Mausoleum of Gloaming

Crypt 1: Broomstick Skirts

In robes of shell pink sunset over woodland hills, girls float the river to dance on hollow logs. Their gossamer gowns, devoured by fungus, release spores in the wind. In broomstick skirts, my sisters float skyward with petals on water. Soft as fleece, the faces our mother wears, one of them mine, smile as she walks away, strung out, outraged by a summer meadow at sunrise. The sunset bounces off her studio walls as she paints shadows.

Crypt 2: Shadow Painter and Man of Wood

In her shadow paintings, a man of wood dives into the ditch. Faceless in the trees, he rises to devour pears ripening in the moths of autumn, as delicate as hummingbirds, courting death in fire glowing like morning. A corpse acts with repose, cradling an unborn in a blanket as velvety as rabbit skin under a veil of silver stars.

Crypt 3: River Crows

Taunting the shadow painter with gray flowers, my sisters haunt gregarious crows purplish in strong sunlight, their woodland nest, a bowl of sticks in trees. Awakened, these intelligent ebony-hued large birds caw-cah-kahr the devious route that cuts through a muddy river slipping through a song as rhythmic as time.

Crypt 4: Women of Vines

A month, a year, a lifetime out of its depth takes hold like a drug. Whispers descend like the river luminous yet rooted to the earth. Women, many women, and girls wear faces like knives sheathed in dark vine. Girls ebb from communal dwellings where their mothers have no names but evening.

Crypt 5: Deadwood Rain

Like rain into deadwood, insects vibrate into hollows of the willows. Wood ants and roaches walk the trail like an old man’s necktie, where I linger in shadow painting, longing to become a shade like her. Leaning among the rocks of the morning, I encounter the monstrous blacksnake oozing digested blood, raising his head. My dancing tongue glitters with scales over his body.

Crypt 6: Fungus

Childhood memories fall like shawls over tabletops to disintegrate with visions leaching into damp soil where fungi grow.

Crypt 7: Anthropomorphic Girls

On my bedroom walls, the shadow painter paints a woodland world of wonder where girls like me become mushrooms and mushrooms become girls. She populates my room with the Questionable Stropharia, the Hooded Helevella, and the Capped Amanita. They skip with the Rose Coral and the Purple Laccaria toward the Prince and the Man-on-Horseback. Anthropomorphic, they linger happily under the trees with Wooly Chanterelles.

Crypt 8: Those Who Drink from the Death Cap

The mushroom girls pet a giant white human skull in the dark of the wood’s shallows. A giant Puffball. Is it good to eat? The girls begin kicking it like a soccer ball. Its spores mist the woodland painting toward the Death Cup, the Destroying Angel, fetid as forgotten dreams in the gills that sweat onto an Anise-Scented Clitocybe, laughing in a girlish manner.

Crypt 9: Gnomelike Foragers

At night, the shadow painter creates murals of fungal joy on my walls. In patterns of spore prints, she paints my sisters walking under the oaks holding large mushrooms as shaggy parasols. Lepiota rachodes. Gnomelike, sauntering behind the girls, foragers wear mushroom caps on their heads.

Crypt 10: A Dead Man’s Foot and a Dead Man’s Hand

Along a roadside near the trees where girls walk, a Dead Man’s Foot leads to a Shaggy Man. A Dead Man’s Hand emerges from the sand. By the light of dawn, I wonder if the shadow painter is warning me of death, then I realize all these dead parts are named after fungi that grow in the wild.

Crypt 11: Lithographs

Shadow paintings spread like lithographs on my bedroom walls where the radiance of water disappears around a big fir tree on the hill with the crudeness of realism and the graveness of graves.

Crypt 12: The Bone Princess

Shadow paintings smudge: shaded drawings scratched into caves. In my little room of morbid curiosity, the shadow painter confronts her captor. Her kidnapper puts her on display, exhibited, posed like a bone princess on a stone throne bearing no name. As if what happened to us was midsummer madness, we vanish without a trace.

Crypt 13: Nightmare Child

I was a child of thirteen when the shadow painter painted the bone princess at night on my bedroom walls. Night after night, she labored on a portrait of the bone princess. I sat up in my bed, watching in silent wonder, not daring to interrupt her.

My father assured me it was only a dream. A nightmare.

Crypt 14: The Unspoken

At night when the shadow painter visited, I wanted her to speak to me. I wanted to speak to her. She was always completely silent, afraid of light and sound. Shy. Being a shadow, a shy shade, she worked in silence and spoke through shadows. In her paintings, the House of Fire in the woods became a cottage of unspoken words where the lights turned off and on, producing a masterpiece of whispers painted on the walls. Unspoken: Mother. Daughter. Trees. Mausoleum of Gloaming.

Crypt 15: Evergreen Night

Staring into the mural, I found the nightly mystery of the shadow painter’s velvety chalk marks. The abstract patterns of the shadows beneath the trees seemed like witches flying above creatures, half human, half animal. They rise in graduations of tones of the evergreen night.

Crypt 16: Ebony Abstractions

She doesn’t try to duplicate the night woods but its moods and abstractions, communicating like children of the wind opening leaves as the maples quake and shiver out the fragrance of the trees after rain.

Crypt 17: The Moons of Her Eyes

Tonight, the moons of her eyes become a part of me.

I want to tell her that I missed her, but she’s shy. More than anything, I want her to stay because I suspect she’s my biological mother. Sarah Janowitz, the painter. Or rather she was the spirit of my mother. In particular, she was the shade of Sarah Janowitz, who had been a painter in life before she died in the woods.

Crypt 18: The Shade

As a shade, she had become one with her art. If I had not known her in life, I would have the privilege of knowing her in death, since she came to me at night. In her paintings, she spoke, showing me visions.

Crypt 19: The Slippage

Like all art, her shadow paintings were open to interpretation, and I often misinterpreted what she was trying to tell me about what happened in the woods, the way her body became an ecosystem all its own. In dying she fed many lives through the slippage of epidermis, putrid gas collecting in her distended abdomen, purging bloodstained fluid from her orifices. Exposed to animals and air, she was reduced to bone in ten days.

Crypt 20: The Body House

Her body housed insects. House flies entered her mouth, nose, anus, and eyes. Flesh flies gave birth to maggots that fed the blowflies. Maggots migrated in masses. Hide beetles, carcass beetles, and ham beetles arrived as her bloated body collapsed in the dirt of the mossy stones above the drop-off.

Crypt 21: Coffin Flies

Consuming maggots, large-jaw beetles tore open the pupal cases of flies inside her as she sat on a stone throne. The beetles carried mites that devoured the eggs of flies.

My putrefying mother decayed as her odor invited cheese flies. Wasps flew out of her mouth before coffin flies and beetles cleaned her skeleton, making her into a bone princess as moths came to devour her hair and clothing in a mausoleum of gloaming.

Crypt 22: The Old Mural

Light hides the mural from me. In every room, the shadow mural connects the walls in a silhouette, life-sized, incorporating the girls in the woods. It was always there in the background to befriend me when I was young. I often wondered who painted it and why. Every time I asked my mother, she told me there was never any mural in the house.

Crypt 23: Love

I wondered why others couldn’t see what I could see.

It was plain to me that I loved the shadow painter.

I love you, shadow painter.

I miss you, shadow painter.

Come back to me, shadow painter.

Crypt 24: Erasure

When I find her in the woods, the perfect skeleton scares me because I’m seeing someone who isn’t supposed to be there. Once again, the bone princess sits before my eyes. She’s in the woods on her throne of stone in the mausoleum of gloaming. She’s in the shadow paintings on my walls when I wake at night. Tonight, when the shadow painter arrives, I’m trying to stay awake long enough to watch her finish, since her paintings will be erased by the light of dawn.