Fiction Fix
Fehler | Death Sentence
Death Sentence
by Gene Fehler
When artist Anne Simmons removed the cloth from her most recent
painting, she saw the white-haired, well-dressed elderly woman’s eyes widen
with shock (or terror) before the woman suddenly reached out and scraped
sharp fingernails across the painting, for all purposes destroying it (Anne’s
painting of the graying, deserted farmhouse – the house that her grandparents had built with their own hands, the one that her parents had lived in,
the one where she herself had been born and had lived for eleven mostly
happy years, until that day when her father had died in that terrible fall
down the basement stairs), Anne reddened, at first with embarrassment at
the woman’s act – so unexpected in light of the woman’s stature in the art
world, so out-of-place among the collection of genteel guests in her home
– but with an embarrassment that quickly turned to anger, an anger that
boiled swiftly and suddenly inside her until she lost control and snatched
the defaced painting from the wall, swinging it viciously toward the startled
woman, who flung her arms up too late in a futile defense, the sharp corner
of the heavy wooden frame catching the woman squarely in her left temple,
just beneath her two hundred dollar pink hat with the lacy trim, knocking
her to the floor where she lay still, glasses knocked askew, mouth slightly
open, eyes staring unblinkingly, a thin trickle of blood staining the thick
white carpet in Anne's drawing room, a room filled with a shocked silence
that only heightened the noises from outside: the barking of a stray dog,
the shouting of neighborhood children, the almost subdued sounds of a lazy
street’s mid-afternoon traffic, the eerie wail of a faraway siren that seemed
to foreshadow and bring sharply into focus to all the people there the
knowledge that the room would soon be filled with an assortment of public
officials who would be solemnly and systemically investigating the death of
one of the country's leading art critics, officials who would be arresting that
distinguished art critic's only daughter, who, in an unplanned moment of
rage, had, after thirty years, finally unknowingly avenged her father's murder.
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