Claudia Monpere: SALT PAINT • Cleaver Magazine

Claudia Monpere
SALT PAINT

Tina and her sister, Meredith, are painting cats on the six-foot cardboard coffin. Tuxedo cats, tortoiseshells, tabbies, Maine Coons. Meredith is the real artist. Tina should have left her to it, sick of her sister offering advice or silently hovering. Hiding her hands under the table so Meredith can’t see, she kneads her fingers from the arthritis pain, focuses on her next panel—Meredith has assigned them half each, spread about. “This way our styles will be mixed,” Meredith says. “The whole will have integrity.”

They need to finish painting tonight. Tina longs to leave the cats behind. And dreads it. It will mean moving on to the other part of the painting. She watches her sister finish up an Abyssinian, the tail long and perfectly tapered, then gets up to pee, sneaking brandy into her coffee.

When Tina returns, Meredith asks about her arthritis. “Are you doing your physical therapy when I’m not here? Eating salmon and lots of leafy greens?”

Tina lies and says yes. She hid the boxes of processed food before her sister arrived. Bright orange mac and cheese, Fruit Loops, frozen dinners with fried chicken and mashed potatoes, Oreos. What she craves these days.

“Okay. I think we’re done with the cats,” Meredith says. “Let’s paint the gymnast panels.”

Years ago when Tina’s daughter, Cass, was eleven—sleeping badly even then—she woke her mother at 3:00 a.m. crying; she couldn’t decide if she loved cats or gymnastics more. Tina said she could love them both equally, but her daughter shook her head. “No.” Raised voice. “I have to choose.” She cuddled with one of her three cats at the foot of her bed. “I know what you think, Ginger,” she said.

Meredith goes right to work painting a silhouette of a handspring, and Tina begins a wolf turn, seeing Cass’s smile when she finally mastered the move. Tina’s tears are coming fast again. Knowing how anxious this makes her sister, she tries to wipe them away. She wipes and wipes but then thinks fuck it and lets herself feel the warm tears drip down her face. She leans over the wolf turn silhouette, her tears dripping into the black paint, then mixes them together. The sisters paint silhouettes of split leaps, stag leaps, straddle jumps. Cass mastered them all. College recruiters hounded her when she was just thirteen. She plowed through anxiety and depression, ankle, wrist, and shoulder injuries. A serious gymnastics accident in college that resulted in surgery and an oxycodone prescription.

“The horizon is no lullaby,” Cass said, during one of her many stints in rehab. Tina paints this on the coffin over Meredith’s objection, her fingers swollen, burning. She remembers Cass’s first few rehab programs, when hope still fluttered in both of them. Then she stands.

“I think we’re done,” she says.

The next day is windy and gray. They drive the cardboard coffin to the mortuary. They carry it for several blocks, San Francisco parking being what it is. Even with the handles, it’s awkward, heavy. When they stop for a rest, a huge gust of wind sweeps the coffin up, out of their grasp. It tumbles downhill as they chase after it, both women yelling. Wind swirls Tina’s hair into her eyes. The coffin slides and flips. Meredith screams, “Damn it,” running faster. But Tina sees something. There’s grace in the coffin’s movement. She slows down. She watches. She simply watches, conjuring her daughter, her body leaping through air and years, those enchanted limbs defying gravity.

Claudia Monpere’s flash appears or is forthcoming in Craft, Smokelong Quarterly, The Forge, Atlas and Alice, Trampset, Fictive Dream, Atticus Review, and elsewhere. Her short stories, poems, and creative nonfiction appear in such journals as The Kenyon Review, The Cincinnati Review, River Teeth, Prairie Schooner, New Ohio Review, and Hunger Mountain. Claudia Monpere received the 2023 Smokelong Workshop Prize and has been nominated multiple times for a Pushcart and for Best of the Net.