Content: Arthur/TMWTPF, Child abuse, Emotional abuse, Death

Arthur sits across from the man with the painted face at the cluttered table. A newspaper is spread out between them, all its pages chewed through with scissor cuts. Shreds of clippings litter the floor. As Arthur turns each page, a grey curtain casts him in shadow and back into light again. He stops when he finds the obituaries and they both lean forward, coming so close to one another that Arthur can smell paint.

"There are some really long ones today," Arthur says, running a finger down boxed rows of tiny print. "Why do you think that is? That there are some really long ones and some really short ones?"

"The short ones are probably for people nobody liked, and the long ones are everyone lying about how great the dead guy was."

Arthur nods. It makes sense.

The obituaries look the same as they always have - uniform blocks of text, bolded names above lifespans described in two dates, a few coin-sized photographs, the smudge of chalky ink. And always the same words rearranged: veteran, husband, grandmother, son. Passed away, taken too soon, survived by. Kind, doting, smiled, laughed. Lived, died. Loved.

"Look at this one." The man with the painted face points out the dates atop a ladder of grieving words. "He was four. Do you think he drowned in a tub? Do you think he fell off a building? Do you think a dog got him? Do you think-"

"I wrote an obituary once," Arthur interrupts.

"Yeah, we wrote yours together. I liked it."

Arthur shakes his head. "No, a different one. I helped mom write hers when I was just a kid." The memory ignites an uneasy sense of pride deep inside himself. He reaches beneath the newspaper and pulls out his cigarettes, sliding one from the pack with his lips.

"How was it? Was it as good as ours?"

"I dunno," Arthur flicks his lighter, "it was a really long time ago." He does know that there was a different room, and a long-gone couch, back before his feet touched the floor when he sat. He and his mother would sit together in front of a sunny, open window. The sheer curtain had a single stain on it; he remembers its blossoming shape and the way it appeared and disappeared behind his mother's head. Everything was bright and billowing around her shadowed face.

"She asked me what I loved about her so she could make a list," he explains. "We were going to go through it and pick out the best ones. The things that would make everyone miss her most. But when I started, she didn't like any of them. She'd write them down and then cross them out." He scratches dark Xs over newsprint, blocking out words indiscriminately. "Her long hair, how nicely she dresses, her eyes, her laugh... It kept going like that for a while."

His vision narrows and he sees the window again, now a dim scene oddly framed, like a television has been rotated to perch on its corner. A gnat cloud of static obscures the picture; the sound is scarred and skipping.

"You only love me because I'm pretty," she snarls, "I'm just thing to fuck. You dont care about who I am and what I do for you. I do everything for you. When I'm gone you'll see." Her voice lowers, hoarsens, churns like gravel underfoot. "When I'm dead you'll see. When you find my rotting body on the floor you'll see."

A deep tremor grinds through the bones of Arthur's fingers, bringing him back to the room with the open paper and the body with a pen in its hand. The man with the painted face has grabbed his wrist and gouged an X so crude and deep that its streaked ink into the table.

"I wanna hear the rest of the story."

"She told me that everyone should be loved for who they are inside, not the way they look," Arthur finishes. "The end."

The man with the painted face claps his hands together gleefully. "And that's why a handsome guy like you can't get laid, right? Everyone looks past your beautiful face and sees your ugly insides."

His cackle is shrill and piercing, and Arthur worries that his mother will wake up, worries that he'll hear the sound of her footsteps stalking toward him at a pace he knows she can no longer manage. "Shut up," he hisses through his own painfully stifled laughter. "That's not funny."

"Sure it is. Write it down. Tell it to your doctor. She'll laugh."

Arthur begins to smooth out the tears and wrinkles in the now mangled paper. "I'll have to make another one for her someday. But she's a lot different now than she was then. I don't need to remember that stuff."

"She can't read it if she's dead. Why waste your time?"

Arthur's thumb runs over a single phrase - familiar in its sterility: Loving mother.' "I don't think these are written for the dead person. They're for everyone who's still alive, to help them feel less guilty about the secrets they kept."

"So you're gonna lie to everyone in the city and keep all the secrets to yourself?"

Arthur shrugs.

The man with the painted face looks at him with razored eyes, in a way that makes him feel two dimensional. "You'll feel guilty when she's dead. You'll feel guilty that you never told her how fucked up you really are. Maybe you'll even feel guilty that you didn't kill her yourself."

Arthur sucks down laughter, then the rest of his cigarette. "Sure."