To Reveal Art

Aliens and Anarchists Pt.8

The banalities of the rest of the day carried me into the evening. The conversation at dinner was polite but notably shallow. Everyone was friendly, but I could tell that there was something they were all desperate to say but could not. I felt as though there was some terrible pressure in the room that my mere presence was holding back. At this, I could do nothing but shrug. I was a newcomer after all and was still an intruder in all of their personal affairs. Though I felt some apprehension about going back to the rooftop garden, such feelings turned out to be misplaced. The strange light did not return, and I was free to work on the raised beds and stare at the sky. It felt good to be alone with the plants, relieved of the pressures to conform to the identity thrust upon me by the commune. Eventually, when I had seen enough clouds for the day, I made my way back to my room to get ready for bed.

               When I unlocked the door to my room, I was immediately unsettled. Something within felt off. I thought about retreating somewhere but could think of nowhere to go. At best, they would think that I was being crazy; at worst they were involved somehow. I scurried to the kitchen and grabbed a knife. Brandishing it in my shaky grasp, I turned from room to room and found nothing out of the ordinary. Once I had scoured every closet and checked under my bed, I locked the front door and returned the knife to the kitchen. It was then that I realized the source of the disturbance. I had left my painting on the kitchen table like so much junk mail. I stared at it and the clumsy streaks of paint that composed it. In that moment, I felt something more in it. There was something preternaturally real about it, but I couldn’t place what. I put the knife down next to the painting and sat to stare at it. My eyes flicked from detail to detail. Every individual thing about if from the coloration to the shape to the simple application of the paint was comically bad, but behind it all there was something that drew me in. I touched the painting with my hand and, of course, I was not magically transported to the Selene, so I allowed my imagination to suffice. I sat for several minutes and just thought about the river. With my eyes closed, I felt the water rushing about my feet as Lucille had. I could hear the gentle sound of its motion. I could almost see the moonlight reflecting off of its surface. I filled with a placidity that masked a great profundity, yet to be revealed. When I returned to my material senses, I got up an made myself ready for bed.

               In the moonlight, I was standing on the banks of the Selene. I looked out over the sleepy landscape and was met with silence and stillness save only for the river and her gentle susurrations. The whole city was safely swaddled in its collective bedclothes. I carried my easel out into the waters and set it up. The water glided on towards me as I looked in the direction of the bridge. The deep shadow beneath it cleft an abyss between the shimmering of the silver waters. When the clouds moved, this boundary dazzled with a life of its own. I sighed a little a sigh and drew forth a long brush from my pocket. I bent down and dipped it into the waters of the river and began to work on my painting-to-be. With each brushstroke, the canvas began to disappear and eventually so did the easel behind it. I worked away and gradually revealed more and more of the river. When about half of the work was complete, I was painting away at odd angles of beige that hung in the air disconnected from any other chunk of material. It was then that I felt eyes on me from somewhere.

               There was a flicker of light in the water. It was warm and orange, dispelling the silvery spell of the moon. It danced with a clear vitality and a touch of longing. I began to panic, fearing eyes all around me, but in a flash of insight composed myself. It was probably just Lucille coming to check on me. She had been quite eager to see how my work was progressing. I continued at my task, awaiting her arrival. She was approaching much more slowly than I had expected. Perhaps she was politely waiting for my invitation. When I again took a pause, I looked over my shoulder. I knew that she was still there. The weight of the gaze was still present, so present, in fact, that I was looking directly into its source. The woman was not Lucille.

               Tenebrous eyes dragged me into their core. I wanted to scream but found that I could not. She also said nothing. When the paralysis of the initial shock wore off, leaving cold fear in its wake, I was able to break her gaze. She was a slender darkhaired woman. In her left hand, she held a candle. She was wearing a dated looking white nightgown. She was about six inches away from me. I should have been able to feel her breath on the back of my neck. There was something unusual about her mouth, but I couldn’t figure out exactly what it was. Slowly, she raised up her right hand and pressed it to my face. Though it felt like the motion took an eternity, I hadn’t a moment to react. Her skin was soaking wet, more like a wet rag than a human hand. Again, the urge to scream rose in my lungs but found no release. I was drowning in my terror now. Gradually, her sopping grasp began to pry open my mouth. I tried to resist, but her strength quickly grew overpowering. Jaw wrenched open, she reached in and pried my tongue from my mouth. The scream did not come with it. Next, she raised the candle in her left hand to my open mouth until the fire lapped at the underside of my tongue. Something shocked alive in the muscle. A spasm contorted my face in ecstatic agony.

               I was awake in my kitchen. In that moment, I relaxed the clenched grip in my hand. Down fell the canvas into the lit burner of the stove. I looked on in some unidentifiable emotion as my work began to burn away. My first reflex was to reach for it and pull it out of the flames. Something inside of me stayed my hand. Perhaps it was some leftover somnolent lethargy. In the next moment, I remembered myself and chucked the flaming mess into the sink. As a small concession to my dreams, I allowed it to burn out there of its own accord. I turned off the burner and replaced the guard that I had apparently removed. I deemed the smoking, half annihilated mess in the sink to be harmless and walked away. That was probably a suitable fate for my malformed creation anyway. It was then that I realized that there was something in the air besides the smell of smoke. Whatever strange energy had been trapped in the painting this evening had been dispersed into the air and was hiding behind the more blatant cloud of smoke. I had no idea what to do about this realization, however. What could I do? My imagination was rarely obedient to me. I simply resolved to go back to bed and leave strange business to take care of itself.         

               In the morning, I finally woke up with a hoarse cough and a bad streak of acne around my mouth. I spent the day hiding in my room reading some book I had bought years ago and never read. One lost day wasn’t going to ruin my painting career. I was going to leave that up to my complete lack of artistic talent. I recovered quickly and the days turned to weeks and the weeks to months. I grew accustomed to living in the commune and to my neighbors. Gradually, I came to feel like I belonged. I would even go so far as to call Lucille and Milton friends. The garden flourished under my care and to a much more modest extent, so did my art. At the very least, I felt as though I could paint better than the average middle schooler now. My dreams grew ever more vivid and offered cryptic half promises. The seasons continued in their way. By the time I found a part time job to work, I had no intention of leaving. There was a certain warmth to knowing all of your neighbors that I had lacked in life up to this point. Soon enough spring was on the horizon.