Page 130 - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

from stories that had only ever been screened in Thalia’s mind. Her mirror

paintings left gaps where the facial features of the characters would normally be,
so that your face could more easily become theirs. T’s brushstrokes are thin,
translucent, and mercurial in their placement; they swirl into one other. Her
colors are white and silver. Around the images Thalia paints a few words from
the script: an alphabet frame. Day’s favorite was a voiceover:
The poison taster is feeling a bit ill. He’s well paid but he hates his master so
much that today, the day he finally tasted poison, he’s eaten a lot and is

managing to keep a normal expression on his face until his master has eaten at
least as much as he has. Eat heartily, boss, don’t stop now . . .
Who’s a homely wench? Luca is, and Day is, and so are Pepper and Thalia
and Hilde and Willa and anyone who is not just content to accept an invitation
but wants more people to join the party, more and more and more. Day can just

hear Pepper and Luca climbing up onto a tabletop at such a party and screaming
out (they’d have to scream through megaphones, as she’s envisioning a
gathering that’d fill Rome’s Coliseum many times over): Hello everyone, it’s
great to see you all, you homely beasts and wenches.
Send.

—

THE HOMELY WENCHES have no fixed headquarters, and all the members agree
that this keeps them humble, relying as they do on the soft furnishings and
snack-based offerings of whichever member is host to Wench meetings for the
month. February was Day’s month for hosting meetings, and this particular
meeting had been called to discuss articles for the Lent term edition of The
Wench. There were to be two interviews: one with a bank robber who’d turned

down a place at Cambridge and now half regretted it. Marie was covering that
story; she had a feeling for bittersweet regret and mercenary women. The other
interview was with Myrna Semyonova, author of a novel, Sob Story, which
she’d written to make her girlfriend laugh, consisting as it does of a long,
whisky-soaked celebration of all the mistakes two male poets (one young, one
middle-aged) had made and were making in their lives. The narrator of the novel
was the bar the two poets drank at, and since Semyonova had published the book

under the pen name Reb Jones she was hailed as the new Bukowski. Willa was
covering that, and her reaction to Sob Story’s being taken so seriously was the
same as that of Semyonova’s girlfriend: It made the joke twice as funny. Ed was
working on a piece about hierarchies of knowledge for female love interests in