’s coffin. I smile when I notice that he
has managed to smuggle in all of the items my grandmother has told him to leave in the
car. He stands there, looking over my father’s corpse, with all of these items held to his
chest as if he were a bag lady: large boom box hanging from his forearm, a duffel bag full
of Neil Diamond and Patsy Cline cassettes, three pairs of headphones tangled up in his
arms, and his portable television, the one that is clear so that you may see its inner
workings, the kind of technology popular in the late eighties. I hear him say over and
over, “That’s not Mike, that’s not him.” His voice is not devastated, but irritated, which is
how he always sounds. I watch as my grandmother shuffles him out of the room, her big
red cheeks flushed with embarrassment. I walk up to the coffin and for the first time look
down at my father’s dead body. In ten months he has aged thirty years. He looks
prosthetic, not at all like skin or bones or organs. No I suppose that’s not him, I think to
myself.

In response, Dayna painted this, “No, I Suppose That’s Not Him”: