Pictures at an Exhibition

This is actually one of my favorites that I've written. One of the problems with it, though, is that I have difficulty maintaining consistency in the descriptive passage of the pictures being exhibited (to bring it back loosely to the title). I've tried to edit a little so that it is more consistent between the parts pre-adulthood and post-adulthood, but it's difficult, and I don't know if it's salvageable for publication purposes. I also edited out parts that might be too specific, while leaving certain things open. (For example - while unclear within the story, yes, my ex-husband lived as a woman for three or so years before retransitioning back to male, and he had not yet made that decision whenever I wrote this. I wasn't sure how to make that clear in the story, so I just hinted.)

I like the wording, and I like the relationship it explains, which is also about the same person as in "Drowning" and also about, really, the animus, the God, and other things.

I like the statement it made about my faith. I was still fully theist at the time, but the connection between then and now is that I think that people's conceptions of the sacred are strongly tied into their self-respect and self-image.

Submitted for your approval, "Pictures at an Exhibition."

Pictures at an Exhibition

"Now, are you positive that you intended for me to see everything you own?" The dull thok, thok of the gentleman's shoes sounded in the hall, and I suppressed a surge of impatience at the repetition of the question...this was the third, or was it fourth time? Suffice to say it had been asked repeatedly.

"Yes. I need every last bit of it appraised. I called you because I knew that you would give an accurate assessment, and there's nothing here I won't show you." You stupid man, I added silently, wishing that I could say it aloud, but I had paid quite the hefty fee for him to come out and do this for me. I knew that if anyone would be able to give me an unbiased and sincere assessment of the worth of these things it was him. Sighing and hoping he wouldn't be so irritating for the remainder of his stay, I went ahead and mechanically rattled off the details about all of the worthwhile items I owned.

However, to my extreme annoyance, the only responses I received were nods, silent gestures of assent and, if an object was especially important, perhaps a brief comment, all interspersed with constant note-taking on a tiny pad he had brought with him.

Par his instructions, I left out nothing of value - even if the value was only personal, and most of my items were valuable only to me. We filtered methodically through pictures of my children and stories I had written years before. Things I had forgotten that I still owned popped up - a letter given to me by a boy in grade school, a teddy bear I had lost when I was five. None escaped the intense scrutiny or jotting of notes, and privately I wondered what he could possibly have to write about objects with such subjective value.

No matter, I shrugged. He'll be gone soon with his notes and his stoic thok-thok in my outer hall.

"Well, then!" I clapped my hands and rubbed them together briskly as we left the final room. "I'm glad to have that over and done with - aren't you?"

"We're not done." I looked up into merciless brown eyes and received the sort of look one gives a very slow child when they are simply missing the point.

"But we went through it all." I stared at him blankly, then also realized that his look was appropriate because, apparently, I was missing the point.

"We went through maybe half the house, tops."

Horror spread through my veins in icy trickles as I glanced back at the shadowy, dusty corridor behind us.

"You're not serious," I said flatly, then saw that he indeed was, as he started to walk back into the darkened passageway. Stopping him with an outstretched hand, I took a deep, calming breath, and then looked him straight in the eyes with precisely the same look he had given me a moment before, hoping he would see reason. "You said things of value to me were what you wanted to see. Those things are all worthless."

"Then why do you still keep them? And why are you fighting so hard to keep me from seeing them?"

"Because they don't fucking matter anymore!" I snapped viciously, then froze at the dispassionate analysis in his eyes. Only a single raised eyebrow betrayed any emotion on his part, and I had no idea what emotion was being revealed.

"I asked you repeatedly hat you wanted, and you repeatedly specified everything. Unless you want to completely forfeit the fee as well as the interest on what you have shown me thus far, you have to complete this appraisal. I assure you I will make no judgments."

"It's your job to make judgments," I observed weakly, feeling all of the blood drain out of my upper body and pool in the tips of my toes. The fee had been a hefty one and I could not afford to lose it.

Waving a hand as if dismissing a trivial detail, he blithely posited, "I am what I am," and then gently but firmly brushed past my hand, gripped my shoulder, and steered me towards a room with a closed door covered in cobwebs.

"You have to open it," he informed me, arms folded across his chest.

"I can't." The words emerged at barely a whisper, and my hands hung lifeless at my sides.

A shake of his head and a sigh reminded me of the reality of the situation, and I reached with a trembling hand and opened the door.

"See? Boxes. Nothing of value." I pointed the boxes out to him, then reached up to push him out, but he would not be so easily deterred.

"Then we open them."

Feeling hot tears burn my eyes and hot shame burn my cheeks, I reached and opened the first box, coughing as the dust settled.

The pictures in these boxes were not so pretty. Snapshots I had not known existed of moments I had not cared to think about in years surfaced - of a skinny little girl with large blue eyes and golden-brown hair being beaten mercilessly by children so much older than her that they no longer qualified as children. Snapshots of a teenager with the same blue eyes and forearms sliced into a bloody pulp.

Objects began to emerge from the boxes - shards of broken glass with blood still fresh on their jagged edges, and razor blades. A wraparound skirt with a barely detectable blood stain and a game of Hexen that had been more important than the reassurance that her gift had been valued and cherished. A butcher knife that had been held to her throat one night when she tried to go against her boyfriend's will. Three-packs of condoms bought by someone who didn't care about her enough to acknowledge the word "no."

Even sound recordings were held in these boxes.

"You stupid fucking whore."

"If you don't do it, I'll find someone who will."

"No! Stop!" Then laughter, low and cruel.

"Why don't you look like her?" I remembered that he had been holding up a picture of a model in a magazine - painted, perfect.

"You're not normal. You just tried to kill yourself."

Stories - graphic, violent, brutal. Sex and bloodshed mingled to paint a confused portrait of a girl who couldn't distinguish between sexuality and brutality. Hedonism, misery, rape, love, hatred, loneliness, connection, fear, and the perverse desire to end the tales battered, bloodied, violated, and usually dead.

Dispassionate mahogany eyes surveyed it all, and then I heard the click of his pen being sheathed. "Next room."

"What are you writing?" I tried to peek at his notepad, wondering what he could possibly have written about me.

"That's none of your concern. It's relevant to the appraisal. Next room, please."

The next room wasn't quite so intensely personal, but the pain was equally, if not more, jarring.

Pictures of that girl as a woman, wearing a uniform, of her marrying a dark-haired man with intense eyes. A picture of her grandly pregnant and smiling. Pictures of a baby boy with laughing brown eyes.

A picture of that little boy in a stroller with the man, disappearing into a terminal at an airport.

Pictures of the woman wandering through an empty house disconsolately, hunched with misery, and pictures of her, unsmiling, with various men. A picture of her grandly pregnant again and alone with the baby boy, who had grown into a little boy with the same laughing brown eyes as a woman who looked suspiciously like his father. Pictures of the woman disappearing into the same airport terminal with the little boy in the stroller again.

Recordings of an anguished keening as she had paced the empty halls again. A broken-sounding mechanical singing of "You Are My Sunshine."

Several bottles of varied alcoholic beverages. A chair with a leg broken in an outburst of anger. A small rabbit, sun in its hands, with a pull-chain on it. Tubs of toys unused for months.

Vestiges of dreams thwarted. Reminders of a married failed. Traces of lovers come and gone with no fanfare or enduring importance. Memories of a much-beloved son gone for far too long. An empty house, save her and a small baby girl who, however equally beloved, could not take his place.

After clearing out the boxes, he stepped behind them and looked at a small altar setup in the back of the room. I did not remember having set up this particular altar, but it was there nonetheless, a graphic portrait of the reality of my faith, and I wept to see it.

On the right was an image, and, depending on how you looked at it, it wore the face of a little boy with laughing brown eyes, a serious older man with thinning red hair, or a smiling man with mahogany eyes that looked through to the soul. Behind them all was the visage of a shining, sunlit Someone, or a horned figure standing tall and proud.

On the left there were several images, all separate - a tiny baby with deep blue eyes, two middle-aged women with dark hair and dark eyes, one with the high cheekbones of her Cherokee grandmothers, and one with a crescent moon on her brow, and two elderly women, one with the look of one who had come through bitter trials and had emerged with humor intact, and one with a keen, penetrating look about her. All of these glowed with a silvery light.

In the center there was a mirror, and, when I looked into it, I saw a shifting image of one of two things - numbers on a step-scale, and a lacerated woman with a massive, bloated body and eyes that reflected my revulsion at the image I saw, which I knew to be what I saw every time I looked in the mirror, and, ultimately, the only way I could view the Goddess. She was the little girl who was beaten and reviled by her peers. She was the teenager who was raped, who was used, and used others for gratification. She was the woman who hated her overweight body to the point of sickness. She was me, and I was Her.

My appraiser clucked his tongue, and I saw him looking into that mirror with me; somehow I knew that he saw the image of me that I was looking at. Sadness flickered on his face, and he turned to face me. Gently he reached his hands out and cupped my cheeks. Sighing, he looked back at that mirror and shook his head.

"Call me again when you see in that mirror the same thing that I see right now when I look at you. None of this will have any value to you, and my appraisal will mean nothing, until you do."

With a soft kiss on my forehead, like a benediction, he turned and walked out, the thok, thok of his shoes on the floor echoing in my ears.