A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte

Your eyes are languid. Look at the trees and see the hazy dappling of the leaves. Look at the river and see the unmixed points of periwinkle, lapis lazuli, Aegean blue. Who are these people? Your attention is drawn towards a woman with a parasol and an hourglass bodice, scarlet like the tomatoes you once stole from the Saint-Germain market. Look at the girl by her side in a dress that is whiter than any vestment you have ever seen. These people are peacocks in full feather. Lifeless yet full of life. The world has stopped. A butterfly is hanging motionless in mid-air. Listen to the silence. You can almost hear the people’s thoughts. The woman in her fashionable hat is thinking about the dinner menu she will request of the cook. The flaneur by the riverbank is remembering the desperate hand in his pocket as he strolled down Avenue Montaigne. How do you know this? How do you know that the woman with the pet monkey has a voice like cockles are rattling around in her throat? The man she has come with has oyster-scented breath. They are not what they look like. Her lips are pulled tight in a smile. But that smile is an illusion. Everything here is an illusion. The girl with the posy of buttercups is impossible. She is a girl you knew as a child and she is sad as though she has just been told she can no longer play with her best friend. Her mother—this is the woman with the fashionable hat—has told her no and that is the end of it. Her mother is thinking about dresses now. She will purchase a new one for the ball at Monsieur Fournier’s. She will need another for the soirée at Madame Aubert’s. Will the woman with the hourglass bodice also be there? You think she will. And the man with the oyster-scented breath. But not his paramour with the pet monkey. No, she will be elsewhere. She will be visiting the gaol at La Santé where she will hitch up the hem of her violet skirt and let the goaler touch her as other men have touched her. Then she will walk the dank, long corridor to see her sister who is manacled at the ankle and feverish at the brow. Does the sister have a name? The woman in the fashionable hat is Madame Roche. The flaneur is Monsieur Dumont. The woman with the needlepoint on her lap is Mademoiselle Blancard. See the way she is wrinkling her nose. Why is that? She can smell tobacco smoke. A man in a sleeveless shirt is lounging next to her and he is smoking a pipe. He doesn’t belong here. He belongs in a squalid tenement on the Rue Saint-Denis. He belongs shovelling coal at the Gare de l’Est. You know this man. You can picture his gruff smile on a Friday morning. You can hear the angry sob in his throat. What is he angry about? The woman with the pet monkey is angry too. Angry and sad. You can see this in their faces even with your languid eyes. The scene is swooning. It is hard to hold everything inside your head when there is not just this Sunday afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte but also the gaol and the tenement and the market and the Avenue Montaigne, a fever at your brow. The girl with the posy of buttercups is crying. The woman with the pet monkey is digging her fingernails into her thigh. And the man in the sleeveless shirt is rolling the name Véronique around his mouth. He shouldn’t be here. No one is here but you. The embers from a fallen pipe are dying on the emerald grass. The light is different now. Look at the trees and see the stiffness of their skeletal boughs. Look at the sky and see the weight of the spectral clouds. Look at the river and see the ferryman’s boat bobbing towards you above the unmixed points of pewter, onyx, and midnight black.

Matt Kendrick is a writer, editor and teacher based in the East Midlands, UK. His work has been featured in various journals and anthologies including Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, Cheap Pop, Craft Literary, Fractured Lit, Ghost Parachute, and the Wigleaf Top 50. Website: www.mattkendrick.co.uk | Twitter: @MkenWrites