For the cherry of her lips, for her refusal to cover new breasts reaching out, her stepmother will banish her. For the slit of her cloak revealing the bend of her body, the split of her. For her father’s tangled yearnings. For the drip-drip-drip of her presence, though slight as young birch before stripped of its curled bark. White as the deer also shunned by its herd. A pin-prick of blood drops to the ground. In a year, the young woman will birth a child with the head of a doe, red flowers for eyes, a hunger for being alone.

*Spring (La Primavera) is a Symbolist painting (oil on canvas, 1910-13), of the Russian dancer and actress Ida Rubinstein (1883-1960), by Romaine Brooks (1874-1970), who was born in North America but lived most of her life in Paris. The painting is held in a private collection, and the image above was downloaded from Obelisk:
https://www.arthistoryproject.com/artists/romaine-brooks/spring-la-primavera/

For more about the artist, see “The World Is Finally Ready to Understand Romaine Brooks” by Roger Catlin, Museums Correspondent, in Smithsonian Magazine (8 July 2016):
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/its-time-acknowledge-romaine-brooks-early-20th-century-artist-180959725/

A detailed biography appears at Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romaine_Brooks

(Links above were retrieved on 7 January 2024.)

Mikki Aronoff’s

work appears in 100 word story, Atlas and Alice, Bending Genres, Gone Lawn, HAD, jmww, New World Writing, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Milk Candy Review, Mslexia, The Citron Review, The Disappointed Housewife, The Dribble Drabble Review, The Offing, Tiny Molecules, trampset, and elsewhere. She’s received nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Best American Short Stories, and Best Microfiction.