A BAR AT THE FOLIES-BERGÈRE — JORDAN HARRISON-TWIST
/Yesterday, I spat out the varnish. The varnish was from Branch of Peonies and Secateurs. It must have been, because that night I’d sat across the table from Manet, and I remember warning him I’d eat it.
Most people devour paintings with their eyes. Leave galleries all wan. I’d started with oils straight from the tube before I got onto the real stuff. They give them names like Cadmium Yellow to put you off, but if you're green, ochres and umbers are pretty palatable, sort of umami, butternuts.
In my defense: they don’t tell you not to eat the paintings.
It’s easy to grow tired of all the additives in Rothko and such. All sealed, caramelised, charred. Agnes Martin got me onto quieter platters. But the Peonies. Fat bechamel blooms, all lobster tail, Riesling. Forty dawn-bleached elders stirring white cauldrons on emerald flames. Talking of anointing, singing to one another about the wind, their grandchildren’s footsteps.
It’s a room full of secretions, a gallery.
And they lie, they all lie. Eyeing it, muttering masterpiece. When to the eyes, a finished painting is a bereavement of all it isn’t. To the mouth, it’s as honest as the days from diagnosis to death.
Manet looked mournful, all petal-lipped, when I’d let loose. I’ll knock you up something else, be a minute, he’d said. Pointing over Picasso, who was playing with his beef, and Anthony Gormley, who was doing nothing of interest at all. But the secateurs had snipped me from the hinterland and I crawled beneath the tablecloth.
Once you're beyond the yellowed posterity, the milk cascades from your mouthsides. All of fifteen seconds you have to wash it back, the strokes, the pigment. You shouldn’t wish for longer.
I was stood at a yawning frame. My face was women shaking sheets off parapets.
They look worried, but these people put their ears to shells, they kiss foreheads over wrists. It is about time they learned the truth. That it won’t grow back is precisely the point.
Jordan Harrison-Twist is a writer and editor based in Bolton, UK. His essays have appeared in 3:AM Magazine, The Double Negative, iiii Magazine, and Corridor8. In August 2020, he won the Retreat West micro fiction competition, in which he has been variously shortlisted and long-listed; he has also been long-listed in the Reflex Press flash fiction competition and the Flash500 competition. His words appear in No Contact magazine, Daily Drunk Mag, and Between the Lines, an anthology published by Comma Press. In October 2020, his story Longitudinal was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His forthcoming chapbook A Few Alterations will be published by Nightjar Press.
