Random stories

The world inside the painting is rainbow-bright, like a child’s memory of a happy day. The sky is a wide palm-smudge of blue, hazing to yellow near the sun. There‘s a single windmill that looks like a stubby toe with an X painted onto the nail, slowly spinning. To its side, a river runs in ribbons of blues and greens and looks, to me, like a nest of exotic snakes. There are people here — a stick-boy (the best I could manage) runs in and out of the stream, feet throwing up big teardrops of water. A stick-woman sits on the edge watching him while cooling her feet.

I feel guilty I couldn’t bring them more to life than this. I try to do a good job but it always ends up like an exaggeration, a caricature of what I intend to create.

I’ve been painting for three weeks now. I paint straight onto the plasterboard-wall of my bedroom, producing mockeries of frescoes. The therapist said painting might help with how I’ve been feeling lately. Lately being the last few years.

“But what should I paint?” I said.

”Whatever you feel like painting.”

Therapists can be like that. Vague. That way, if anything works, helps, then they can take credit. And if it doesn’t work, no problem because they didn’t intend you to do it that way.

Or maybe I’m being unfair.

The truth is, neither me nor my therapist figured I’d be able to walk inside the paintings — a secret I’ve kept to myself. I was just meant to communicate how I’d been feeling onto a canvas, I guess. But I can create a living world with my art — restricted only by my limited talent and skill. So here I am on a sunny day during what I intended to be a September afternoon. The sky holds a warped lemon for a sun and, nearing it, is a faded moon. They’re heading for an eclipse.

I sit by the stick woman, the stripes of grass rough against my skin. It’s like sitting on waves of plastic. The woman glances at me — she has big eyes and a bigger smile, unwavering — then returns to watching her stick-child splash in the ribbons of water.

”Nice day,” I say. “Beautiful, even.”

She nods.

We’re silent together for a while. A kind of content silence you’re nervous to disturb, but you know must break soon. It’s like the surface of a pond waiting to be rippled by coming rain.

It’s the first time I’ve drawn this scene but I’ve been building up to it since I started. Here, it’s just hours before the eclipse.

“He’d tell you how much he loves you, if he had a better painted mouth,” I say, watching the stick-version of myself enjoy the water. I try to laugh but it’s half-hearted.

The woman nods. Smiles, of course.

”It kills him, you know, to not have been able to tell you. He just didn’t think you’d be gone like that. So suddenly.“

I’m glad my face isn’t made of paint or it’d smudge as I wipe arm arm over it.

The boy runs up to us, his wet stick-feet changing the hue of the grass, darkening it behind him like there‘s a ghost footstepping after him. He waves at me. I wave back. Then he sits by his mom’s side, his head lolled onto her shoulder. They gaze vacantly at the windmill and the yellow hills beyond.

”My therapist said it’d help,” I explain. “Paintings. I figured, maybe, if I could come back here… I don’t know. I figured I might change something. But none of this is real is it? It’s just a painting. And I don’t think even the best painter could breathe actual life into their work.“ I laugh. “God knows I never had a talent for art, right?”

The woman looks at me then. She doesn’t say anything at all but she looks suddenly sad even through that smile. I wish I could say why I think this. Then she taps her chest twice.

I frown. “I don’t understand.”

She taps again. Then she and the boy get up and head towards the windmill. The boy waves a final time, looking back over his shoulder.

The moon paces forward, the day darkens just a little.

They’ll go home now. She’ll tuck the boy in soon. Read him a story. Then she’ll go to bed and never get up again. The boy will find her the next day.

I sit on the grassy bank and watch them leave, my whole body shivering — although there is no cold here. Just the crisp chugging sound of the paper-crumpled river.

What more can I do here? I leave the painting before the dark consumes the world and step back into my apartment. Into the emptiness of my real life.

How can any therapist think this could help? All I’ve been doing is opening old wounds. Picking at stitching that should have been left alone. The past isn’t something that can be changed.

I sit on the bed a while and stare at the painted wall. The stick figures are back by the water, the moon far away from the sun again. Just a painting.

For a while I do nothing but stare vacantly at it, trying not remember, but not thinking of the future either. It’s strange, looking at this scene, but I don’t really see it how I painted it. I see the morning after. The weeks and months and years after. Not the scene itself.

I can’t say why I grab the paint bucket, but I do. I slosh layers of white over the drawing, drowning it out.

I think of the woman tapping her chest.

I imagine what she would have said if she’d been real. Something about painting from inside. About how wounds need air to truly heal.

I dip the brush into the bucket and face a different wall, as yet unmarked.

I close my eyes, concentrate on my chest, everything inside of it, and begin to paint. I paint slowly at first, uncertain of what it is I’m even painting — then broader, longer strokes as I become more confident.

I hear her, as I work. She’s behind me, she tells me I’m doing great. That she’s proud. That I shouldn’t open my eyes, that I need to paint out everything from inside me. My paint strokes make no sense — my arm is a weathervane caught in a storm, firm directions lost, but every stroke is straight from inside me and onto the wall. And in this way I feel something is leaving me.

Eventually, when I think I’m finished, I step back and open my eyes.

The wall is an impossible, senseless mess.

And yet somehow I recognise it.

It‘s everything I couldn’t say to her and it’s everything she would have said to me. It’s my life since. It’s my life going forward. It’s not a painting I need step into, but one I need to step out of.

I collapse on the bed and weep into my hands, as a cool spring breeze ripples across the room.

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Submitted by Rupertfroggington on Tue, Mar 29, 2022 to /r/WritingPrompts/

The prompt

You're having a quarter-life crisis when you decide to try and pick up landscape painting. That's when you discover that your paintings are portals to the actual places in the painting. Too bad you're on the skill level of a toddler.