The artist was born on a Friday. Breastfeeding was a dismal failure and no matter what her mother tried, the artist-to-be was hungry all the time. Finally, her mother defied the omniscient mid-century medicine men and bottle-fed the infant who flourished. As she grew she sang little songs to herself, laughed much, and when she began to walk the artist either ran or danced everywhere she went. She was a delightful child and easy to love.

Before the artist was two, she and her older sister spent six weeks with their paternal grandmother. Their own mother was attending a summer session of graduate school so that she might support them while their father, a conscientious objector, worked out of state for the government. Their father’s mother worked a factory job leaving the two sisters with their haggish great-grandmother who sexually abused them. This maltreatment was not new behavior in the family. An abused child herself, the great-grandmother was kept in diapers until the age of seven when she finally had to go to school. As an adult the great-grandmother tortured her own daughter who, when grown, was never able to see a gynecologist without being liberally dosed with sedatives or have intercourse while sober. After spending years debauching the children of distant relatives and strangers, the long-widowed crone’s presence was tolerated by her offspring simply because she had nowhere else to go.

When the artist returned to her mother she was nearly unrecognizable. The child, heretofore potty-trained and happy, wore diapers again and was fretful and difficult. Her older sister was different too, tending to suffer either constipation or diarrhea, conditions that plagued her until her death. The older sister began enacting cruelties upon her younger sibling once they returned home. These acts worsened after the artist’s mother became pregnant and bore another daughter.

At four the artist stole candy from the grocery store as instructed by her older sister who told her that it was kept on the low shelf just for her. She was caught, of course, and her father vowed to never take her anywhere again. Nor did he. It was then he gave up on his daughters and women in general, soon after beginning a torrid hushed affair with a local Episcopal priest who later committed suicide rather than face the bishop. But this is not her father’s story.

In first grade she began private art lessons and was reborn. Her life was filled with color, inspiration, and joyous self-expression. Unfortunately the art lessons stopped when she was nine and her family moved to another town. Her parents were never able to make it up to her. They tried sending her to an antiquated analyst at the local university, but that supposed expert’s efforts were ineffectual.

She lost her virginity at thirteen while under the influence of LSD and God-only-knows what else. The artist remembered little of the event other than the expected swirling psychedelic sensations and inevitable descent into a maelstrom of fear and painful penetration. The boy, older of course, belonged to one of the wealthier families in town and though she adored him he predictably never knew her name.

Love came when she was sixteen. He was a drama major at a nearby college. They met via a mutual friend, an ersatz drug lord. One day the artist’s mother brought fresh linens to the girl’s China-red bedroom and found the artist, the actor, and the older sister all asleep on the bed. The mother, oblivious to the lavender hashish fog, sent up a prayer of thanks that the three were fully clothed.

By the time she was twenty the artist had slept with more than a dozen men, most of whom she didn’t remember clearly. Being the seventies, however, this was not unusual.

She was twenty-three when she had an abortion. She expunged the child of a spiritual soul who drank excessively and smoked specially blended roll-your-owns made of half tobacco and half marijuana. He was a lapsed Southern Baptist who habitually escaped to foreign missions of varying flavors. A journeyman Jesus freak, he might be anywhere by now.

Soon after the abortion the artist became involved with a bisexual folksinger. She was unaware of his predilection until the night she hosted a dinner party for him and his musical merry men. At the end of the evening her lover bade adieu to one particular friend. She was stunned to see him kiss the man full on with a passionate probing tongue. Feigning blindness to this act, the next day she sought advice from her younger sister, a singer. The younger woman relished her sister’s distress at first but the artist’s shame-filled agony and bewilderment was so frightening that the savvy songstress spent hours reassuring her sibling. The seemingly sophisticated artist had never encountered such conduct and the experience destroyed her already damaged post-abortion psyche. She lost her self. She no longer knew who she was, or worse, why she was.

Two years later she bore the illegitimate child of a man who abused her physically and emotionally. He wooed her offstage during her performance art period. She did not report his beatings because she felt she deserved them. An unexpected pregnancy gifted her with a second chance so she shed the man and kept the child.

The artist married at twenty-nine. In her self-written vows she said that she would allow her husband to love her unconditionally. In his he said that he would and that he was grateful.

She was nearly institutionalized in her mid-thirties by her older sister, a bitter twisted creature that felt pleasure only when inflicting pain on others. The less said about that sister the better.

By her forties the artist had forsaken her own mother yet somehow developed a fascination for the Holy One. Sadly, her Madonna complex gave her child the impossible task of being a Savior. Her Savior. It was an awful responsibility. As for her art? She never strayed from the Madonna theme.

At fifty-two she was in a nursing home, permanently addled from years of substance abuse, repression, and a determined inability to function. Her son, long since gone, sent her postcards that her nurses stuck on the walls of her room with thumbtacks until the artist began removing the tacks, sticking them into her body one at a time. Her husband discovered her self-mutilation while visiting one day. He never returned.

Today the artist has no tombstone. A small plaque with her name and the title, "Artist at Large," sits high upon the rear wall of a churchyard next to a similar one bearing her father’s name. Their ashes roil in the ground beneath, waiting for those of her older sister to join them in wretched unrest.

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