by M.C. Schmidt

They want me to be a fifteenth century painter. Just because I shared a crypt with that scoundrel, though, doesn’t make me him.  

‘Crypt’ was the clergy’s term. To those of us entombed there, it was only a pit where the unclean dead were lowered and forgotten. Our intermingled bones told a century’s history of heretics and fornicators, paupers and debtors and thieves in one sun-starved pile. At the time we were tossed in—first the painter, and then I, a few years after him—the crypt was a feature of the most ornate church in a rich and powerful city. Five centuries on, the church is a ruin, the city survives only with tourist dollars, and what little remains of me is in a laboratory being tested for DNA. There are other bones alongside me. Some of them are the painter’s true remains. All they have of me, though, is a clavicle. 

In his lifetime, the painter was a scourge on the prostitutes he would hire for modeling and sodomy. He bought women and boys with money paid to him by the Vatican for his depictions of the Virgin. It eludes me why they are so keen to find him. Will they stitch together his bones and enchant them so that they might create new masterworks? Does his fame make his remains precious things, while ours are merely the detritus that obscures them? In the eyes of history, I suppose that is so. 

Giulia is the lab tech who scrapes and cores and studies me. Even through her protective gloves, I know her by her touch, the intimacies of her life, just the way I knew the sins of everyone in that crypt. Just the way I learned about the painter. I understand the processes she puts me through—sectioning and image processing and high-throughput sampling. I find it heartening, as the father of daughters, to experience Giulia’s accomplishments. No woman of my time received higher education, of course, but we were not as discriminatory as our fathers. Our women could become artisans and work in tradecrafts, and I do not know what all; I was never one for politics. I simply wanted the best lives for my daughters, and for this reason, Giulia means something to me. 

In girlhood, Giulia was a thief—visiting shops and secreting trinkets up her sleeve or in the folds of her skirt. The trinkets had no value, but she delighted in taking them. They provided her an impression of connectedness whenever she fell into her lonely spells. It is a habit she returns to from time to time, mostly during periods of trouble with Marco, when wine is not enough to sooth her. One should not steal, of course. Not trinkets, anyway, not more than what is essential to survive the hardship of a rich man’s world. Still, I feel a warmth for her.  

She has been working with me for days, but today will be our last. The results of my DNA tests are laying on her workstation. She has not been moved yet to look at them. She is distracted, I know, from another fight with Marco. It was the one she had been dreading, the one where she finally voiced all the things that she knew would make him leave. She is regretful today, even though she meant every word.  

I wait on the counter where she has laid me. In my test results she will see that I am not a match to the painter’s offspring. There is a room in the lab for others like me who have failed their testing. We will be returned to the crypt or, I suspect, burned together, and that will be the end. The painter’s true remains will be presented to his hometown government—their famous son returned to them in a gilt box. Nothing has changed in all these years, you see: the world is still built for scoundrels. 

In time, Giulia brings my results to where she can read them. She lifts and closes her fingers around me in her palm as she studies the data. Her grip tightens and slackens, and she knows. She rolls back her stool from her workstation, and then stands and studies me—one old, gray, and broken clavicle. Her mind is blank, but when I drop into the pocket of her lab coat, I feel her rush of intoxication at having me, and in that moment, our connection is true. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

M.C. Schmidt's recent short fiction has appeared in EVENT, Spectrum Literary Journal, X-R-A-Y, Nonbinary Review, BULL, and elsewhere. He is the author of the novel, The Decadents (Library Tales Publishing, 2022).

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Reporter photographic and visual artist, Guilherme Bergamini is Brazilian and graduated in Journalism. For more than two decades, he has developed projects with photography and the various narrative possibilities that art offers. The works of the artist dialogue between memory and social political criticism. He believes in photography as the aesthetic potential and transforming agent of society. Awarded in national and international competitions, Guilherme Bergamini participated in collective exhibitions in 52 countries.