Sosie

by Tiffany Crum

After her daughter runs away, Sosie self-medicates with television. Procedural dramas, cooking shows, disembodied heads forewarning threats of warming oceans, of hurricanes. She has no preference, only a fear of silence, and so she closes her eyes and nods off to great Brits baking scones. To Eleven harnessing her telekinetic powers.

One afternoon, she finds herself on the Bob Ross channel. The Joy of Painting. Bob’s voice is a placid lake. His brush strokes, a whispery breeze. She lets her eyes shift to the half-finished landscape on his canvas. Titanium white. Dark sienna. The palette knife rasps. A mountain rises. His trees and clouds are happy.

She watches him at all hours, transfixed by his calm demeanor, his confident brush strokes. Outside her window, tourists snap photos of historic Savannah. Ghost tours pause to pontificate about Yellow Fever. There are graves everywhere, they say. Beneath your very feet. The live oaks weep with Spanish moss. Bob’s incantations feel personal, his sotto voice her only companion.

Sosie’s husband is tired of this. He’s never apologized for his reaction when their daughter confessed. Instead, he waxes on about “appearances” and makes ironic statements about God. Unlike Bob, he’s not averse to shouting. He likes to hear his words punch through walls, echo in and out of rooms.

Sosie dreams up various ways to maim him. Brass knuckles and nunchucks, baseball bats and lead pipes. Her visions form on the titanium white canvas. Brush and tap, scrape and fan. No mistakes, only happy accidents, Bob says. In your world, you make all the decisions.

Sosie has no other children. She regrets many things, but most of all this. Every time she confided, every time she asked her daughter to help cover a bruise, she further blurred the lines. Caretaker or caregiver, bystander and go-between. There were two and then there were three. Three, and then two. Her daughter was sixteen when she met the boy. Sosie doesn’t blame the boy.

Storm season shadows into winter, winter bleeds into spring. Sosie’s hair falls out in spidery masses and her husband buys her a wig. She flings it out the window at a passing bicycle tourist. She wishes she could climb into Bob’s canvas and live under his sap green trees, bathe in his phthalo blue waters.

Sosie is probably a grandmother now. She might never meet the child. These types of runaways come back when they’re ready, the police said that day, averting her eyes, her tear-streaked face. But Sosie knows better. As long as her husband resides inside this echoey house, her daughter will stay gone.

Sosie’s daydreams amplify as hurricane season returns. Like febrile hallucinations, they break free of the canvas, visions of antifreeze and carbon monoxide, handguns floating before her eyes. This is where you take out all your hostilities and frustrations, Bob coos as he washes his brush in paint thinner and whips it against the easel. Go on, he says, beat the devil out of it. Some believe this was what killed him, these odorless chemicals suffusing the air.

Outside, the wind picks up. The insects sing louder, signaling an oncoming storm. A shutter thwaps against the house. In the bedroom above, Sosie’s husband sleeps unsuspecting, unburdened. Guilt, she’s learned, is wasted on the moral. Climbing the stairs, she feels Bob’s presence, hears his voice. He reminds her it’s all about technique. No patterns, no tracings. You need only to have an idea and let it happen. Now is the time, he says, to be decisive.

She inches open the bedroom door.

There are graves everywhere. Beneath your very feet.

Tiffany Crum lives in Atlanta, but was born on a California dairy farm, where flies outnumbered stars. When not writing, she can be found dictating novels into her phone while walking her dog.