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Inspired bySurrealism, still life, embroidery, needle, colored threads; flowering pumpkin stems embroidered with silk - the petals come to life, float through the air and settle on the embroiderer's intricate hairstyle with a wreath of small silver skulls and tiny gold pumpkins, crystal beads, moonlight, Multimedia Art, A blue-jeaned L.A. ballerina with a mischievous pirate smile dances barefoot across moonlit sand, her multicolored hair streaming into a psychedelic sunset. A wandering piano man performs beneath ornate arches while mystics distribute celestial tickets along a boulevard. Highway headlights dissolve into constellations; flowing ivory lace becomes clouds and ocean waves. Churrigueresque Psychosomatic Magicalism, Baroque-Rococo surrealism, cinematic chiaroscuro, intricate textures. No text.
A Little Dance at the End of Everything
Nobody knew whether she was Santa La Muerte or Our Lady in the White Dress.
This was a considerable theological problem in a little seaside town where the dead frequently came down to the beach to listen to the piano.
She wore blue jeans and a white lace dress that looked as though somebody had started making a wedding gown and then changed their mind halfway through.
Her hair was made of rainbows.
On her head she wore a magnificent collection of human skulls, pumpkins, and little glass bubbles containing the last thoughts of people who had died while thinking about something completely unimportant.
One bubble contained the thought, I wonder where I left my shoes.
Another contained absolutely nothing.
That one belonged to a philosopher.
Every evening she danced beside the ocean while a young man played a grand piano that had washed ashore during a storm in 1927.
The piano had been waiting for her ever since.
She danced with one leg raised, her arms extended toward eternity, and a smile that suggested she knew something about the universe that the universe itself had forgotten.
People thought she was beautiful.
They were correct.
But underneath her white dress she was a skeleton.
This was not particularly unusual. Everybody was a skeleton underneath something. Most people simply wore more elaborate disguises.
The difference was that Santa La Muerte could take hers off.
Sometimes, when the moon was full, she would unzip her beautiful human appearance and step out as a perfectly white skeleton, still wearing her blue jeans.
She would fold her skin carefully and place it beside the piano.
Then she would dance.
Her bones made a delicate clicking sound, like somebody counting rosary beads in a distant kitchen.
The pianist never looked up.
He had been dead for thirty-seven years and had learned that looking up seldom improved anything.
Once he asked her whether she was Death or the Virgin.
She considered the question.
Then she picked a small flower growing between the piano keys.
“Why do you suppose,” she said, “that people are always asking me to choose?”
Beyond the beach, the sunset burned through its collection of impossible colours.
The stars arranged themselves into constellations that had never existed before.
A few pumpkins rolled quietly toward the sea.
And Santa La Muerte continued dancing.
She was not collecting souls.
She was not delivering salvation.
She was simply enjoying the extraordinary inconvenience of having a body.
For one evening, at least.
Eventually the pianist stopped playing.
The ocean became perfectly still.
She put her skin back on, straightened her white lace, and walked barefoot into the moonlight.
Nobody followed her.
They were afraid of discovering whether she was a skeleton pretending to be a woman or a woman pretending to be a skeleton.
But the pianist knew.
He had watched her dance for thirty-seven years.
There was no difference.
And somewhere inside the grand piano, a single note continued playing long after everybody had gone home.
It sounded remarkably like somebody laughing at the idea of death.
