Fiction by Spencer Nitkey
The Mouth, 2009
Eucheria Yul (b. 1984) The Mouth, 2009 Water on and across limestone
This unfinished sculpture—a large stone placed in the center of the gallery room and raised atop three opaque glass columns—plays with themes of motion, verisimilitude, and longing. Above the once smooth surface, a cracked pipe, installed by the artist’s hands, sits. Water trickles ceaselessly, a dripping insistence upon the stone. The water kisses the rock before running down its side where it is collected by a small drain on the floor.
“The truth is that there is a sculpture in the base of your spine—a terrible, perfect sculpture that will never see light,” the artist says.
“Always, it resides within you,” she continues. “But its aesthetic perfection is ruined by your blood, obscured and coated by your sinew, swallowed and digested by your bone. Always, it strains towards the light.”
A work of glacially slow performance art, the water has carved a small divot, a pooling slit, a cracking smile into the stone. The erosion creates a disharmony of movement. An absence. Changing shadow. We stare into its mouth, ever-widening in communion with water.
“You’ll feel it,” the artist says. “You won’t have the language for it, for its longing to exist, its desire to slip beneath the current of someone else’s qualia. But you will feel it yawning. You will feel its gaping maw unhinge, its bubonic insistence gargling forth its sediment of fangs sinking into the soft flesh. Yes, you will feel its fangs sink into you. Always, you will feel it. Listen—I have clawed through the world in search of it with brush, and lens, and clay, and blood, and spear, and serigraph, and body, yes mine, but hers too, even his. And air, and throat, and drumskin, stretched across cedar, and string, and eroding stone, and the water dripping you all hear and see. I seek the ecstasy of a riverbed drain, but more than that I search for the always of it, and the forever of it, and its ending, and the endless recurrence of its ending, and the end of that too, and being six years old, and spinning in circles until I hurled, and ayahuasca in the desert, and shin splints, and strep throat every winter until I was fourteen and they finally took my tonsils, and the first bite of pineapple but only after I grew to like it, as if taste is an instrument a person can learn to play. And the whistle of its sweetness, and moments that exist solely for themselves, and the wide water at midnight without a moon to bounce off it, and the feel of snow on my bare skin outside the lakehouse window, and her shape there in the white, and the latent warmth of her still there as I lowered myself into the divot, and how I could not fit into the shape she made without making a new one, and the sense even then that this meant something, and the fear even now that I couldn’t fit in her life without changing it. Look. No, picture her resentment opening like a Mouth above us where we slept. And then there’s my arm brushing against hers in the too small bed in my too small apartment, and the long silent walks along the river where I took her silence as strain, and the feel of uneven rocks, and my twisted ankle, and her hand pulling me up, and the look there on her face that I swore was disappointment, and me living in the divot of that disappointment, and the ache of imagining the end, and the thousand and three ways I’d tear like an old sweater across a nail if it came, and her legs wrapped around me, and my body wrapped around hers, and my never really being there wrapped around imaginings of the end. And the whisper of if only I could love her like pineapple, and not being able to, and the Mouth finally opening, and the Mouth open, and open, and letting it swallow me, and hoping fangs serrate me, and becoming the whistles across its tongue, and sitting like shredded confetti in its stomach, and remembering the sculpture at the base of my spine, and all that darkness, and all that coughing, and the Mouth as it tries to dislodge what it could not swallow, and the catching of an esophagus, and the leaky blood, and the hacking, the hacking, and the part of me it can’t swallow, and the final spitting out of it and my sculpture and the rest of my tatters out into the forest’s soft loam. And the recoherence, yes. But also the knowing—the knowing that even the Mouth can never fully swallow and, like us, dreams of eyes.”
The water drips. The artist is silent. The mouth on the stone widens. One day, the water will writhe its way completely through the stone and will fall, untouched, to the drain below. Once it does, the artist has instructed that the piece be destroyed completely. Until then, it remains, an ephemeral, evolving piece, different, if only slightly, each time you view it.
Spencer Nitkey is a writer of the weird, the wonderful, the horrible, and the (hopefully) beautiful. He is a 2023 Eugie Award Finalist, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Apex Magazine, Weird Horror Magazine, Dark Void Magazine, body fluids, Dark Recesses, and others. You can read more of his work on his website, spencernitkey.com.