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Some Say Art Deals with the Unexpected

By James Dorr

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ART: The quality or expression or performance of that which is pleasing to the senses; that which is raised to more than ordinary importance.

ARTIST:  One who produces art.

Is art permanent?  I seem to remember they said that in school, but what about music?  I mean, I know there are records and tapes now, but what about before those things were invented?  Would an original performance conducted by Beethoven be any less art because it hadn’t been taped?  Or an opera by Verdi be called commonplace simply because it hadn’t been filmed?

Some say art deals with the unexpected.  A couple of senators — you know, in Washington — say it’s obscene.  I say it’s beauty.

Just that:  Beauty.  It takes in the rest.

The unexpected?  The discovery of beauty in that which is plain.  The found importance.

My wife doesn’t understand art.

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Sarah, my wife, had a thing for uniforms ever since before we were married.  For marching men.  “Vince,” she would say, “why don’t we plan to go out and watch the parade tomorrow?  See the K of C with their flags and swords?”

Columbus Day, sure.  “You know I work holidays,” I’d reply.  “Got a banquet tomorrow night.  But I’ll tell you what, Sarah.  Why don’t you go?  You can tell me about it.”

“Sure, Vince,” she’d say.  Sometimes she’d call me “Vinnie.”

“But don’t forget, Sarah, to get back in time.  We got to get dressed, right?”

“Sure, Vince,” she’d say.  Then she’d go back to watching TV or whatever else it was she was doing.  She’d watch for an hour, maybe two hours, then turn and look at me.

“Vince,” she’d say, “why don’t you join the Knights of Columbus?  Really get dressed up, you know, with the blue and gold. . . .”

“Sarah, Sarah, Sarah,” I’d say.  I’d take her into my arms and I’d kiss her.  “Sarah,” I’d say, “you know I don’t have time to march in parades.  I’ve got to create.”

She’d nod and kiss me back.  She’d mutter, “Yeah, I know, Vince.  You’re a good butcher.  You’re good to me, too.”

She’d go back to watching her show on TV and I’d think.  A good butcher? I’d wonder.  That’s all she thinks of me?  Of what I do?  Like Michelangelo was a craftsman or Frank Lloyd Wright, maybe, had a job in the construction business?  But then I’d look at her and I’d see she’d been crying a little.  So I’d go to her and kiss her again.

“Maybe someday,” I’d say, and I’d hug her.  “Maybe someday when I have my own apprentice.  I understand at the K of C lodge you can get drinks cheap.”

“Yeah, Vinnie,” she’d say.  “I understand that, too.”  She’d laugh and be happy and I’d remember, all over again, why I loved her so much, even if she didn’t understand art.

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Does art understand art?

That is, can an object embody a virtue and know of its qualities at the same time?  An interesting question, but one I haven’t had the education to answer.

My education:  Grammar school, high school.  The old “eight-four” system.  Six years apprenticed to Marcino’s Fancy Groceries.  Married to Sarah, a non-Italian girl I met at a dance — my inspiration.  That’s when I discovered meat as an art.

You know what I mean?  You’ve heard of ice carvers.  Sometimes they get mentioned in the newspapers, at winter carnivals, things like that.  Openings of ski lifts.  They take a big block of ice, cut a lion, maybe a soldier or a knight in armor.  Sometimes a dragon.  It gets on TV.

And then there’s soft molders, artists in things like butter and cheese who make centerpieces for decorations for fancy dinners.  What I do is a kind of combination.

I sculpt in ground meat.

Mr. Marcino started me off.  “Vinnie,” he said, “we got a policemen’s banquet we got to cater tomorrow and now the chief calls me.  Says he wants to have sixteen hamburgers, shaped like little guns or something, to give to the mayor and the council.  Something special, but I ain’t got time.   You think you can take it?”

I thought of Sarah.  We’d just been married.  I thought of how proud she would be if I could, especially since we’d get tickets to go to the banquet ourselves so I could attend to the final details.

“Sure,” I answered.

I worked all that night — I called Sarah at home.  That night I discovered the method that’s since become sort of my trademark, a combination of molding and sculpting.  I ground the steak five times to make it fine, then formed it by hand in the shape of the pistols.  Then I flash froze it, leaving it malleable in the center, but hard on the surface.  Then, with an ice pick — now I use chisels, just like a stone sculptor — I carved the details:  Grooves on the cylinders, little cross hatchings on each butt.  I used a pencil to push in the bores and the little holes that define the chambers.

The work was pretty crude by the standards I hold to today, but the thing is, the mayor loved it.  I understand he even still keeps his at home in his freezer.

And when Marcino’s finally closed down, it was the mayor who got me banquet work as a freelancer.

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I looked Sarah up once.  The name, I mean, in the big dictionary we keep on the shelf behind the TV.

Sarah means “Princess.”

And then I wonder.  Does even a princess know what it means to be a princess?

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Those days were hard on both me and Sarah.  The fancy grocery and meat-to-order trade had been killed by the supermarkets.  I bought a used freezer, a big lean-in model, and set it in the back pantry at home, and I got a deal on Marcino’s own grinder.  It helped us get by.

I did Democratic Party picnics — nothing real fancy but, with the mayor’s help, I made more contacts.

And then it turned around.  People, all of a sudden, had money.  They still liked the supermarkets’ convenience, but, especially when they gave dinners, they started to want things a little nicer.

And banquets came back.  Republicans, this time, but that didn’t matter.  October 12, Columbus Day morning, I kissed my princess — my Sarah — goodbye and walked to the Eighth Street Supermarket where, under Tony Lagaducci, I run the custom meat department.

Now Lagaducci himself is no artist.  He’s the head butcher for the store while Mr. Wagman is the chain’s manager.  Lagaducci and I get along, though.  We sort of have to.

For instance, this time my work involved a major sculpture.  A big Spanish galleon, just like Columbus had, made out of meat.  For something this big, we borrowed back and forth.

That is, we pool our meat orders to start with, for sake of the price.  But different meats have different uses for someone like me.  In this case, coarsely ground beef formed the hull, while pork was shredded in twine-like frozen links for the rigging.  But central to the work was the great expanse of sails, fashioned from veal, white from the grinder and molded in curved sheets that, surface frozen, formed a canvas for red food-dye crosses and golden sunbursts.  The magical signs that accompanied Columbus across the sea.

You see what I mean?  Now, veal is expensive and, normally, one doesn’t order much.  And for something like this there’s a lot of wastage.  Yet few other meats can match its shiny fine-colored surface, its smoothness of texture.  So that’s when I borrow.

With Lagaducci’s permission, of course, some of it goes onto his account, with this understanding:  When I’m finished, I’ll re-grind the waste meat into patties, wrap them in cellophane in packets, and put them on sale on the regular meat shelves.  This way, generally, he’ll get back more than his part of the order accounts for, so we adjust again.  This time, maybe, he gives me back liver — something I don’t order for myself much because people don’t like it.  But liver is black and good for detail work, like, in this case, the ship’s little cannon.

Mr. Wagman doesn’t approve of this, but it works out.  Lagaducci and I don’t approve of each other either — we do get along — but, when I’m between commissions, I help him with the regular meat cutting, just as he helps me on days like today by lending me an apprentice or two.

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It gives me a chance to turn on the TV across from the freezer and watch a little bit of the parade.  To wonder if Sarah is out there watching.

And that’s when I saw her.

She rushed from the crowd — her thing about uniforms.  She rushed right up and kissed this cop in one of the precinct marching units.  Right there on TV.

Blue and gold all around her.

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Policemen wear blue-and-gold uniforms too.  Like the Knights of Columbus.  Blue and gold follows me.

Like my first dinner — the little revolvers.

The idea was the head table guests had these plastic bullets.  Red was for rare, blue for medium, yellow for well done, and the idea was they’d put one on their plates with their carved, ground beef guns.  Then waiters took the plates back to the kitchen, put the revolvers into broilers that cooked them in minutes, then took them out smoking, with buns and condiments heaped on one side, just the way their owners had ordered.

After that, more work came my way.  And, with it, I was able to start to perfect my art.  For instance, the annual Christmas Boar’s Head — something I now do for free as a charity for St. Boniface Seminary — became the first sculpture in which I combined different kinds of meat.

The bulk of that first head, as might be expected, was made from ground pork, but ground in a lumpy, gnarled sort of way.  The eyes were just black-dyed, but deeply set so it didn’t matter.  But for the apple — the bright red apple to go in the boar’s mouth — no matter how many times I ground it, pork just wouldn’t do.

And that’s when I first discovered veal.  Just for detail work, like apples and tusks, since it was expensive.  But nothing else gave the fineness of surface, the natural pale lustre, the ability to take color as well when color was needed.

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And then I discovered there was one other flesh that could be used as well.

Oh, yes.  I admit it.  That second Christmas, the hardest winter of the recession we went through back then.  I couldn’t find veal.  Not that I could’ve afforded it either, but never mind that.  The shops didn’t have it.

I tried to use turkey, for sake of its color, but that was a failure.  Even then I was too much an artist to accept its crumbly quality, its way of flaking instead of acquiring the sheen of trapped ice when it started to soften.

I tried other meats.  I even thought of cheese as a substitute — I’m not ashamed to admit what I went through.

I prayed for a miracle.  Sarah and I needed the commission.

And God interceded.

God understands artists.  I think, if anyone could be said to be God’s partner, it must be the artist.  His fellow creator.

God sent the vagrant who froze in the alley behind my house.  Sarah was still in bed that morning when I went out.

When I got the idea.

I just needed one arm — I wrapped the rest and hid it in the big lean-in freezer.  I carved flesh from bone — the bone I disposed of — and used the grinder Marcino had sold me.  I ground it up fine.  Right there in the kitchen.

I had already half-colored the apple by the time Sarah came down to fix breakfast.

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These days, there’s no need for substitutions.  After all, I have the run of the whole meat section, what with borrowing and pooling orders.  But, back in those days, I’ll admit it.  That wasn’t the only time I went to humans.

You see, I came to realize that, for some purposes — times when I needed even more exquisite surface detail — human flesh can be better.  It grinds more cleanly even than veal and, under ideal circumstances, it will retain somewhat of its texture even when well past the point of thawing.

And, even after times became better, for major commissions, I still sought out humans.  Prostitutes, derelicts, bums on the street who would never be missed in the commonplace world became parts of my sculpture.  Became, as it were, art and, afterwards, yes, were sometimes eaten.

The boars’ heads, always, were just decorations for Christmas Eve, but on Christmas Day they were re-ground and baked into small meat pastries to be given out to the city’s poor.  And no one complained because who would notice?  Sometimes, though she didn’t know it herself, Sarah used some of my human scraps to make our own dinners.  Again, who would notice?

Even the well-to-do rarely eat veal except when, sometimes, they find it on sale.  And even then, when it’s ground into patties, it’s cooked with sauces that hide the flavor.

Chemical analysis, yes — that would show a difference.  If the police should come to suspect me, should come to miss, shall I say, my victims, I dare say they’d find me out quickly enough.  But I, and Sarah, and the police got along well together.

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Columbus Day evening Sarah called to beg off joining me at the banquet.  “I watched the parade — it was really good, Vinnie — except it was too long.  I’m home now, but tired, so would you mind awfully much if I just had a bite to eat here and went to bed early?”

“I know,” I said.  “About the parade.  I saw you on TV.  When the police post was marching by.”

There was a short silence, then a chuckle.  “Oh, Vinnie,” she said.  “Then maybe you saw me with Officer Collins.  I don’t know what came over me then, except that maybe he’s such a nice man.  You know him too, Vinnie — at some of the functions?  He moonlights as a security guard.”

Yes, then I placed him.  Patrolman Second Class Peter Collins.  He often worked banquets where my art was featured and, like Sarah said, he always went out of his way to be pleasant.  I let Sarah go, then wondered, if I saw him that night, if I should mention he’d been on TV.

But I didn’t see him.

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After Columbus Day, the banquet circuit starts in earnest.  Thanksgiving turkeys are ground and remolded, left hollow inside to be “stuffed” with individually wrapped sausages and cheeses.  At Christmas, as always, there’s the traditional Boar’s Head Dinner.  The work becomes so much that Sarah and I find ourselves growing distant.

And then, this year, in February, I was offered the Cattlemen’s Banquet.  This was to be a Western styled dinner with, as its focus, a life-sized sculpture of a Black Angus bull done entirely in ground steak.  This, you might think, was a simple commission — just one kind of meat — except that the restaurant owners who sponsored it wanted a different kind of detail than the sort I was used to.

For this work of art, different grades of beef were to correspond with the parts they originally came from.  Does that make sense?  For instance, rump was to be used for the bull’s rear; sirloin, then short loin, then rib for its sides; brisket and chuck for its forward portions; even ground tongue.  In a way it was funny.

An artistic joke.

And I loved the humor.  I spent long nights with Lagaducci, making out order forms together.  Flank and plate, foreshank and chest floor.  Meats that few people normally call for but, to be realistic, one must use genuine dewlap to grind for the dewlap, real poll for the forehead to cover real brain.

Some nights I didn’t even come home.

But the banquet was worth it, at least from the point of view of the artist.  The Black Angus, shrouded with a cloth just like a real sculpture carved in marble, stood in the room’s center in a meadow of salad.  Surrounding it were the tables for diners and, beyond them, along the room’s long sides, were braziers for cooking, sideboards for condiments, tables of bread and rolls of all kinds.

The guests dressed as cowboys, sheriffs and gamblers, the women as cowgirls.  Sarah was dressed as a dance hall queen while I came as a trail cook.

And then the unveiling.  I did the honors.  As I’d been instructed, I pulled the cord that released the shroud, then backed out of the way as, as if the gun for a race had sounded, the diners converged.

They cut and tore flesh, the women as often as not with more savagery than their consorts, then, hands dripping meat juice, they ran to the braziers.  Patties slapped onto the metal of grills, were stabbed with spatulas, flipped, slapped again.  Steaming meat was lifted on bread slabs, slathered with relish — often still half raw.  And so it was eaten.

In twenty minutes, the statue was no more.  A memory in blood pink fragments of ice crystals.

I needed air.

I walked the corridor outside the banquet hall, strolling between steel-lined shelves to the pantry.  I turned the corner.  And there I saw Sarah.

My princess, my dance hall queen, lay with her skirt hiked above her thighs.  And riding on top, like a bronco-busting rodeo cowboy, was Peter Collins.

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I wondered, later, if I should confront her.  They hadn’t seen me.  I watched, detached, when we’d gotten home, at her undressing.  I thought about art, my wife’s body as perfect as one of those Roman statues of Venus.

I thought about beauty, as cold and untouchable — at least for me now — as some of the sculptures I created.  Fashioned with love, but for others’ enjoyment.

But isn’t that always the fate of artists?

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Sarah and I had drawn apart, and we stayed apart this time even when summer came.  When, with its picnics, we usually had fun.

“Sarah,” I would say.  I remembered the thing she had, because her uncle had been in the navy, about men in uniforms.  It wasn’t her fault.  I wanted, more than I knew, to forgive her.  “Sarah,” I would say, “I’m going to join the Knights of Columbus.  I’m going to show Tony Lagaducci how to make the ship for the banquet so I’ll be able to march in the parade.”

She wouldn’t answer.

She took to staying out late in the evenings, while I came home early.  I wanted to love her.

But she didn’t know me — she no longer knew me.  She didn’t understand any more than an artwork I might create understood art.

#

ART:  That which is raised to more than ordinary importance; that which, even if temporary, is forever after etched in the collective being of man.

Boars’ heads reduced to meat pies for the poor still remain in memory, both for the banqueters on Christmas Eve who see its beauty and those who devour it the following morning.  Even the bull at the Cattlemen’s Banquet, in its twenty minutes, would not be forgotten.   Thus, art is permanent.  And unexpected — a bull torn to pieces?

And Sarah is beauty.

The idea came to me in September with, as is often the case, a commission.  The city had recently reinstated its annual Police Awards Banquet — the one that, so long ago, I’d made guns for.  And, I was told, because he had saved a girl from drowning, this year’s guest of honor was to be Patrolman Second Class Peter Collins.

I started my drawings.  This was to be more than little revolvers.  Rather a statue, like the Black Angus, to be unveiled with a shroud and all.  My work’s culmination.

The theme of the statue:  The Rescued Princess.

Sarah and I still lived together, however coldly.  I never had told her I’d seen her that night and, if she stayed out late more and more evenings, I just smiled and nodded.  “Sarah,” I would say, “now that fall’s coming, and banquet work is starting again, I may have to work late more often myself.”

Sometimes she’d answer, “That’s okay, Vinnie.”   She almost always said “Vinnie” these days.

And then I asked her, “Could you model for me?  It’s for a commission I want to be special.  It’s for the policemen.”

She smiled when I said that.  About policemen.  “I guess so, Vinnie.  If it won’t take too long.”

I had her undress and I drew her beauty into my sketches.  I had her pose only for a brief period, in the back pantry, but as the days went by I had her pose more and more often.  “This,” I told her, “will be my masterpiece.  A statue of you.  It’s for the centerpiece of the banquet where they’re going to give a medal to that policeman, Officer Collins.”

I watched her eyes light up when I said “Collins.”  “That’s it,” I told her.  “That’s the expression.”  I wanted her happy.  And, in the meantime, in the supermarket freezer I started to build an armature out of plain water ice.

Water ice?  Yes.  It was unusual, but this sculpture would be dynamic.  I molded it after a human skeleton, hollow inside, to hold the meat that would form the body.

I ordered veal — the finest I could get.  Using Lagaducci’s order forms as always, with his permission, so I could trade back whatever portion might not be needed.  This would form the surface.  The skin.

And then, just days before the banquet, I got a letter from an uncle in Kansas City.  It said he was ill — he was always ill — but this time I wrote back and said I would visit.

“Sarah,” I said after supper that night.  “I’m going to have to go out of town.”  I showed her the letter.  “I’ll finish the statue beforehand, of course, but I’m going to need you to stand in for me on the night of the banquet.  Would you mind doing that?”

“You mean” — she was hard pressed to keep the excitement out of her voice — “you mean you want me to go alone?”

I nodded.  “Yes.  And I’m also going to need you to pose for me some more, not just tonight, but tomorrow and the next night as well.”

“Oh, Vinnie,” she said.  “That means I’ll have to stay at home every night between now and the banquet.  Still” — she gave an elaborate shrug — “if it’s for your art, Vinnie. . . .”

“Then you’ll do it?”

This time she nodded.  “Let me freshen up a little before tonight’s posing, though.  Okay?”

I kissed her cheek, then went to the pantry to get my things ready.  Ten minutes later, I heard her still talking on the hall phone, explaining to whoever it was on the other end that she wouldn’t be going out at all for the next few days.

I didn’t hurry her.

When, at last, she came into the pantry, I had the big bend-over freezer open.  “Sarah,” I said, “why don’t you stand there, by Marcino’s old grinder?  To let the light from the freezer lid reflect on your skin?”

“Okay,” she said.  I saw she had already unbuttoned her clothing, so I helped her slide it the rest of the way off.

“Now,” I said, “let’s have you look in the freezer.  No — not like you were going to fall in.  Tilt your head sideways.”

She tried to follow my instructions.  I knew she hated that aspect of posing.

“That’s it,” I said.  “A little bit more.  Close your eyes . . . just so. . . .”

“Hurry, Vinnie,” she said.  “It’s cold.”

“That’s right,” I said.  I picked up the cleaver.

Struck.

Let the blood run into the freezer.  I’d clean it out later.

I started the grinder.

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The next night — straight through — and the following day I worked both at home and at the Eighth Street Supermarket.  I finished the sculpture just in time.

My masterpiece.

I bought plane tickets.

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I understand the banquet was to be on local TV.  I was in Kansas City, of course, but I’ll look up the tape when I’m back in town.  I’ll have to come back when the police call me at my uncle’s to tell me that my wife is missing.

I’ll play the part of a grieving husband, although I’m sure I’ll be  suspected.  I’ll admit that things had gone bad in our marriage.  I’ll call Sarah’s mother to see if she went there.  And, finally, when there’s nothing more that I can do, I’ll sell the house and move back to Missouri to start a new life there.

The police, to be sure, will have their own ideas — especially after the statue’s unveiling by the mayor, and what happened under the TV lights afterward.  How, with Sarah notably absent from the proceedings, her likeness in meat gleamed under the cameras.

How, when the heat from the lights penetrated, the hollow, water ice armature under the flesh started melting.

How the statue’s limbs began to sag, how the breasts started drooping.  As if the subject were aging and dying.

How, in an instant, the face caved in.

You see, I had tested it all with models.  I knew the moment the legs would crumble.  I knew the direction the sculpture would fall, first to its side, then onto its back, the arms swinging forward across the chest.

How, in the simulation of death, my wife would become art.  She would be immortal.

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Yes, the police will have their ideas.  By now they’ll already have tested the meat.  Wouldn’t you send it to the police lab to be analyzed if you were in their place?

What they’ll find, of course, when it comes back the following week, will be pure veal.

They’ll go through my house before they call me.  Find everything clean.

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Because well before then, Sarah, my princess, will have achieved all that art can accomplish.  Her glory not only that night on TV, but, even more so, her memory will live through the purchasers of the cellophane-wrapped, oh, so tender, ground veal patties Lagaducci will have put out on sale the next morning.

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Host Commentary

PseudoPod, Episode 972 for April 18th, 2025.  

Some Say Art Deals with the Unexpected by James Dorr  

Narrated by John Michnya; hosted by Kat Day; audio by Chelsea Davis 

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Hey everyone, hope you’re all doing okay. I’m Kat, Deputy Editor at PseudoPod, your host for this week, and I’m excited to tell you that for this week we have Some Say Art Deals with the Unexpected by James Dorr. This story originally appeared in Splatterlands in 2013 under the title “The Artist.”

Author bio:
James Dorr’s AVOID SEEING A MOUSE AND OTHER TALES OF THE REAL AND SURREAL was a January 2024 release from Alien Buddha Press. A short fiction writer and poet specializing in dark fantasy/horror, with some forays into science fiction and mystery, Dorr currently harbors a Goth cat named Triana, and counts among his major influences Ray Bradbury, Edgar Allan Poe, Allen Ginsberg, and Bertolt Brecht.

For more information, Dorr invites readers to visit his blog at http://jamesdorrwriter.wordpress.com

Narrator bio:
John Michnya is a Pittsburgh-based actor, director, and teaching artist. He is also an illustrator and screen printer at Revival Print Co. If you enjoy his narration, why not check out a flash story from the crypt: The Beachcomber, in PseudoPod episode 411. We’ll put a link in the show notes.  

 

And now we have a story for you, and we promise you: it’s true…

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Well done, you’ve survived another story. What did you think of Some Say Art Deals with the Unexpected, by James Dorr? If you’re a Patreon subscriber, we encourage you to pop over to our Discord channel and tell us. 

 

I was born in the, ahem, 1970s, and thus grew up in the 1980s. It was, certainly by today’s standards a wild time. My parents did keep me away from 15 and 18 certificate films – 12 and 12a not being a thing until the 1990s and early 2000s – but anything on television before 9pm was considered fair game. And obviously no one paid any attention to books at all – hence my entire generation being traumatised by That Scene in James Herbert’s The Fog. No, I will not be explaining further. If you know, you know. If you don’t know you… don’t want to. Trust me. 

But I digress. 

I mention all this because I recall that the television show Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected was shown on television at 8:30pm back then, although I might be misremembering… possibly I somehow negotiated being allowed to stay up until beyond 9. But anyway, that TV show, featuring adaptations of Dahl’s definitely not in any way child-friendly short stories, is firmly etched in my mind. It’s tempting to describe some of them, but that would be hard to do without spoilers, so I won’t. Suffice to say, if you’re not familiar, they definitely have a horror bent. The closest modern equivalent – and I’m sure they cite Dahl as inspiration – would be the British TV show, Inside No. 9. 

One of the Tales of the Unexpected stories was Lamb to the Slaughter, and I thought of it immediately when I read this story. Again, spoilers – I will say that the ending of this story is pleasingly different – but the parallels are obviously not accidental, hence the title here: Some Say Art Deals With The Unexpected. 

Here, a man catches his wife having sex with another man and… doesn’t react. At least, not outwardly. Not immediately. Ah, yes: a man would rather murder his wife, carefully construct a sculpture of her out of meat and then sell her body parts for veal to cover up his crime than… go to couples’ therapy. Obviously.

It’s absurd. It’s also clever: once the meat has been eaten, there’s no trace. Probably. They can do amazing things with DNA these days, and we’re not given much sense of the story Vince intends to construct to explain Sarah’s disappearance – will the lack of a body be enough to save him? Who knows.

But anyway, Vince, or Vinnie, is off the hook for now.

“My wife doesn’t understand art,” he says, at the start, and you wonder… how does he know? Has he asked her? Has he shown any interest in her, other than as his muse? He knows she has a thing for uniforms, but everything else seems to be about what she isn’t: she isn’t Italian, she doesn’t understand art, she isn’t faithful… 

There’s no moment where he stops and wonders, “what would Sarah like?” “What is she interested in?” “Is there something I could do for her?” Could I be part of the problem, here?”

But no. No. All he thinks is, “Sarah and I find ourselves growing distant.” “Find ourselves,” as though it’s happening to other people. As though it’s as inevitable as the passing of time. 

Sarah is unfaithful, yes. She also seems lonely. Lonely people will often seek connection where they can find it. 

And Vince is angry because he’s lost something that, as far as he’s concerned, belonged to him. A prized possession. Stolen from him by another man. Sarah’s not a person to Vince, she’s an object. She doesn’t love him because how can an object love its owner? And he might think he loves her, but he doesn’t because… same thing, other way around. 

She’s already dead to him, long before those final scenes.

And if he must suffer the loss, so will everyone else. 

He’s not a nice man. He’s certainly not a reliable narrator. 

But the really sad thing about Vince is that he believes himself an artist and he thinks his wife doesn’t understand art, when the reality is… 

… his wife was his art, and he never even tried to understand her.

Fantastic work from James Dorr. I love this story. And I also urge you to seek out Lamb to the Slaughter, along with some of Dahl’s other adult works. If your experience of him is largely as a children’s author you’re… in for a ride.     

          

 

Now, onto the subject of subscribing and support: PseudoPod is funded by you, our listeners, and we’re formally a non-profit. One-time donations are gratefully received and much appreciated, but what really makes a difference is subscribing. A $5 monthly Patreon donation gives us stability and allows us to keep coming back, week after week.

If you can, please go to pseudopod.org and sign up by clicking on “feed the pod”. If you have any questions about how to support EA and ways to give, please reach out to us at donations@escapeartists.net. 

Those of you that already support us: thank you! We literally couldn’t do it without you! And just a reminder that if you are signing up as a new Patreon, you should go through a browser – including one on actually ON your phone – it’ll be cheaper than if you go through the Apple Store app in particular.  

And, if you can’t afford to support us financially, then please consider leaving reviews of our episodes, or generally talking about them on whichever form of social media you find yourself… consuming… this week. We have a Bluesky account: find us at @pseudopod.org. If you like merch, you can also support us by buying goodies from the Escape Artists Voidmerch store. The link is in various places, including our latest social media posts. 

PseudoPod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Download and listen to the episode on any device you like, but don’t change it or sell it. Theme music is by permission of Anders Manga.

 

Next week we have… Flash on the Borderlands 73 (LXXIII), featuring four amazing authors. I love Flash on the Borderlands episodes – can’t wait! 

 

And finally, PseudoPod, and Roald Dahl, know  

“Grown ups are complicated creatures, full of quirks and secrets.”

See you soon, folks, take care, and… don’t eat the veal.