Instructions for a Broken Heart by Kim Culbertson Read Free Book Online

one. Act like it, please.”
    “Um, why can’t we take pictures?” Cruella again. Tyler widened his eyes and made a low gagging noise. Francesca explained about the delicate artwork, the respect for the space. Cruella adjusted the huge sunglasses atop her head, then parked her hands on her hips over the two twists of gold cord she wore wound around her waist. Belts? A noose should she need one? Jessa wasn’t sure.
    “They shouldn’t show it to us if we can’t take pictures of it.” Her voice rang out over their heads like a living, breathing thing of its own, a specter.
    Jessa felt her group shift, send out a bubble of space between them and the other school. Tim whispered something to Devon, who started to laugh.
    Cruella’s eyes swiveled his direction. “Is something funny?”
    Silence from Tim and Devon, eyes on the floor.
    Cruella’s eyes narrowed. She waited.
    Drop it. Drop it. Jessa waited for her teachers to say something. Mr. Campbell glanced at Ms. Jackson, who was chewing her lip. Jessa watched Cruella from under her lashes.
    “Ready, please.” Saved by the frog. Francesca waved the students one by one into the chapel, the frog giving a quick little nod on the end of the stick each time one passed. Mr. Campbell shook his head at Tim, who shrugged, sheepish, and then Jessa stepped inside.
    ***
    The flayed skin on the mural followed Jessa with its hollowed out eyes. The Sistine Chapel was actually much smaller than she’d thought it would be—dramatic and haunting but smaller. She couldn’t seem to escape that image of the flayed skin. Turning her back on it, she scanned the pages of her Italy book, tried to look somewhere else, at the South Wall with its crossing of the Red Sea, the ceiling arching with the events of man before Christ. The North Wall, the temptations of Christ in broad, rich colors. Michelangelo had painted his soul into these walls with each brushstroke; the emotion, the vision, seeped through them, permeated the air. The silence. Around her, coats rustled against each other; shoes shushed along the floor. Somewhere a guard said, “Shhh,” though Jessa hadn’t heard anyone say anything.
    She could feel the skin watching her. Her eyes slipped back to it.
    Behind the altar, Michelangelo had painted The Last Judgment . Francesca had said the work showcased his maturity, as he’d been in his sixties when he finished it. Jessa’s eyes fell on the powerful central figure of Christ, one hand allowing the rising figures to ascend, the other keeping those souls down who would not rise. Two times Michelangelo’s self-portrait appeared in the Sistine Chapel. Once in a small figure watching the souls try to rise from the grave, and the other in the flayed skin that St. Bartholomew held like a sack of dirty laundry, a screaming sack.
    Jessa felt suddenly cold, felt the grip of the saint at her neck, stripped of bone, peeled from ligament and tissue, left an empty, gaping thing. Sweat collected on her upper lip. There were too many people pressing in all around her. She hurried toward an exit.
    Outside, a breeze caught her, cooled her. The sky had gone gray with rain clouds, casting the world into a cool, blue light, and making the sweeping stone of St. Peter’s look like weathered bone.
    It had been raining the night of her first fight with Sean.
    One of those strange late-April rains that hit suddenly and soaked through your clothes. They had been waiting outside the movie theater, waiting for Carissa and her flavor-of-the-week boyfriend to show up so they could choose a movie.
    Sean had gotten mad at her because of the end of the year fund-raiser Scene and Be Seen. She and Carissa wanted to do a scene from The Women, but he wanted her to do a scene with him from A Streetcar Named Desire . She would suck as Blanche, and she didn’t want to do it, but he really, really wanted to play Stanley. Mostly, he wanted to scream a lot so people would think he was an amazing actor. Jessa said as