Fine Art III

By Steve Gergley

There is a painting in the basement of our house that vomits briny seawater. My wife and I purchased the painting from a yard sale in the woods. The seller was a frighteningly attractive, fifteen-foot woman who lived in a decaying gothic chapel hidden among the oaks. The woman wore a fashionable leather jacket, a retina-searing orange bra, and a short black pencil skirt that terminated six inches above the knee. She smoked a long, thin, creamcolored cigarette and stared at us with feline indifference. Once finished with our curious browsing, we lugged the painting to the front of the roofless chapel and paid the woman with a counterfeit dollar bill we had printed in our nineteenth-floor office back home. Using my wife’s virtuosic Photoshop skills, we had created a dizzyingly complex, aesthetically breathtaking 7689 dollar bill, which featured a stately portrait of our beloved pet manul, Ref, in the place where Ben Franklin’s strange and grotesque torso was supposed to be. The woman examined the bill with great interest. Her alien cheekbones and stone-sheet stomach glowed the color of a cherry tomato. She sucked on her cigarette with wet hunger and tossed the painting in our direction like a tiny paperclip. The painting crashed into the grass before us. A blast of reeking seawater drenched the totality of our pulsing skincocoons. We didn’t care. The woman’s presence was mesmerizing. The painting remained in pristine condition. A trio of suspicious crows watched us from the swaying canopy.
We lugged the painting home through the soundless mid-autumn heat and hung it in the basement of our giant and terrifying house. Peeling off our sticky clothes, we retired to our walk-in shower stall and turned on the steaming water. For the next thirty-two hours, while the painting ejaculated jet after jet of sharp and foamy sea water, my wife and I fucked in a frenzy on the shining bench of black marble and listened to the deafening screeches of the feral and truculent seagulls circling overhead.

Steve Gergley is the author of a bunch of books and a lot of weird writings of an indeterminate nature. His most recent book, There Are Some Floors Missing, will be published by Bullshit Lit on February 20th, 2026. He tweets @GergleySteve. His fiction can be found at: https://stevegergleyauthor.wordpress.com/. He’s also the editor of scaffold literary magazine.