Peace & Weirdness

It was the third letter, in a simple envelope between a sheet of pizza deals and that month’s internet bill.

“Ten’s dead,” the front of the letter read. 

Harper paused, it was written in sloppy acrylic brushstrokes, and the paper was folded so imperfectly that there was no doubt of its authenticity. Ten had written this.

He opened the letter.

“If you’re reading this, that means the cancer got me real good. Sorry about that, but I’m smoking angel weed in heaven, so… not really that sorry after all. Love you brother, and I wish you the best.

Peace and weirdness to you, 

                      your friend, Ten.”

Despite the news, Harper couldn’t help but laugh at the letter. 

It’s what Ten would’ve wanted anyways—not dying, of course, but the laughter. He lived for that. 

Harper sat for a long time there on the porch. On the table his tea grew cold, and outside he could hear the dog scratching at the door to be let back in. 

Ten was dead.

-----

Brady Tenenbaum, who everyone called Ten, was not one for regular funerals—or regular anythings for that matter. He had asked to be cremated and for his ashes to be put into a giant penis-shaped firework. He wanted his ten best friends (a fitting number) to shoot the firework at the Lincoln memorial on the 26th of December. 

A joke, right? 

Far from it.

Ten’s mother, being a devout Christian, decided against the penis firework and the cremation, as well as the act of terrorism, and so the funeral was to be a rather drab ordeal. Very un-Ten.

She did, however, allow for three of Ten’s pieces of artwork to be shown at the service. Only a few of the tamer pieces—none from the “flaming vagina” series, and most certainly none of his infamous “Jesus-raptors.” 

The very thought of seeing a Jesus-raptor beside Ten’s casket set Harper laughing as he drove to the funeral home. 

Ten had never been tame, nor tamed, and even the safest of his work could hardly be shown without warranting a PG-13 rating at least. Of the three hanging on the walls of the funeral home, Harper knew the first two very well.

There was the one called “A Man and His Ants;” an acryllic that showed a very vivid scene of a man being torn in half. From the tear in his body, hundreds of ants poured out of him, each with different tools, hobbies, or other defining traits. Rockstar ants, businessmen ants, politician ants, skater ants, stoner ants, inventor ants. The painting had it all.

There was one ant, in particular, that always caught Harper’s eye; at first glance, it looked extremely out of place, for it was a miniature sheep. On closer inspection however, it could be seen that beneath the sheep’s wool, was the grey fur of a wolf, and beneath that… the slick black body of an ant. 

The attention to detail on the piece was absolutely incredible.

The second was a sculpture Ten liked to call “Chickens against genocide.” The piece had been a very interesting collaboration into taxidermy, and quite a novelty in the art world. For every mass genocide in history there was one chicken body; his count had resulted in fifty-one chicken bodies, all meshed together and attached in a disturbing, billowing pillar of feathers, outstretched talons, and screaming beaks. 

Harper let the piece speak to him again, as it had on many occasions before. The screams of so many millions of innocents sounding clearly through those beaks. Several women shuffled by behind Harper, audibly grumbling their disgust in the piece.

Harper moved on to where the third piece was hung. Harper had known Ten since the 2nd grade, and was certain that he had seen every one of his pieces.

This third one, however, was new to Harper. 

There was no title for the piece, but a little note beside it explained that it had been a gift to his mother when he left home. In the center of the piece was a photograph of their family home, Harper recognized it from their childhood—the secret Dungeons and Dragons sessions among the canned goods of the basement cellar in the dead of night, the water balloon fights in the yard, and the animal nursery they had converted the porch into one year. 

Harper sighed, there were memories in that home that he hadn’t known were still there.

As with most of Ten’s work, this one was mixed media. There were charcoal scribblings that gave the impression of barbed wire and choking branches, and dark beasts and demons spiralling around the home, painted on with acrylic. At the outer edges, the painting turned to red and purple oil paints, with bits of sand, grass, and feathers stuck into it. Madness and pain and anger, and in the center, the stillness of a home.

Then something caught Harper’s eye.

The doorway to the house was cut out. He moved closer to make sure he was seeing it right. Sure enough, the door was cut, and there was something glowing behind it. 

After checking behind him to make sure nobody was watching, Harper reached a fingernail under the door, and it opened easily before him like turning the page of a book.

There was a small screen behind the door, and before Harper’s eyes, it looped through a collection of family videos. Ten pinching out the candles of his birthday cake (he didn’t like to blow them out.) Ten holding his baby cousin, and making her laugh by forming his face into a line of goofy expressions. Ten dancing his signature “wild-arm” dance. Ten dangling upside down from his bunk bed, laughing himself silly. Ten juggling knives (with covers on), while his mother fretted anxiously behind him. 

In small print he had written on the screen in his colorful, sloppy, acrylic writing. 

“Thank you.”

Harper shut the door to the house, and returned to the world of madness outside.

-----

There was an open casket in the other room. Harper thought open caskets were rather creepy, but he wanted to see his friend again, so he waited near the doorway until the strangers cleared away.

When he got near, he saw that Ten’s mother had at least honored one of his requests; his casket was full of paint brushes, tubes of paint, broken pieces of charcoal, and an assortment of all of the random materials that Ten used in his artwork; feathers, sand, shredded paper, stickers, and many other things that most people would consider trash.

He claimed Egyptian heritage, and said he needed the paints in his next life. Everyone who knew him, knew that he was most certainly not Egyptian, but that was the sort of thing that made Ten different from others, what made him so lovable; he lived in a different world.

Ten sat up when he saw Harper.

“I’m so glad you could make it, brother!” he called to him cheerfully.

Harper smiled, it had been so long. 

“I would have come if you’d let me.”

Ten laughed at that. “I was too busy dying, man. I had a lot of letters to write and gifts to give. I just needed to be alone. Did you read my plan for the Lincoln memorial?”

Harper nodded. “Sorry, it’s not gonna work out.”

“It’s okay, I didn’t let myself get my hopes up too high.”

They shared a long laugh at that.

Somewhere behind Harper, a church bell sounded. Three o’clock, time for the burial. 

“Did you make everything you wanted to?”

Ten shrugged. “Meh. Not even close, man. It’s okay though.”

A man showed up and lifted the lid of the casket. Ten laid back in his bed of brushes and smiled. “I just wish the world was weirder, man,” he said. “Just a little weirder.”

Before the casket closed, he reached out, and slipped something into Harper’s hand.

The casket shuttered closed, and Ten was hidden now.

Harper opened his hand, and smiled at what he saw; a paint brush, of course.

-----

He didn’t stay for the burial, he had already seen his friend. He was alive, and it would be a waste of time to watch them put him in the ground. On his way home, Harper saw an old brick wall. It was yellowed and crumbling like the end of Summer. 

He parked the car in a cloud of dust, and went to the wall. The building had long been closed, whatever it was, and the only hints of the past were a few unreadable letters. There was a muddy puddle beside the wall, and Harper knew what he needed to do.

Taking the brush, he began to stretch the mud onto the wall. It shone in the fading light of the day, and stood dark and wet against the brick. 

Harper returned to dip the brush in the puddle again and again, until it became too slow for him. Then he abandoned it, and began to use his hands instead. He smeared and dragged the mud until, finally, he was done, and his clothes were filthy and his body spent from the project.

It was Harper’s first piece. The silhouette of a man with his arms outstretched, levitating several feet off of the ground. Around him were other people, sitting featureless on the floor. They all had heads, except for the one who was levitating—where his head should have been, was a simple burst of mud that Harper had thrown. 

So weird, so peaceful. 

He drove away then, with mud in his hands, on his clothes, and in his hair, the same mud that he had painted with, that would sink back into the earth when the next rain came.