Still Life

by Emma Hine

It was not a very small goat. Its ears turned delicately to its own tapping across the tiles and its creased nose smudged the frames of the larger paintings. It stayed often with Modigliani, looked up at the sad women draped thinly on the walls. When it slept, it arranged its bony knees around it in a wreath and sank its nose in the tufted balloon of its belly. It never hurt anything, except once when it took the title Nostalgia in Blue from a kitchen scene of a mother pouring milk and laid it, with careful teeth, below a study of irises. Perhaps that was its idea of a joke. It walked, scratchy and brown, though the wide galleries and the long, empty halls. It got cold. It turned its back on Degas’ quiet ballerina and breathed along with the saints. It blinked with horizontal pupils at its own reflection in the marble floor, but it did not know itself and walked across its own glassy yellow eyes. In one hall there was a painting of a goat hanged with a rope; the soft v of its neck strained against the canvas.