PATHÉTIQUE

Or the story of Anna, a new associate registrar at a prestigious art museum. The job is a dream come true for Anna, but she is unprepared for the intense, highly professionalized workplace she finds herself in.

The salary is barely enough to live on, but she feels obligated to buy expensive clothes to match the wardrobes of the other women she works with.

Anna’s boss Theresa continuously talks about Anna’s predecessor:

Meg—she just got really burnt out.

Theresa repeats how Meg overhauled the entire collection’s database—with a rebuilt taxonomy and metadata structure—that improved searchability and compliance frameworks across the entire collection.

But Meg had to take two weeks’ vacation—

right in the middle of a major exhibition installation

(remember how you were both wiping down windows in the minutes before the preview cocktail reception for major donors?)

And Anna is drawn into learning more about Meg to learn about Theresa,

and Anna and Theresa develop a friendship that becomes so intense
that they are often mistaken for one another
and share a mystical unity of identity and purpose.

And when Anna, falsely accused of damaging a rare, 15th century woodblock print,
is ferociously defended by Theresa,
it’s Theresa who gets fired by the chief registrar as a result.

Later, Anna, who now has Theresa’s job, contracts leprosy—

and is told in a vision that her only cure lies in being bathed in the blood of Theresa’s children.

And in a moment of ultimate sacrifice,

Theresa slays her own sons to save her friend,

only to find

that the children are miraculously restored to life.

Dan Magers' poetry book Partyknife (Birds, LLC) is described by musician Thurston Moore “as if poet-ghost adrift thru dressing rooms backstage taking notes…Writing poems like these is just as good as starting a band.” His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Vice, The Notre Dame Review, Hyperallergic, and the PEN America blog, among other places. He lives in Chicago.