Rem-Iseul Kim

The duck and the artist

“I don’t know why you make such big deal about it!”

“Dad, it’s the first time a major curator has shown any interest in my work!  This could be-”

“Interest in your work?!  Those sad, ugly pictures you make?!  What mom and me do to you, make such sad work?!  Eh?!”

“Please, don’t start with that…”

“I’m not start anything!  You-” 

Thud.  Marigold’s father crumpled to the floor, suddenly.  Marigold unclenched her fists and approached him cautiously, as a young tiger would approach an injured ox.  She knelt by him, gingerly picking up his wrist.  His pulse was rapid, his breath fading.  She pulled out her phone, considered the numbers she should dial, the address she would tell the operator.   Her father’s face was upturned towards her, his mouth still open from yelling, eyes bugged out, as always.  She set the phone to the side, letting critical minutes pass, letting him drop away.  The house was blissfully quiet.  Tears of shame and panic and relief dribbled out onto the floor.    

Something rustled under her father’s shirt.  A duck emerged.  A fully grown, mud-colored duck with a dark face that made a scowl.  Marigold stared at him, dumbfounded.  The duck stared back, both orange feet square on her fathers chest.  The duck shook out his wings, startling Marigold.

“Jumpy much?” the duck asked, miming some semblance of an eye roll.

Marigold shook her head vigorously.  She hadn’t been sleeping well lately.  Ignoring the duck and the smell of algae he brought with him, she grabbed her father by the ankles and proceeded to drag him up the stairs.  The duck hopped up the steps as the cadet’s head bonked against the treads. 

“Yeesh, good thing the poor bastard is dead,” quipped the duck.

The ratty bed squealed as Marigold rolled the stiffening body into the covers, attempting to arrange the limbs in a poor imitation of a nap, an old man dying in his sleep.  Marigold sat at the foot of the bed and thought of who the hell to call.

“You can’t tell the truth, can ya?  That you let him die,” said the duck, standing backlit in the doorway.

Silence, she was lost in her father’s eyes, still wet and glaring right through her.  Not all too different than when he was alive.  Marigold  stood up, tremors of anger coursing under her skin.  

“Fuck you Dad,”

She slapped him square across the face and ran out with a sob.  

“Real mature,” the duck sighed and waddled after her.

Marigold’s childhood room had been turned into a storage room for her artwork, all 20 years of it.  Everything from 14 years old onward.  It was both a comfort and a torment to be among her life’s work.  Gloomy paintings, disfigured sculptures, tapes of old absurdist performance pieces.  Nothing her parents had ever liked or understood.  Everything she ever really loved.  Now she fell before them, in a daze, wondering if they would make it into the news story about her father’s preventable death, something called manslaughter.  Perhaps that’s all it will ever amount to.

“What’s all this shit?”

“My work.  Art, I guess,”

“Huh.  Name’s Lucas, by the way, thanks for asking,” 

Lucas cocked his head at a impressionistic rendition of the Black Dahlia Murder. 

“Why are y’all so obsessed with the gazillion different ways you could die?”

 A lot of the paintings and sculptures depicted a death of some kind. 

“These aren’t gonna help your case, all this morbid shit,”

Marigold sighed, her distress beginning to boil.

“Will you get to your point bird?  I gotta think,”

“Who said I had a point?  Do animals always have to be the bloody vessels for you humans’ self-actualization?  Jesus.”

Marigold turned her back to Lucas.  She picked up a painting and examined it, as if a portrait of the late Anthony Bourdain could help her.

“There’s so much stuff crammed in here.  No wonder your dad was yelling at you,”

Lucas began preening.  The clock downstairs struck the hour.

“Fuck, what time is it??” Marigold looked at her watch.

“Who are you important to?”

“This art curator, he wanted to see my work tonight,” Marigold shuffled through her paintings, getting more frantic.

“Why?”

“I don’t know, okay?!?  I don’t know!” She wailed suddenly, throwing a sculpture at the Black Dahlia Painting, puncturing it.  Lucas waddles over to examine it.  

“Clearly… You should look into ripping all your paintings, it’s avant-garde,” he added with a quacky chuckle.

Marigold cramped her eyes shut and rested her head on a stack of work.

“What are you doing here?” she asked through clamped teeth,

“What are YOU doing here?” Lucas shot back,

“Ducks don’t talk,”

“And humans don’t listen, nothing but death and birth make sense, kid. Everything else in between is bullshit.  You gotta get over it,”

Marigold looks up at him, her eyes suddenly lucid.

“Staring is rude.  Didn’t your father teach you anything?”

Marigold thought for a moment.

“He taught me how to kill a duck,”

The art curator had never had such a delicious meal.  As a rule, artists weren’t good cooks; he was usually lucky to get cheap wine and a couple cubes of cheddar cheese.  However, everything that Ms. Yang prepared was perfectly seasoned, precise.  The potatoes were crisp, the salad was tangy and crunchy.

“But that duck, Ms. Yang, exquisite,”

“I’m so glad you enjoyed it,” she smiled tepidly,

“I have to go now, but I’ll touch base about that solo exhibition next week, okay?”

“Yes, thank you.  Have a goodnight, Mr. Durand,”

Mr. Durand gave her an admiring look and a wave.  Marigold shut the door and the house was silent again.  She turned to the row paintings on the mantel.  All were pierced or torn with a statue wedged in the canvas.  

“He say it’s good?” asked her father, emerging from the kitchen.

“Yes,”

“And make money?”

Marigold’s lips upturned slowly.

“Yes,”

“Marigold?  What avante-garde mean?”

She waved her hand dismissively, sending the shimmering image of her father into the back of her head.  

“It means I finally made it.”