7.15: SHOULDER from BODY 32 discovered outside of Albany. Police called. Crime scene erected. Sculpture revealed when coroner arrived, who is now v. familiar with my work. He says the county is going to sue for wasting their resources. I told him to go ahead and that he would be embarrassed to learn how many more parts are waiting undiscovered.

8.30: LEFT FOOT from BODY 12 discovered in Taghkanic farmhouse by elderly widow. She knew immediately that it was fake. I’m not sure how. Age, I guess. She drove it over here and dropped it off. Kind of a letdown.

9.11: FINGER from BODY 38 found at bottom of dumpster at Montessori farm school by janitor. Very satisfying: school shut down for a day. Coroner called again, extremely angry, I taped our conversation, so much authority and rage in his voice. Upsetting. I tried to explain about the Calusa—the Native Americans in Florida who buried their dead wherever they fell down—but he wasn’t interested in discussing anthropology.

It became clear to me that her notes were intended to be read by the other members of Pine City, especially when it came to her feelings on a critic, curator, gallery, or museum; like everyone else, she was keeping score—except she had four people to leverage in any given situation.

“E&S are hesitating, I can hear it in their voices,” she wrote. “I think they need to be encouraged—Tyler and Jack, can you say something to JR about a studio visit, Marlin and Jes, can you say something to Donna, too, and let it slip to people?”

On another occasion, over a formal dinner that Eliot&Sprain wanted her to host in Miami:

Charles is asking me to host a dinner. I’ll insist we commission Jack for the table and Jes for the sound.

I reached for YOKEFELLOWS, nearly falling off the ladder as I did. For a dazzling instant my guilt gave way to a wild freedom, a sisterhood, a sense of being in the right place at the right time.

YOKEFELLOWS:

to yoke me as his yokefellow, our crimes our common cause

YOKEFELLOWS bodies will be Pine City’s bodies: Tyler, Jes, Jack, Marlin, and Carey, tangled together, in progressive stages of decay.

The bodies weren’t identified when I saw the show—in any of the text or any of the materials. I went cold, thinking about it, that I had seen what Tyler’s body would look like when it died. That I knew already what it would look like. And worse—that he had seen Carey’s fake dead body in the show—and then Carey’s real dead body, later.

What followed the initial idea were notations: on molds, casts, temperatures, firings, glazings, the usual. I read and read until I got to a page that only read

6.01: There’s a dagger line across T6 calf