“Georgia, Georgia Georgia. I’m from Tennessee, you know that? Tennessee, I loved it there. I came down here after they hung him up. I knew he didn’t do it. I knew it. But I wanted to see him up there. For some reason. I needed to see him up there. I knows it’ll come around again. From up north. Some way or another. I knows it.”
*
Lazy-eyed Georgia Baker touched her namesake for the first time. The grass was softer here, caressing her toes. There was a dead fawn in the woods. The stench crept to her nose, and tears welled. The carrion beetles swarmed around the corpse. They masticated little crumbs of pallid flesh from bone. The dead eyes looked out to the road, snout weeping thick gore. Swarming flies met the beetles, vultures peck pecking away at red bits.
The Chevy misfired and lurched like a lazy mule being whipped. The truck pulled off, against any oncoming traffic. Watering yellow the curbside growth, Billy Baker relieved himself, issuing oohs and ahhs.
“Would you stop that?”
“Stop what? Everyone pisses.”
“Billy! Don’t use that word.”
“Son, get in the car.”
Two weeks later they left Madison, the bones were still there. Roses sprouted around them.
Two weeks after that, they went back, but no one talks about that time.
Two years later, she returned again.
*
When lazy-eyed Georgia Baker saw Skinny Constance Baker, her Great Grandfather, for the second to last time, he gave it all up. The curse, the leaving, all that and the other. He hadn’t said a word before he realized that she was painting his portrait.
“Georgia, Georgia Georgia. You always were a quiet type. Just like your brother. Ain’t a word outta the two. I always thought you’d be some good southern belle, but you went off to that school of yours. Just had to go off to that school.”
At first, she didn’t respond out of shock, but soon it was too long after to muster up any response that wouldn’t have been awkward. So, Georgia just went back to painting him again, trying to rein in her second-rate eye so her vision didn’t go blurry like it usually did.
*
At one time, they had tried to correct her eye with surgery, but she could never get it straightened out like Bennett Baker’s. Her father was Bennett Baker. Oftentimes, Georgia Baker preferred to think in the third person. She quite liked playing around with outlook in this way. Her first-person days were long past now, but despite the switch, her eyes were always skewed. Georgia had set out on this change in point of view to see her placement in the painting, but it stripped her of power. She thought it would have straightened her out, but she was still so lazy. She’d decided to switch perspective when they came back for Billy, and ever since then all she painted were the catfish.
*
Georgia Baker was in Walmart, great cascading lights stretching on straight above in the beige jail of warehouse infrastructure. Little birds played around up in the rafters, flitting from perch to perch. She was with Bennett Baker and Bob Baker, a family trip, but had soon split off. The birds slammed their little heads up against the tin wall. There was a newspaper stand. The headline was about a recent mountain lion sighting.
Georgia Baker liked painting. It was all she did, for if not occupied with the soft symphony of color on canvas, all her thoughts, turbid with silt, clogged with sediment, would refrain from flowing. She had to frame the world 16×20, though there were 20×40 days, sometimes even 4×4.
Going out to the parking lot, a homeless man caught her eye. She stumbled forwards clumsily. “Excuse me, do you mind if I were to paint your likeness?”
“What’n is that?” He turned towards her. “I reckon you can do as you please, missie.” He looked at her in a way which in her mind was a liminal tug between predatory flirtatiousness and pseudo-paternal sentimentality. “I reckon you look like the Corpse Bride. Ye ever seen that’n?”
Georgia reckoned she did look like the Corpse Bride. Her eyes were so big, face gaunt enough. “I want to paint the painting. Everyone is a part of it. It will encapsulate all walks of life, all forms of it, and everything which is not alive either.”
“Yer one of those college kids, aren’t ye?”
Georgia looked down and noticed toenails sticking out of his 94 cent plastic flip flops. “I go to Stanford.” She lied, “I love it up there.”
“I couldn’t never be up there in college. I just couldn’t muster it up. Alls we need is one mind like yers, and a thousand people like me. Yer mama an’ ’em just live down here?”
“Yes.” Bob and Bennett Baker, father and son, were walking out of the store. They had fishing line and tackle, not bothering with a gray bag. “Speaking of which, here are my people.” She pointed back towards the door.
“Let’s get on now, Georgia, we got fish to catch.” Bennett called out from the 250.
She walked back, the diesel of Bob’s truck idling out across the parking lot. He grinned.
“You see them there brazil nuts?”
“You can’t go off and say that nowadays Dad. They don’t like things like that nowadays.” Bennett chuckled, “But I saw them alright.”
*
Glazed in an off-kilter aura, Skinny Constance’s resting body sat nearly dead. After he told Georgia about Tennessee, she always wondered if the same young man was there under the taxidermied plastic eyes. He had never moved from his recliner, not once. He always had a white sheet covering his legs. The only form in which he expressed himself was the nonenal odor. Every time he woke up, it was a birth to Georgia, a break from the silence of portrait painting, but he occupied most of his time with sleep. Now breeding breathlessness, his mouth hung ajar—it stayed open like the front door. The tv was turned down, only the swipe of her brush filled the air.
*
“We didn’t never need no doctor, we don’t need one now. He’s old enough to where they couldn’t do a thing anyways.” Constance would occasionally look at Bob, actually seeing. It was like thinking a dog could understand you.
*
When they had arrived the second time, bones stuck out through the Georgia foliage. Towering over the small streets, the bones were greeted only with the sights of camera lenses, the wrinkled Avon grins of old woman tours. Some mansions reminded her of whale skeletons washed up all along the upper shore of a beach. She’d seen it in a video once. They spiked up through the sand, half buried majesties. Others reminded her of a video where the body of a whale was still intact. A crane came, trying to lift it up, but its guts exploded, scattering blood on the fiber siding of a nearby family beach house. Out there in a world that wasn’t for them. Some of the discarded plantation homes were pulled down to their graves by the ivy, the sand. Others still swam in deep water, but never in the same ways. Finally, there were those that had their bones in a museum, cleanly polished, toured through by the wrinkles, but a skeleton all the same. A hint at the real beast. They were all pretty houses to Georgia.
*
“Georgia, Georgia Georgia. You know how I got to be this way? I fell out a deer stand. That was the last time I ever hunted.”
“How did you do that?” Skinny Constance was making for a more interesting subject than she’d thought.
“The sun was comin’ down, and I figured I wouldn’t see no deer, but once I was on the ladder, I heard footsteps. Well I figured it was probably just some doe, and at this point, I wasn’t gonna fool with nothin’ anyways, but then there were these three thuds. So I turned myself around and there she was: a fawn comin’ out her mama. The mama didn’t sit down or nothin’, she just stood up and the baby fell out. And that’s the last thing I remember ‘fore my foot slipped. I guess it all worked out cause once I was in the hospital, I got a call that said you was born that very evening.”
“I don’t guess Bennett ever told me that story.”
*
Amidst the tall hair of trees sat the dilapidated house, a blemish on the bald patch that was the homestead. The front door was ajar, mumbles coming from Constance’s lifelight. A dog barked off in the distance.
Bob Baker lived in a shed by the house. One day, he decided to take her out to the woods. He showed her pink lines beneath the dandruff leaves, a cut hidden amongst the mane.
“Yup, that’s where they was.”
“That’s actually very interesting, Grandpaw. Did they stay as sharecroppers here?”
“Yup, that they did. They liked it here that much. They didn’t treat no folks bad around here. We get a bad rap ‘round here. Us folks don’t like treatin’ no one bad, black, white, or purple.” Bob kicked underbrush back over the foundations, and as he did, Georgia noticed a chimney peering through the woods. It would certainly be a part of the painting, but it did not shape up to Georgia’s aspirations for the subject. A piece of it was there, but far from the whole picture.
“That’s where the farmers lived.”
As they walked by the towering stone column, Georgia overlooked the foliage. The sun was setting, shining through the gaps between the mossen structure. It stood on a slight hill. It was impossible to tell where the foundations were from here.
*
“Georgia, Georgia Georgia. Yer daddy came back after he run Billy over with his mower. Mowed him straight over.” He hacked up a piece of phlegm. It came up and he spit it out onto his shirt. “You know I once held the catfish recurd for the southeast? You should’ve seen that thing. Whole lot bigger’n the one you have in that tank, even though yers has grown a lot. If we fried that thing, it coulda fed a whole family. The meat stayed in my freezer fer years it was so big. I just didn’t know what to do with it.”
“Did you ever eat any of it?”
“Naw, meat spoiled all of a sudden. I checked on it the day before, but the next day it just up and spoiled. I mean it. Like the flick of a switch. I took one whiff and had to hack. Nastiest thing I seen till this day, and I’m a vet you know.”
*
It was one of those impossibly clear afternoons, the sky a still membrane, the sun a piece of pollen on the water. It was inconceivably hot, and a dog’s echoing barks had punched through the quietude for days now. The amount it echoed reminded her that they were not currently in a place, but rather near a place. Georgia walked up to the door and twisted the knob before shutting it.
“Uh, uhhhh. Uh, uhhhh. Uh, uhhhh.” Constance’s arm was outstretched. His hand had its fingers half curled. He was shuddering in pain.
“Do you want the door open? I’ll leave the door open.” Thinking about it now, Georgia had never seen it closed.
Right amidst the hairy old carpet, mold spores tainting the air, she set up her easel. Constance Baker sat in his wheelchair. Georgia Baker made sure he could see the television. His eyes opened wide every time she turned it on for him. He would sit there sedated, a moth to ungraspable flame, mouth open and drooling little lines of clear slime. Looking at him, Georgia thought of age as something more of a parabola, or maybe a cruel circle. He was wearing diapers, (the son and the son of that son had run into problems with the man shitting himself).
She brought up her brush, hand shaking. Georgia got into art school by painting like she was about to be hit. She’d squint and flinch. Swatting this, swatting that, she made two oblong lines with the whiskers at the front: a catfish. Heinrich had made himself at home as the subject today.
The catfish always followed her lazy eye. Her good eye wanted to paint oceanic dreamscapes, regal tangs and butterfly fish sipping teas on the seabed. In painting clear blues, her laziness would always creep in, muddying up the water, and Georgia’s bad eye would be drawn over to a corner where Heinrich always snuck out.
“Skinny Constance, do you like the show?”
Her final this year in art school had nothing to do with a catfish, it was a still life series on apples, but there one was in the bottom left-hand corner, smiling with yellowed, human teeth. When they caught Heinrich lurking, she had to explain him away as her signature. To be defined by such a dirty fish.
She liked surreal things, Dali to be sure, Carrington to be secure, but always did this little thing creep into whatever she was showing to the world. It could not be the case that it was in the painting. That would not do at all. Not. Do. At all. She knew that her eyes would need to be straightened out before then. That’s why she was painting Constance. She hated painting things from her childhood, but her eye needed to be straightened out. It had to be. She could not depict the work if she was blurry-eyed from laziness. Laziness, that was it. Georgia suffered from laziness.
*
When they came around the first time the fair was in town. Bennett didn’t want anything to do with the fair. Instead, the family went over to downtown, where the skeletons were. Everyone walked, and everyone talked, and everyone went about everything here like perfect actors on a perfect stage. Bennett adored the antique shops, and shops aplenty there were. Mother called them junk stores. Going inside, they were slapped in the face by a buzzing fan. The air made them all squint, but upon opening their eyes the family found, glistening beneath the green $10 sticker, a Song of the South bootleg.
“Wow, you don’t see one of these every day.” On the back was a poorly photoshopped Disney logo with the words ‘From the Vault’.
The shopkeeper grinned. She looked like a jolly Mrs. Claus. “No you don’t, they tried to take ‘em all away.”
“I remember watching this all the time growing up. It’s such a shame they had to go and do that.”
*
“Georgia, Georgia Georgia. Yer Grandpaw came back after his wife up and left him. He weren’t ever with no woman after, or before I reckon. I knew what he was really runnin’ from. She didn’t find no womanly scent on his clothes after he got back those nights. He ran and ran from that. And I told him not to. I told him to come to the lord, we can all be there.”
*
One night, Bennett and Mother got into a screaming match bigger than ever. They were in the living room of Papaw’s house. Everyone else hid in their rooms, pretending they weren’t woken up by the fight. What drew Georgia out were the thuds. She got out of bed and cracked the door open. Billy was sitting on his bed, crisscrossed, staring down into the quilt pattern. Georgia went into his room. He wasn’t crying, but that always made her cry.
“Y-you wanna go to the fair?” Georgia grabbed ahold of the quilt and kneaded it. Squeezing and letting go. She sniffled. He looked up and smiled. It was hard for Georgia to remember his voice. He was so quiet when he did talk. Mother and Bennett didn’t give them any mind, so they stole away to their Grandpaw’s shed.
Bob was the fattest in the family by far. He slept on a cloth couch with golfing patterns all across it. Like his father before him, his only cover was a white sheet. It veiled every inch of his body and embodied all the shapes: his feet pointed upwards in a pyramid, his stomach was perfectly round, and a hard looking square pillow was planted on top of his face.
Billy tapped his big toe and he shot up immediately. “Uh,” Bob rubbed his eyes, “whudda y’all want?” His black beard stretched down to his toes. It had retained its color through the years.
“Would you take us to the fair?”
“Huh? Why’d y’all wanna go and do that?” He looked at his watch. “It’ll probably be done through with by the time we get on over there.” In the moment between responses, the match was heard now, as a mumble, by all. “Yeah, lemme get some britches on we can go.”
The fair was closing in a half hour once they had arrived. The nice lady at the front desk let them in for free, so long as they promised to not ride any rides. They moseyed over to the ice cream stand, only ordering vanilla because that’s all that was left. The three just sat on a bench and watched the rollercoasters roll along their cycles two or three times. No words were said, the laughter and screams and chatter all blended in a soft cacophony of merriment. Georgia remembered seeing Bob’s big beard flinging this way and that whenever a cart flew by.
“I wish we got to see you more often, Grandpaw.” Billy said.
“What was that sonny? I didn’ hear you.”
He didn’t respond. Eventually, all the carnies started packing everything up. They even took the bench. The three had finished their ice cream but ate cones as they remarked at how every ride folded up on itself. When the rides were loaded, and they were just in an empty field with a ticket booth, Billy started clicking his heels. “Zip a dee doo da, yip a dee yeah. My oh, my what a wonderful day…” Even right next to him, Georgia could barely make out his singing.
They went past the ticket booth, “Excuse me?” It was the nice lady. “I saved these for the two of you.” She got out of the booth and went over to the children, “I felt so bad that someone was gonna come to the carnival and not get a prize.”
That was how they got Gretchen and Heinrich, two baby catfish. Gretchen was Georgia’s, and Heinrich Billy’s, but when they came back, Mother didn’t allow the two to swim home with them. Georgia thought it was just because they’d snuck out.
Bob couldn’t ever stand to see his grandkids so upset, “Just let ‘em live over here, won’t you? Please. I’ll take care of em. I swear.” He turned to the kids.
“Dad, I’m glad you feel so strongly, bu-”
“And then when y’all come back ‘round, y’all can see ‘em any time you’d like. Me and yer Papaw will take good care of the both of ‘em.” Begrudgingly, their mother agreed.
*
Now, it was just Heinrich. He ate Gretchen when Billy died. All Georgia saw was the aftermath: an imitation pregnancy.
Bob and Bennett had never given him a bigger tank. His barbels leaked out of the murk, swaying around crusty in the air. His mouth opened and closed slow, as if he had to focus on each muddied breath. Patches of mold surrounded the tank, for whenever he decided to brush his fins against the borders of grime, water trickled out from the corners and seeped into the carpet. He had lived this long with no food.
Every night Georgia had been without Billy, Heinrich had been with her. Still and soaking, he chased after her. His gray eye could barely be seen through the murk, but it always found its way to Georgia. She wasn’t so lazy in that bedroom. Her sight was always clear when met with the brown tank, but surely, this could not be the painting. It wasn’t. It couldn’t be. There were flakes floating around the muck, like light vomit.
*
“Georgia, Georgia Georgia. Why you runnin’, dear? You can’t go off and do all that. Look around here, just take a look. My boys just hide in their shells. Their country shells. There’s nothing ‘round here for you. When you go back, I’d rather not see you again. Ok Georgia? I don’t want to see you ‘round here. Not anymore.”
*
Thud, thud thud. Those were the sounds that woke Georgia up from her recollective dreams where all she did was remember. She got up out of bed, inching forth into the unlit living room. The darkness carried with it a death stench which crept to her nose. She was indifferent.
A mountain lion was hunched over on the floor. It pounced on something, toying with a meaty limpness. She thought it might have been Skinny Constance, but he was asleep in his chair, snores mixing in with the lion’s mastications.
Georgia flicked the light on. She stared at a cougar chewing on a fawn’s throat. The lion peeled down its skin, thin like paper, it ripped the same way. It sounded like one big sheet of paper being ripped down the center. The lion licked at the ribs, flinging up his head. The dead eyes looked out to Georgia, and she felt nothing. Outside, the dog began barking again. She sprinted over, shut and locked the door. It revealed itself to her. The eyes of the lion met hers. They wouldn’t be back from catfishing until daylight. And there it was. The painting. It was right there.
*
These dramatic images blew through as she sat about with her brush and looked at the slender thing beneath the sheet, asleep and dead. Her head high, hanging, up in a home she’d carved out for herself, between one breath or another, attached with slim fish line, trailing between her brain, eyeballs, and into surroundings, it was a 3 lb. deep drop weight, down to the murky depths of brown, freshwater slime, a muddy oasis where she, the weird catfish lived, waggling about on the mud caked riverbed, asleep and dead, the slender thing unstirring beneath the sheet, dead and asleep.