Mercy, part I

There was a time, not long ago, when I went from having everything I wanted out of life to having very little. As time wore on the hole went deeper and deeper. I did what I could to clamber out, eventually spending every waking hour, seven days a week at this job or that. But my health suffered and what gains I had made were quickly lost. In the midst of this gloom, a friend appeared, back from the Wild West with a notion of starting a literary concern – one of those fruitless little ventures of no consequence; I was eager to contribute, to perhaps regain a little bit of my lost life.

Early on in the endeavor my friend received a humble submission entitled “german briefness and a bucket full of eels” penned by a beleaguered prostitute in Belgium. It was a masterful black fairy tale about her sordid life. She was a godsend and quickly became his marquee writer. Her blood and guts stories were full of horror and misery and yet always managed a breath of humor or some small gesture of heartbreaking tenderness.

My friend smartly resolved to publish a book of her writing. He commissioned more work from her, which came in a flood, sometimes two or three stories in a day. He then took the literally hundreds of pieces and assembled the best of them into a vague narrative. The result was a kind of fugue – a portrait of a young woman as complete as Anna Karenina but superior in its black humor and bloody violence. He asked if I would design a cover and I jumped, but how could I represent this wonderful artifact? Surely all books are forever judged by their cover. I knew a careless reader would see only an endless and irredeemable barrage of sadism and perversion – I wanted to emphasize its astounding literary quality.

I procrastinated, of course. Then one day I had a breakdown. The structure of my unreasonable life gave out and the ever-deepening hole caved in on me. I quit one job, and took a leave of absence from another. I was emotionally broken, exhausted, and suffering from serious health problems. At last I had time to illustrate. If you looked closely at the lines of my drawing you would see a trembling hand, an effect of a middling fever and strong medications. Designing the art for a small press book by an unknown Belgian writer is not the most consequential thing a person can do, but it was everything to me.
…

Kittens in the Boiler
by Delphine Lecompte
[amazon]