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The Exhibition

by Melinda Selmys

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This was the first time in over a century that Garnet had found the courage to attend an exhibition. In those days the fashion had been deliberate deformity; men made with the faces of beasts, or misshapen into the likeness of a turning screw. The art of it had been to make the most severe possible departure from the human form, without creating something too monstrous to be viable; apparently, things had grown worse in a hundred and fifty years.

“Give us a blessing, little mother,” the man standing next to Garnet said to her. He clearly fancied himself a critic of the arts, dressed in the new-style – layers of expensive cloth and furs draped so that they loudly proclaimed the wealth of one who could afford natural fabrics, while doing nothing to clothe or obscure the body of the wearer. His laugh was as joyless and acerbic as bubbling vinegar.

“That one only blesses monsters,” his companion, who was neither male nor female, sipped its wine and ran its fingers along the surface of the blood-drenched ice.