Me and Mine

My cousin Lexi says that I’m so beautiful she can taste it in the air around me. Even when I got sick, she didn’t change her mind. Wasting, bruising, gurgling through a tube:

“You’re so beautiful, I can taste it.” 

I’ve learned that artists say strange things. When I survived, I learned that low oxygen in the lungs means low oxygen in the brain. I moved in with her because I couldn’t take care of myself anymore. After that, those words became something like a good night kiss.

This morning I’m sitting on the toilet in the hall bathroom, the one that doesn’t smell like paint fumes. Her private bathroom is where she “bleeds onto canvas,” as she puts it—but right now, she’s bleeding onto me. She puts one hand under my chin, tipping my face toward the ceiling. Her other hand brushes the baby hairs around my ears. My neck tingles.

“Don’t blink,” she whispers. The liquid eyeliner glides on, cold and wet. Her hands are like feathers on my face. The scent of coconut oil wafts from her hair. 

It was her suggestion that I move in after I was discharged. She helped me move out of my long-empty dorm room, handling my dusty belongings like treasures. Memorizing my face as we each lifted one half of my dresser, stopping every two steps so I could catch my breath. Fingering every button, zipper, and seam as she hung my clothes in the closet off her former guest room. The first time she asked if I could model for her paintings was only a few days later. Of course I say yes. And now she’s here, lining my eyes like she’s signing her name.

She’s saying, “It’s like, inspiring, how much pain beauty can endure.” She switches from one black applicator pen to another that looks the same. “You look like me, but so much lovelier, so much sadder.”

“I dunno, most people don’t think sunken cheeks and dark circles are pretty.” And even before that, my mom was always quick to point out Lexi’s fuller lips and sharper cheekbones.

Lexi’s hand shudders against my cheek as she laughs. “Most people are dull and unimaginative. Real artists know better.”

Lexi tests a swatch on my wrist, next to a collage of pinks and nudes. This one is the shimmering rose of a trout’s belly. She frowns and chooses another shade. Next to the lively pinks, this selection has the purplish cast of a bruise. She nods, brushes my lips with her thumb, and paints it on. The products go on, layer after layer. She touches me like she’d touch herself.

“I want to bleed you onto canvas,” she breathes. “Are you ready?” 

“Are you going to let me see this one when you’re done?”

“You’ll see them all, when the series is ready. Just not yet. Can you take me on faith?”

“Yes.”

“I already have your outfit laid out on your bed. Do you need help changing?”

The toilet seat creaks as I shift to avoid her gaze. “No. I’ve actually been feeling better lately.” It’s not false; “better” is relative.

“Oh. Just wanted to make sure. Let me know if you need help with anything, okay? I’ll be waiting on the deck.”

When I return to my room, there are clothes waiting for me on my bed: flesh-colored, seamless briefs and matching sports bra. “Where’s the rest?” I call over my shoulder.

Lexi answers from her bedroom as she gathers painting supplies. “That’s it! My vision isn’t about clothing, it’s about the body meeting water. A fetus who can’t escape from a cold, lifeless womb.” Artists say strange things.

I strip everything off and step into the unfamiliar undies, which exactly match my size and color. When I pull my T-shirt off over my head, I stretch the neckhole wide so I don’t smudge my makeup. 

As I leave my room, I notice myself in the mirror above the armoire. No fresh flush to my cheeks or round contouring. I look like Lexi, but woven out of moonflower petals—a lovely, concave thing that wilts in the sun. I hurry out onto the deck where Lexi is waiting with her easel, a small, square canvas, and her tools.

“There she is!” Lexi trills, mixing my skin tone onto a palette. “So what I was thinking is, you get in the lake and walk toward that buoy, and I tell you to stop when it looks right.”

Across the sloped yard, the lake laps at the stony shore. Clouded sunlight illuminates the oils on the surface and makes it lovely. Before Dad died we lived just down the street, and I’d come over and splash around with Lexi on summer nights. We learned the taste of perch and walleye together here.

“I’m not …” I exhale, trying to find the right words. She knows this lake is the reason I got sick. She was probably there the day the bacteria found its way inside.

“Oh don’t worry, I’ll be right here.” Lexi smiles. 

I squint out over the water. The buoy’s hard to see—a weathered, grayish sphere in glassy gray water. How far? A hundred feet? Two hundred? “That water’s gonna be freezing. Are you sure you want your model’s lips blue?”

“I’ve been taking care of you for months, Mia. Don’t you trust me?”

I could tell her I’m still too weak. But here is someone who sees something in me worth looking at—asking to look. So I say, “Okay. I trust you.” I pick my barefoot way across the yard and step into the lake. Cold slime and rotted vegetation squeeze between my toes. Waves lap at my ankles, then calves. “Far enough?” I ask, shivering. 

“Keep going! I’ll tell you when to stop.”

I don’t know how I’m supposed to look pretty with my arms wrapped around my ribcage like this. The cool lighting makes the blue veins on my thighs and upper chest look like cracks through white stone. 

“Please? You’re the only one who can do this for me.”

Taking a deep breath, I crouch until wavelets lap at my chin. It smells like a fish market next to a tire factory. This lake used to be lovely, but now it’s plagued by litter, algae blooms, and industrial runoff—causing cancer, diarrhea, typhoid, cholera, hepatitis A, microplastic contamination, dysentery, parasitic nematodes. Its gift to me was Legionnaire’s disease. 

As I paddle toward the buoy, currents prod and tug as if trying to find a way in. The cold seeps into me until I can’t tell where the water inside ends and the water without begins.

“There!” Lexi calls distantly. “Stay! Right there!” 

I turn back toward her, treading water. She’s tiny on the deck. Out here, the waves don’t foam or splash. The lake’s all one unbroken creature of slime and mud, rising and falling with each breath. My body is already numb and exhausted, and I realize how hard I’m working to maintain buoyancy. How labored my own breath has become.

“Lexi!” 

The lake breathes in, and I don’t kick quite hard enough to stay afloat. My mouth slips under. I splutter. More rancid water goes up my nose, down my throat, into my eyes. I sink, toes reaching, finding nothing. Hey, wait. I try to wave my arms, but without their help my head goes under. Stop. The sun blinks and then dims as the surface ripples over it, as if it is the one sinking. The water fills me. What is this? No, not here. After everything. Right?

Something, maybe a fish, maybe an angel, seizes me by the wrist. My head bursts back into the world of silver sunlight. 

“I’ve got you!” Lexi says, pulling me to her, heart to heart, her hands pressing flat into my back. She is wonderfully warm. “Just hold onto me.”

She kneels so I can weave my clumsy arms around her neck and then she stands. Her hands leave my back and hook underneath my knees. As I take ragged pulls of air, I smell coconut oil.

“Don’t be afraid,” she says as she staggers over stones and into the grassy yard. She lowers me onto the ground. The gray sky opens above and I fear falling into it. “I can save you.”

She places her hands over my sternum, and I think, Why is she looking at me that way? Then she takes a deep breath and crushes me into the earth. The pain and surprise send lake water out my mouth and nose. Before I can gasp she’s pushing again. And again. Until there’s an ominous crack and a sharp pain. I cry out and Lexi leans back on her heels.

“You are saved, my beautiful thing.” 

Somehow Lexi carries me up the deck steps, opens the sliding door without dropping me, and sets me on the couch. I mumble, “911?” and she mercifully answers, “No, that’s okay. I’ll take care of you.” We both know how I feel about doctors.

She brings me a towel and a change of clothes—sweatpants and a T-shirt, more oversized now than when I bought them. I don’t care when she peels off the wet bra or slides my underwear down over my hips. It’s nothing she hasn’t seen before. She does her best to dab off the lake water and then helps me slide my comfy clothes on. No matter how carefully she dries me, there is always more water. It bleeds across the fabric and makes me cold.

“There, that’s better, isn’t it?” Lexi coos.

My eyes are burning and blurry. When I rub them, my fingers come away black. “My makeup.”

“Don’t worry, I can always do it over again. That’s the wonderful thing about art. You can do it until it’s perfect. How do you feel?”

“My head hurts. No, my lungs. No both. All of it.” 

My mouth tastes like fish water and grease and something I can’t place. What I really want is a toothbrush, but don’t think I could manage to sit up to use it. In the hospital there were little blue sponges with white sticks. My rare visitors were permitted to dip them in water and let me suck on them, but it was never enough to quell the taste of my own rotting blood. That’s what I taste now: fish, grease, iron, and rot.

“I can only imagine how you feel,” Lexi says. She sits beside me, her hand creeping under my blanket to stroke my calf. The other goes in her lap as she stares glassily at the opposite wall. “Tell me what it’s like, Mia.”

“Urgh.” 

“No, like … with words. Tell me what you’re feeling right now.”

“Hurts when I breathe. Pain is a six out of ten. Sources are my lungs and my ribs. My limbs are also weak.”

Lexi presses her lips together and looks at me. I’m surprised to find genuine exasperation there. “You’re sucking all the humanity out of the experience.”

“Uhm …”

She stands up. “Never mind. I’m going to go nurture our masterwork. Let me know if you need anything.” And she disappears down the hallway without looking back. 

Our masterwork? The painting she started while I was drowning? On one hand, I suppose it’s good that I didn’t nearly drown for nothing. On the other hand … I draw a breath too deep and can’t suppress a cough. I sputter into my hand and when I bring it away from my mouth, it’s covered in an oily iridescence that turns my hand into a living watercolor.

She does not come back before I fall asleep—if this trance could be called that. It’s more a straddling of sleep and consciousness, real and nonreal, impression and sensation. Water trickles from my ears and eyes and mouth and nose. And now Lexi descends from above, squeezing the sides of my waist with her knees. Our warmest parts pressed together. She has that look again, like she did before she broke my rib. But this time when she leans over me, it does not hurt. She presses her lips to mine and sucks out the rainbow poison inside of me. And then, once I can breathe again, I fall asleep for real.

I wake to the sound of intermittent dripping. I am cold, muscles tense and sore from shivering. Tongue thick in my mouth. 

“Good morning, Mia,” Lexi sings over the kitchen island. “I hope I didn’t wake you. Do you want French toast?” 

“Nnnn.”

“I thought so. Good thing I made enough!”

I sit up laboriously. Everything is wet. I wipe my hands on the couch but there is always more water. “Lexi, help,” I slur through the fattened bulb of my tongue.

“Oh, honey …” The faucet runs as Lexi rinses the batter off her hands. As she hurries around the corner, she’s still drying them on the front of her shirt. “What’s wrong? Tell me what’s wrong.”

“It hurts,” I croak. There’s too much spit in my mouth and it all tastes foul.

“I know.” Lexi kneels and pulls me into a deep hug. The water between us, at first shockingly cold, slowly warms as she holds me.

I close my eyes. “I’m sorry.” My voice breaks.

“Shh, don’t be. You’re still my beautiful Mia. I’d paint you onto every canvas in the world with my own blood, if I could.” 

I sniffle into her shirt until I suddenly smell burning batter. 

“Shit,” Lexi hisses, and then she flies back into the kitchen to salvage what she can of our breakfast.

In the end, I volunteer to take the most burnt pieces of French toast, hoping it will overpower the flavor of my own mouth. Lexi puts both stacks on the same plate, drizzles syrup over them, and then squeezes in beside me on the couch with the plate.

“I was thinking …” she says, shoving half a slice into her mouth. “Could I paint you again tonight?”

I can only imagine how I look. Every swallow feels like I’m forcing glass shards down my throat. There’s hardly enough room for food with my tongue in the way. “I don’t really want to immortalize myself like … this.”

“Like what?” She looks hurt, almost, or concerned she’s hurt me.

“Wet.”

“Oh, just this?” Lexi grabs a handful of my shirt and squeezes it, wringing water onto my bare belly. Touches her fingertips to her velvet tongue. “I like it. You wouldn’t be the same without it.”

And maybe it’s the French toast, or the warmth of her arm against mine, or the fey sweetness of her smile, but I say, “Okay.”

“You don’t even have to move. I’ll do all the work.”

She crams the rest of the French toast into her mouth and takes the plate to the kitchen, even though I wasn’t done. Then she disappears into her bedroom. I clasp my hands in my lap and notice, for the first time, the darkened veins in my wrists. As if I’ve been broken and reassembled with black tar. This is not how living skin should look.

Lexi reappears wearing a one-piece swimsuit, drop cloth tossed over her shoulder.
After setting up her easel, she clears the nearby ottoman and armchair from the scene. She stands with her hands on her hips, tongue between her teeth, considering. After several minutes she resolves to pull the couch three inches forward. 

On the other side of the room, I shiver in the oily water that never dries. But I’ve grown used to weathering pain. I know without looking that my lips are dead lavender.

“This is going to be exquisite.” At this point she’s beaming. “Now look right at me.”

“Like this?”

“No, your eyes keep looking around. Right at me. Pretend I’m a statue. Like you can study me for hours but no one will look back at you.”

I meet her gaze. Heat builds fast, like a cold hand in hot water, until all I want is to look away, but the longer I endure, the more bearable it becomes. I know this strange shame—I’ve been watched before. After a few weeks, only Lexi visited me in the hospital. By the time it was clear I would not die, the linoleum in my room was flecked with white, baby blue, and dark red paint. She was the only one not there to say goodbye; she was there to say hello when I finally opened my eyes. 

Lexi barely looks as she sketches the first lines. Even less when she mixes paints and puts brush to canvas. “Tell me what it’s like,” she asks again. “To be not quite living and not quite dead.”

“I don’t know.”

“How can you not? You’re there right now. Look at yourself.”

“I can’t tell you. There aren’t enough words. And even if there were, I don’t think as well as I used to. I’d never find them.”

“Then show me what it’s like.”

I let my head fall back to expose my neck. I can only imagine the black veins spiderwebbed over my throat. My parched lips parting and my eyes glazing over. I become like a thing you’d find in the black mud of the lakeshore. 

As Lexi works, she gains speed and ferocity, gripping the brush in her fist. Bringing it down on the canvas as if plunging a knife into a chest, spattering blues and greens onto the dropcloth and her swimsuit. She is always buying new brushes.

But then, a furrow suddenly troubles her brow and her slashes ease.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“There’s something missing, something radiant, like lemongrass, or a piccolo.” Her dark eyes dart and she exhales half-formed words. 

“Radiant … like, light? Like bright colors?”

She shakes her head slowly. While I wait for her epiphany, I look down at my hands. They’ve become pruny, thick white skin sloughing off around my nails. There is lake water trapped between the layers of skin, between what used to be my outsides and my insides. Iridescent and lovely. 

“Shimmer?” I venture.

Lexi tilts her head.

“Is that what the painting is missing? Like the rainbows on the surface of spilled oil.”

She nods, eyes wide. “Yeah.” We lock eyes for a moment, and then Lexi rushes down the hallway. When she returns, she’s pulling jeans over her hips with one hand and holding a pair of shoes with the other. “Stay here,” she says, as if I’d go anywhere else.

“Where are you going?”

“Holographic spray paint. Let’s capture your full radiance.” And then she leaves.

Since I moved in, I haven’t spent much time alone in this house. Without Lexi, it’s like a bird’s nest with only a gasping gray chick inside. Much too quiet without her softhearted twittering. No interruptions even from whirring machines and beeping monitors. In the quiet, my jagged breath is obscenely, pathetically loud. Water trickles down the small of my back. My rib aches with every inhalation. I am dripping, hurting. Nothing else to think about. I used to have the imagination to fill these voids with stories and daydreams, but even that is lost to me now.

These were the worst days before Lexi took me in. My mom once said that she didn’t like to visit me because of the way I smelled, like meat left in the bottom of the fridge for too long. She never looked at me. I know she was scared, but I was too. Somehow, Lexi sees something different in me. Something compelling enough to study for months, painting after painting, though I’ve still never seen the work she claims we’re making together. I stare at the easel turned away from me. She’d never know if I looked.

Hand pressed to my side, tense breath held, I scoot to the edge of the couch and plant my feet on the floor. I shuffle across the polished hardwood, wet feet slick. When I reach the easel, I hesitate, but not for long. 

It’s the top-down view of the couch, plaid and waterlogged. Lying on it is not one girl, but two—a skeletal, nude, black-veined woman and the black silhouette of her mirror image, side-by-side on the couch. The two touch mouths as if kissing, but there’s too much tension. The nude woman shrinks into the back of the couch, as if trying to pry herself away. Lexi’s jagged brushstrokes suggest gritted teeth and eyes squeezed shut. The shadow woman is distorted around the kiss, as if she’s being vomited, swallowed, or both. White paint highlights her shoulders, high cheekbones, and clavicle, as if she’s made of liquid.

I step closer to the canvas, squinting. The cheekbones are too high to be mine. Both the woman and her shadow look more like Lexi. So where am I? I see myself only in the illness that afflicts the twin Lexis. Is this supposed to be me?

There is one more place to look. I start down the hallway, where lies Lexi’s bedroom and primary workspace. Behind me is a trail of wet footprints, which I don’t have the energy to conceal. Maybe Lexi finds me. Maybe I don’t care. 

I have never spent much time inside Lexi’s bedroom. She always comes to mine. I expect paint-smeared carpet, spent tubes of acrylic among the bedsheets. But other than the bland floral paintings hung in artful collages, nothing here betrays her craft. The sole object of interest here is the terrifying thing staring at me above her dresser. But that’s only my reflection.

Beyond this room is a door to her private bathroom. It’s closed, but when I try the knob, squeezing tightly with damp hands, it cracks open. I’ve been in this bathroom only once as a child, when it still belonged to Lexi’s parents. Back then, the entire room was tiled in gleaming, white ceramic. Now it’s difficult to tell it used to be white under all the spilled paint. On every surface—the back and lid of the toilet, the rim around the tub, the vanity, leaning against open cabinet doors—are small, square canvases, like the one still on her easel.

Every painting is one frame of a scene: a gorgeous, curl-crowned woman carrying her own shadow up a hill. Fierce black lines contour the woman’s body—a slash across the neck to form a chin, gouges in the upper chest for clavicles, deep pits under the eyes. She looks like she was cut into pieces and then laid out on a dark backdrop. Stiff brush bristles have come loose with Lexi’s violence, pale threads lost in the collage of green-blues and black. Each one bears Lexi’s face, and my wounds.

They’re grouped deliberately, but not by chronology. I realize this is because each group of paintings tells the story anew, with slight changes to mood, lighting, and angle. In each iteration, the woman trudges up the hill with her shadow, determination etched into her eyebrows with vicious strokes. Upon reaching the summit, she throws her burden into a pit filled with identical corpses, all lined with thick, gooey lines. The last frame always shows one of the shadows, broken and mud-slicked, crawling out of the hole, becoming flesh, casting its own shadow, and starting back up the hill with it. Each savage brushstroke etches her (My? Lexi’s? The woman’s?) mounting anguish. 

On the bathroom counter between dual sinks is an open sketchbook. It depicts two women, one wrapping her legs around the waist of the other, hearts pressed together. The linework on the carried woman is particularly scratchy, as if the facial features were altered after the initial sketch. On previous pages are more smear-faced drawings in various stages of drowning. These are dated over a week ago, well before the incident with the buoy.

The terrible thing from the bedroom is looking at me again from above the sinks. All sunken eyes, black veins, blue skin. A girl too repulsive for her own mother to want.

My cold-numbed legs carry me back to the living room, where I bundle up Lexi’s drop cloth between wet coughs. I drag it on the floor behind me, erasing my footprints, as I return to Lexi’s bathroom and throw paintings and sketchbooks on top of it. The loose, pruny skin around my nails sloughs off against the rough canvas, but I do not bleed. 

Then I seize the corner and, stopping to collect the half-finished painting in the living room, pull the series out onto the back lawn. Paintings slip off and lay facedown in the grass as I haul the cloth down the deck steps toward the lake.

Maybe I was beautiful once. Not anymore. And if Lexi wants to be a monster like me, she’ll have to find it in the goddamn lake, like I did.