Breath and Bones by Susann Cokal

left in the lurch. Just be grateful it’s only a few
Kroner
you lack—thank God he didn’t leave you missing your monthlies.”
    Silently, Famke laid the money in the beer-stained palm.
    â€œI am right, am I not?” Fru Strand asked, hovering on the threshold. “He didn’t leave a bit behind, did he?”
    â€œNo,” Famke snapped, her hand on the doorknob. “He did not!”
    It was a pleasure to slam the rickety thing in Strand’s disappointed face. And to know she now had every right to stay until mid-May, if she wanted to.

    No, Albert had left precious little of himself behind. She had done his packing and knew very well that, except for the tinderbox he’d given her and the sketch he’d used to woo her, she’d been scrupulous about returning everything he’d ever touched or used. She had even returned the bits of costume he’d assembled for her to wear in some of his tableaux: Nimue’s filmy shift, Calafia’s tin sword and the shield she’d used to hide her missing breast, the shiny tears shed by the love goddess Freya when her husband lost himself among the nine Norse worlds. Freya had wept liquid gold; all Famke had had were a handful of spangles she’d stuck on with Albert’s pomade, and even those were now rattling in one of his trouser pockets.
    For the most part she avoided intercourse with the outside world. While she wasn’t with Albert, she would be alone; she would wait. But one day, drawn by curiosity as much as by the idea of making some money, Famke roused herself to visit the Royal Academy of Art. Her pulse fluttering with nervous excitement, she presented herself as a professional model, and as it happened one of the life-drawing classes needed a girl that very day. Famke disrobed and sat as the instructor told her to do, with her knees pulled to her chest and head bowed, her neck and spine exposed. It was a relatively easy pose. When the students filed in she peeked around a kneecap and searched their faces eagerly: Perhaps, she thought, there would be another Albert among them—not a replacement, for no one could replace him, but someone with the same sort of vision. Maybe several such someones.
    But it was not to be. The boys, a few of them younger than herself, darted quick, dispassionate glances at her, saving their true focus for their sketchpads. Of course, she thought as she shifted her pose after the first fifteen minutes, Albert had parceled out their time together in much the same way. But even when one of his artistic fevers took him, he had reflected her back at herself in that form she found so appealing.
    She had expected that Albert must have been that way as a student as well. But he was nothing like these pimply-faced boys with their noses to the drawing boards, their bodies slouching almost as if the task at hand bored them. Albert must always have been different.
    When she strolled among these students at break time, Famke realizedthe difference was that he
wanted
more than these boys—more detail, more beauty, more of the world. She felt less exposed now than she ever had been with him, and she was the one getting bored. All she saw on the students’ sheets was a collection of body parts, arms and legs and ribs and, occasionally, a cloudy rendering of her area Down There. In these sketches she was just a woman.
    The
Kroner
she was given for posing were as negligible as the artworks; she spent them on the way home, buying an orphan’s treasure of licorice and chocolate, most of which went stale before she had a chance to taste it.
    So Famke stayed in Albert’s studio—now reverted to a garret, and a murky one at that—and spent her days in silent meditation. She ate little but didn’t seem to feel hungry. She rubbed the tinderbox, thinking sometimes of her days at the orphanage, sometimes of the farm in Dragør, but most constantly of Albert and those few happy