Ghosts of Corel Clipart

WILDER1.BMF: A color portrait of Douglas Wilder, who served as Virginia’s 66th governor from 1990 to 1994. Named after the great 19th century abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Wilder was not just the first African-American governor of Virginia, he was the first elected African-American governor of any state since Reconstruction. Do the math. 113 years between Reconstruction and Wilder. A century and change. Or little change, as the case may be. There have been only three black state governors in the three decades since Wilder.

SIGN15.BMF: A triangular hazard sign, cautioning passersby of impending pyrotechnics. Such signs are posted all over “The Pit,” the sub-sub-basement of ParaMorTorque, Inc.’s Evanston facility. Here pyrotechnicians and demolition experts hone their mastery of heat, light, gas, smoke, sound, and other byproducts of exothermic thaumaturgical reactions. They are overseen by a tall figure in swirling robes who occasionally fine-tunes their work with subtle but rapid hand gestures.

MYANMA_T.BMF: An outline map of Myanmar, though Rod occasionally calls the country Burma in casual conversations with the men in his employ. When he talks with his contacts in Mandalay, Rod has to be careful which name he uses. It says a great deal about someone, the name they prefer their country be called.

TAXESI.BMF: A black and white line drawing in the style of a political cartoon. It shows a swimming pool labeled IRS that is really a monster with its mouth open. A line of people with dollar signs on their shirts jump into the pool/mouth from a diving board. If you find this image distasteful, please file 37-5 Updated Form 1040 Section 01 IPU 22U0009 issued 01-03-2022 IRM 3.24.37.3.3.

BUFFALO.BMF: A full illustration of an American bison, identifiable by the distinctive shaggy hump on its shoulders.

MANWIBM.BMF: A white man in a button-down white dress shirt and red tie, sitting down and leaning on an IBM personal desktop computer. This is basically Mattie’s dad. And also the dads of all her junior high friends. They told you back then this is what you had to look like to work with computers. Straight, white, male, IBM dress-coded, smooth, slick, and confident. Mattie gleefully deletes the pic. She checks like maybe one of those boxes, and computers are her fucking life. Her fucking lifeline.

MACAW.BMF: A scarlet macaw perched on a tree branch. The gloriously colored parrot has a red hood and red back, with blue, yellow, and green plumage. Rod once tried keeping a macaw aboard our ship, but the parrot refused to learn any words, and besides, Rod was no pirate. He was just a plain old thief.

F16DTLTP.BMF: A grayscale top-down view of an F16 fighter jet. Each “Fighting Falcon” costs the U.S. Air Force a mere $14 million dollars, a bargain considering how hard they are too lose. Unlike, the general thinks, Admiral Groat’s little underwater boats.

OSQUASH.BMF: A winter squash, shaded in green, yellow, and orange. Ann’s eyes are drawn to the scattering of bumps over the squash’s hard shell. They look like warts, or cysts. She resists reaching out to touch them, but only barely.

JESUSCRO.BMF: Jesus Christ crucified on the cross, blood trailing from the nail wounds in his hands. Long story, but on a trip to Moscow in 1990, Samantha saw a Russian production of “Jesus Christ Superstar”—“Иисус Христос-Суперзвезда.” It was the tail end of the Soviet Union. Glasnost was in the air. Years later, when asked by the prison psychologist about the trip, Samantha said she only remembered two things. One, waiting in line for hours at McDonalds. And two, Jesus was fucking hot. Up there half naked on the cross, his six pack glistened under the stage lights. When he gasped at the end, “Father, into your hands, I commend my spirit,” his abs rippled like a snake in motion. All Samantha could think was, Jesus Fucking Christ, commend yourself in my hands.

JAMAICAN.BMF: A color illustration of a dreadlocked Jamaican man playing a steel drum. The man is smiling and barefoot. The clipart is the work of Phil at Totem Graphics, a small graphics design firm that licensed its IP to Corel in the 1990s. Phil, it is safe to say, has never been to Jamaica, much less met a Jamaican. Phil did see Ziggy Marley in concert once—a packaged tour with Midnight Oil and Hothouse Flowers also on the bill. Any insights about race, music, and stereotypes that Phil might have gained from the concert escaped him, however, as he was too preoccupied trying to impress his date by dancing like The Oils’ frontman Peter Garrett. He’s so fucking huge, Phil told her. He’s so fucking white, his date thought. (It didn’t work out and Phil remained, until his disappearance several years later, single.)

HELCOPT2.BMF: A medevac helicopter in mid-flight, rushing toward the trauma center at 120 miles per hour. The medics didn’t know what to make of the patient’s injuries but they sure as hell knew the local podunk hospital couldn’t handle them. The patient’s left leg was covered in a sticky black tar up to his thigh. He was writhing in an agony that seemed disproportionate to the situation—seemed disproportionate, that is, until one medic tried to dab the black goo off his leg and discovered that under the goo his leg was essentially liquified. There was no flesh or muscle, not even bones, just a red slurry sluicing around his leg like raspberry vinaigrette in a sausage casing.

AFDAN.BMF: An illustration of an African man dancing. He’s wearing a traditional African mask and tribal garments. Or at least Phil hopes he is. Phil only started working at Totem Graphics 5 weeks ago, and they dumped a huge pile of clipart requests on him that they gotta ship to Corel stat. An air horn. A crumpet. And “African Dance.” Truth is, Phil knows fuck all about African dance. Encarta is little help. So Phil is just making this shit up, cribbed from half forgotten memories of his grandmother’s National Geographics, rows and rows of them on bookshelves in her basement, the faded yellow spines standing up like skinny little anthropologists.

LITHAR.BMF: The coat of arms of Lithuania, showing a knight mounted on horseback with a sword in one hand and a shield in the other. Lithuania adopted the blazon in the 15th century, making it one of Europe’s oldest coats of arms. The original meaning of the knight has been lost to time. Mounted knights on heraldry traditionally symbolized the state’s right to defend itself. Yet the name for the knight depicted on the coat of arms—Vytis—has its origins in the Lithuanian word for chase, or pursue, suggesting an offensive motive on the knight’s part. How can the knight be both defensive and offensive? How can one thing mean two opposing things? I guess you could say the knight is nonplussed.

SYMB513.BMF: A picture of a thing—you can’t think of the name just yet. (the hum of the fluorescent lights overhead is distracting) It has three triangles. What kind, the man across from you asks. What, you reply? What kind of triangles, he asks. (the smell of disinfectant hangs in the air, chlorine and lemon) Scalene, you say. He moves to press a button. No, wait—you’re shouting—isosceles. Isosceles, that’s what they are. Three isosceles triangles, the long side of all three lined up with each other. The thing is called a, a, a—damn, the word is escaping you. But you know it does (the fluorescents) something where it, what’s it called, rests (the whine of the fluorescents) on the water without (flickering fluorescents) sinking. The man across from you writes something down. He looks up, studying you again. Those things, you say, wanting desperately to please him, those things are called something. There’s a hole in your mind where the word is. (humming and whining the fluorescents are vibrating the chlorine) The man looks at you sadly. (lemon humming whining bleach) He presses the button.

BURN_OUT.BMF: A cartoon of a man in a suit whose head is a giant candle on its side with a burning wick on either end. Get it?

CROSS04.BMF: A black cross on a white background. The ends of each crossbar have serifs, so that the cross resembles two Times Roman capital I letters intersecting each other. I tried explaining serifs and glyphs and kerning to my grandson but he wasn’t interested. We stared at the gravestone upon which the cross was engraved. The grave itself was empty, and deep.