Anya Underground
“Arm’s Length” by Katy Stewart
It was Penitent Magdalene—tears in her eyes after washing the feet of Christ with her hair, breasts bared to God, both erotic and sorrowed—that Anya loved most, and now, crossing the square outside the Hermitage, wind grieving through the trees, she wonders how Titian captured the ecstasy of a woman abandoning everything—gold, clothes, herself—for a man-god, feasting on nothing but faith and desperation.
Soon she’s at Sadovaya, her station, the city’s teeth grinding down, down, underground, and when an intercom says watch your step, she stumbles off and sees her reflection in a train slide by like the face of a stranger in trouble, a person who might need her help, and then there’s another train, and she boards with others heading to the end of the line, Kupchino or Veteranov, everyone zero-eyed, wheels screaming against steel. Across from her a woman’s knuckles flex around a bag as if the bag itself is her salvation, and Anya’s sight rises to a face much like hers, pale and tired but with an eye bruised purpleblack, memory-fresh, the reverb of bone still trembling into space, a throb she might call aubergine or violet but for the beauty of the words, the negation of pain by language. It reminds her that the ride must end, that soon she’ll return to a battered room, a place where her husband is waiting, touching the red eye of his cigarette to the night, cognac blazing in his hand. The woman’s face is bright in underground light and Anya stares at the pigment that will soon go green as bile, green as the silence of god, and for a moment their glances meet, and Anya watches the woman’s irises dilate in recognition, black moons filling with her wound, thinking that perhaps this woman sees sad Magdalene crawling through the desert for her Christ, the holy brute who will redeem her. When the doors wheeze open they stand and bump shoulders, nimbused in mystery, and the woman’s hand reaches into her bag and pulls out a plum, succulent and round, plump with darkness, and hands it to Anya, who nods, as if saying yes to question that only she can hear, and they both step from the train, anonymous, two women in the lifespans of their bruising.
About the author
Ryan Griffith’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Flash Frog, X-R-A-Y, Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions, Best Microfiction, and elsewhere. He runs a multimedia narrative installation in San Diego called Relics of the Hypnotist War.
About the artist
Katy Stewart is an analogue collage artist and experimental film maker living and working in the French Alps. Her work is an enquiry into the complexities of intervention / relation between the Human and the Geologic, as viewed through the prisms of materiality, dynamic process and timescale. She is very much inspired by the writings of Anna Tsing, Ursula le Guin, Deleuze + Guattari and Manuel De Landa. She regularly exhibits her work in exhibitions in the UK and France, and is published in several journals. She spends her days teaching English Literature and Language, or looking after her small garden and two middle-sized children. Find her at katystew.art and on Instagram @katy_stew_art.