Lucinda Smith

I don’t fucking know how long it had been—three, maybe four days—since Murmur’s suicide, and I just fucking couldn’t take it anymore. I went out to my studio and looked at those paintings—stacked, in some cases, six deep—of fucking seagulls and I held my hands to my ears and screamed.

Then I fucking went out to the toolshed, found a shovel, and started digging in the middle of my backyard. I dug and dug. The sand was full of crap—broken glass, petrified shells, pop tops, plastic toy cowboys.

“Motherfucker,” I kept saying. “You goddamned motherfucker!”

I brought out my paintings, every single last one of them, and tossed them in the pit. They looked insane down there, all stacked up, hither-zither, and I thought, This is the best work of art I’ve ever created. I started singing—and I mean loudly; I was yelling more than I was singing—“One monkey don’t stop the show! One monkey don’t stop the show!” I retrieved from the shed the gas can I usually used for the lawn mower, emptied it in the pit, soaked those fucking seagulls, and then tossed a match. Poof! Just like that, those embarrass-me-even-in-my-sleep paintings were ablaze.

And for some reason, I said right out loud, “So, what do you think of that, Murmur?”