Featured Prose Writer vol 6, i.1
Travis Flatt
“She Stopped Painting Chickens”
She stops painting feathers and paints guts. She hooks tempera fingers in eye sockets, popping oil sclera. Her watercolor chickens won prizes for years at the fair and the bookstore art shows, but now, after the panties she found crumpled in her husband’s backpack, she stays late in her junior high school classroom, splashing gore onto canvas. Before the panties, her paintings earned pleasant smiles and nods. Passerbys might say, “Oh, that’s nice,” and forget moments later. Now, she’ll make you suck through your teeth, flinch, and back away with a hand slapped over your lips. She paints self-defense: go for the eyes, the crotch, deflate organs with nails and knees. Blunt trauma. And, her head resting on her cradled arms, like her first block students, with a bottle of bourbon’s neck protruding from her desk’s drawer, a vice principal discovers her in the morning before her class, her not giving a shit. She’s left her painting uncloaked. With nowhere to go but back to her mother’s where she’d been warned about men like her husband, a warning she’d shrugged off as bitter jealousy, she drives half drunk and half hungover, expecting a told you so.
Artist’s Statement
My stories come from images, usually images that haunt me. I toy with these images until I manage to transform them into words. My job is to give those words emotional depth in the form of characters. Of course, these characters resemble people I know, people who might inspire the images. It’s circuitous. Authors I admire include Jorge Luis Borges, Raymond Carver, and Denis Johnson.
Bio
Travis Flatt (he/him) is an epileptic teacher and actor living outside Nashville, Tennessee. His stories appear in HAD, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Bending Genres, JMWW, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. He is a Best Small Fictions nominee.
