The Work

The gallery was both a teething child and an ageing parent—it needed constant care and maintenance. It required vigilance.

She had been returning to this meal her entire life. The smell of it, the saltiness, made her eyes water. It was the certainty of the thing. The reminder that she had been in this dark, low place before, and she had returned home to her mother before, and time went on and problems passed, and she survived.

The silver lining was that he wasn’t around to vote in 2016.

then the man she left it for kept her dependent on an allowance from him, and even though his death could have made her rich again, she had rejected

What was strategic about that? What was so cost-effective about being on your own? How was work so lucrative and alluring if this was how it manifested in the body? No, this was the truth she’d brought back from the dark place. Independence had always been an illusion.

Now she knew for sure. An established artist she admired profoundly had judged her his equal.

A man’s death leading to a life-changing amount of money. How it felt like receiving a paycheck for the work of enduring their cruelty.

The installation had been meticulously photographed as soon as it was completed in situ, but if someone from the buyer’s side noticed any anomalies they wouldn’t raise the matter with her for fear of word getting out that the work had been compromised and their investment tainted. They all patted each other’s backs and asses like that. Praise could

That he could only benefit from having a wife whereas she could only suffer from having a husband? That they could fuck on equal terms but anything more than that would inevitably cost her? Wives and mothers were not art. Nobody wanted to be reminded of domesticity, of mundanity, mediocrity. And weren’t all mothers mediocre? All wives eventually mu