Brewery

It seemed as if everyone in our town welcomed Kay once she returned home. She had come back from New York City with a good attitude about the whole thing. Those supposed video collaborators simply did not have the will to push for the avant-garde sensibility Kay had so cherished during our school years, and if those video collaborators did not exist in New York City, where could an excitable young person, such as Kay, find work making the experimental videos she was known for in our department? This was the question asked by those of us who had followed her departure with an interest for our own ambitions. We who stayed behind and lapped up the everyday things she posted online. Did Kay realize how closely we had paid attention—to her selfies? To the photos of the skyline taken from rooftops? Her lunches and dinners? We also had dreamt of New York City’s artistic communities, and yes, we looked to Kay’s online profiles, seeking out the people she had met with the intention of snatching them up for ourselves if we were to ever follow in her footsteps. But her posts gave no indication that Kay had met anyone at all. “New York City no longer serves the young, artistic people that move into its neighborhoods, and those young, artistic people no longer wish to move into its neighborhoods anyway, so New York City has somehow failed those young, artistic people that reside in all of the other smaller, stunted cities around the world, ours included,” she told us one night. Could those older artists—that irremovable vanguard—be to blame as they entered into their retirements? Kay thought so, but we did not let her off easily, for we knew better. How unfortunate we found her failure. Every awful question we initially asked chipped away at her, eventually alerting her to her new problem. Now, she struggled to find work and interested collaborators back home. We stopped responding to her texts, forgot to send out invitations to openings, turned our backs away when she saw us at the bars. Even her old professors claimed they could not meet with her during their office hours. Eventually, Kay moved from our city out to the country, erasing all of her social media, cutting ties with us once and for all. Someone told me she gave up video work for painting, then gave up painting for farming, then took her own life when she could not figure out how to live off the land. When she was found, her cell phone lay on a deck table in her backyard. There was an email confirmation for a plane ticket to New York City and a video of her suicide: a brutal act of self-immolation near the field’s edge, surrounded by the wheat she had been attempting to grow. She had evidently set up the recording on her phone, then allowed its battery to run out. Someone suggested we show it—the video of Kay’s final work—at the evening memorial service that was being held at the brewery, so we did, the least we could do.