Vivienne

Vesta Furio is grinding her teeth as she often does in the deep sleep hour before waking. Franz, whom her father named after the artist Franz Kline, sleeps beside her, and the crepuscular sounds emanating from her mouth stir him awake. He leaves the girl be. His dog body, more muscular and furry than her girl body, grasps the morning rhythms. Vesta will wake soon and they’ll go downstairs together. Eat, pee, walk, repeat. He quietly licks his ass, then his paws, as Vesta grinds her teeth.

        The room is dim. Silent save for the child’s bone on bone pulverizing. Franz nudges Vesta and she stirs, stops grinding for a moment, then starts up again. Since forever, the girl has been given to tense nights with sleep broken by bad dreams and bruxism. Recently, she started losing her teeth which are allegedly just temporary baby teeth, and she’ll be getting adult ones soon enough. Permanent. She keeps the small fallen fangs in a silver box with Michael the Archangel on top, a gift from her grandmother, her idol. Those original teeth are the only ones Max Furio knew and so each time a tooth gets uprooted, it feels to Vesta like her father is leaving all over again, her jaw getting as bare and achy as the space around his death.

        Max Furio: a tall, capable man with an indistinct face. When Vesta pictures him, she sees a blur where his features should be. He was raised in the city and idealized the country—its vast green peace and long stretches of pretty nothings. Still, he wanted to leave—onward to another world entirely. Vesta has one memory of her father which she counts as all her own—one that she doesn’t dare share with her mother or grandmother, for she fears speech will dilute its awesomeness. The memory is part of her central dream machinery, prone to variations which range from terrifying to lovely—

      Women in bonnets selling strudel and shoofly pies, old men eating hot dogs with buckets of sauerkraut on top, old men and women whose faces are melting off as they smile at little Vesta—four years old and miniature in dad’s arms wearing a black sweater, dad only ever wears black—and today his skin is fast and clear like an angel’s—Vesta knows her dad won’t ever get old like these sauerkraut people as they walk through a long hallway lined with stalls—dad’s clothes change from solid to lava—and Vesta’s not wearing any at all—just water—and the hallway is not a hallway but a river flowing into the violent sea—the baubles and antiques the vendors are selling which Vesta finds quite pretty—bubblegum jewelry, glimmering junk, and bright old sweaters that reek of the dead start to float, drown and dad’s holding her—but his arms now turn liquid—and over the whole scene—a dog, hanging by its neck—swinging back and forth over the gross, antique-crowded ocean—the dog is Pepper and Pepper looks like a smaller version of Franz—the ceiling is a sky with all the constellations and it’s September. Vesta’s birthday month. And her lava father points up towards the maiden—that’s the one, he says, as the suicided dog swings back and forth above them and dad smiles real big, really big, before telling her all about the vestal virgins—the priestesses of the maiden constellation—they keep the fire of Rome going—are you going to keep the fire going or no? his smile changes to a sinister grin, then he opens his mouth wide—hot, toothless, and pocked with scars

*

When she wakes up, out of breath, her gaze falls on her grandmother’s old tarot cards which she had recently taped to the wall opposite her bed. They’re arranged in a vertical line:

High Priestess

Strength

Empress

Hermit

Seven of Swords

Hierophant

        Vesta finds them beautiful, perfect, much too good to use for fortune telling or for anything at all. They are to be kept separate from the dirty world of loose tooths and crooked looks. They are meant to be here—ever beheld by Vesta and Franz, as art. Also taped to her wall are several brightly-colored Candyland playing cards. Vesta doesn’t care about the game’s objective, which has something to do with arriving at a castle of candy. The cards, however—princesses made from pink sugar and mint green princes—she finds stunning. When she tore open the game (a birthday gift from her mother) she immediately decorated her wall with its pieces.

        An original Dorothea Tanning painting is also mounted and framed on Vesta’s wall: Tableau Vivant (1954), a work in which a behemoth fluffy dog, which Vivienne says was the artist’s actual dog, embraces a naked woman who, depending on Vesta’s mood, is peacefully sleeping, excited, terrified, or altogether dead. The dog, too, changes. Sometimes, good and true—a protector. Other times, he means to suck the life out of the woman. The painted dog looks nothing like Franz Kline, though.

        Vesta rubs her jaw, then rolls over and embraces Franz, who yawns, dotting her silky purple nightshirt with drool. After their tender morning moments, Franz bounds downstairs, sliding over the old hardwood and annoying Velour. Vesta follows close behind, moving much slower. She makes a point to walk carefully, for a child in her class last year said his grandfather fell down the stairs, cracked his head wide open, and died right there. She has tried and failed to train Franz to go slow. On her way down, Vesta runs her fingers over the intricate wallpaper, its complex designs and eyes and velvety texture, which seems to be living, animated from behind. She whispers into it: Thirteen days til Christmas.

*

The girl pauses at the kitchen’s entrance and eyes her mother, sitting in her robe smoking, long hair upclipped in the space Vesta’s father died. She wishes to freeze the scene. Vesta is happy they still eat at her father’s table. At the flea market that day, Vesta became overwhelmed, suddenly frightened of the old wares shooting musty smells and manned by scary vendors. Trinkets like blackboards and matchboxes, worn and rusted, brummagem and authentic. Her father comforted her. Magic, he said. That afternoon, Max Furio put his hand on a white porcelain table bordered with chipped red flowers, closed his eyes, and told his daughter to do the same. They bought the table, along with five white chairs.

        She enters the kitchen—la la la, la la la!—inside a bubble of joy. She loves the morning’s best, especially when she’s had a bad dream. Morning washes all the night’s silt away and Vesta feels, for a frothy instant, so happy she thinks she’ll come apart, limbs pirouetting over the yard. She makes a high pitched screech, only audible to Franz, who jumps. Her joyous surge deflates when she clocks her mother’s forlorn face, cheeks sallow as she sucks on a cig.

*

Girl and dog trot toward the town center, twinkling with Christmas lights and a giant plastic candle. The sidewalk into town begins a few feet from the front yard, covered in a light dusting of white snow. Beautiful, says Vesta—then grimaces as she pictures the suicided dog hanging from its neck and swinging above the ocean filled with old junk: disgusting rusted things or pretty portals to other worlds, maybe both. Like the dream dog, Vesta swings. She swings back and forth between elated and sad, at the whimsical mercy of her moods, humming as she makes new lines through immaculate snow, strong Franz yanking her arm. She clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth to signal no—come back, be good, then sing-songs the names of the various downtown establishments as she swings back into something resembling happiness. Town is a rundown four blocks and Vesta loves the look of the shops. Today, their signs tint the snow pink and orange: