I haven't seen any Flash Fiction Fridays lately, so I thought to dig through the ones from years back and start over again. This was the first one I did in 2013 - pick one from 5 tables... it turned out more interesting this time than it did first time around.
enjoy.
The best way to see an art museum is after
the crowds have left the building and the doors are shut for the night. Yes,
the after-hours tours are always fun and more personal – more intense – than the
daytime ones where you’re forever trying to hear what the tour guide is saying
over the hubbub of the other people milling around the place.
It just doesn’t do the art and other work
justice either when you’re sharing personal space with them either... when you’re
breathing the same stale air as another person and want to reach a certain feeling
with a statue or painting and some stranger is mumbling some crap about it that
they’re ‘really not into it, because the artist wasn’t my first choice to study
at uni’. Or they’re on the phone talking, talking, talking.. or texting,
tweeting or commenting on Facebook, looking down instead of up and around for
five fucking minutes of their mundane lives!
Yes, the after-hours tour is well worth it –
even if it costs twice as much!
It takes you places you’d never thought
possible – like the basement of the place where there’s real art there sitting
amongst corridors of other art which will most probably never see the light of
day with massive sponges to pull up the moisture which would usually destroy
the work sitting in the darkness where the red-eyed mice live and the spiders
cringe in the corners of the corridors as you pass by with your torches
clutched in your hand, terrified that you might step on something in the dark.
But, then I saw it... the piece I had been
waiting for... the painting which I had only seen photos of in books – and owned
a huge print of in my bedroom.
It’s a painting by an obscure artist nobody
had heard of from the 1500’s who worked for Michelangelo for three weeks in
Florence before being fired for doing something minor and stupid and was sent
on his way. This artist did only one major painting in his life and this was
it: ‘The Love Triangle’.
In it is a gorgeous woman, who sits behind a
window of a house, dressed in something only a person of wealth would own.
However, as I stared at it, I found she wore a locket around her neck – her fingers
were touching the chain tentatively as she stared out at the artist from within
her – I don’t want to say prison – home, where if you looked hard enough, there
was everything in there a house of that time had. There was a large, stoic
fireplace, a bed, and a table where sat vegetables, a bowl of fruit and an urn
filled with what could only be ale or larger. Bunches of dried herbs lined the
walls and I spotted a man sitting at the table with a meal in front of him –
but he hadn’t touched it, he was looking over at her instead.
“Sir, I said don’t look at it too long. This
painting has pulled people into its hold before.” The guide told me firmly.
“I have a print of it at home... I’ll be
okay.”
“No. You don’t understand, we have lost
people on this tour because of how this painting affects them.” He took my arm
gently, “This way please, sir, I can’t stay here long. There is more to see.”
“Okay, sure... no probs.” I turned for a
last moment and took a last peek at her to see she was smiling at me through
the window, her hand on the glass of the
pane; when it wasn’t like that before.
My drive home was a blur, and I unlocked my
front door, flicked on the lights and found the print above my bed wasn’t
there. My guts hit the floor, as I wondered where it vanished to! Dropping my
backpack on the lounge I raced over to my bedroom and found it on my bed,
facing the ceiling, and I stopped a few feet away. How could it be positioned
like this when – if it had fallen off the wall – it would have been face down
on the bed. I climbed onto the bed, carefully picking it up to find she was
looking at me again... her hand on the pane of the glass, smiling at me.
“But, that’s the painting.” A whisper choked
from my throat before I dropped it back onto the bed and turned to break eye
contact with her to find her sitting at the window, her long dark lochs of hair
cascading down her back and the gown that eye-catching green velvet was so much
better up close than... but wait, what was she doing in my bedroom when I...? I
turned to see the man at the table looking over at her, then his eyes shifted
to me and I jumped, “Who? What’s going on?”
“Well, you’ve been pulled into this place
too.” His voice was edging on angry, “And she won’t let us go.” He stood and
walked around the table glaring at her back, “What was it for you? Her eyes?
Her hair? Or was it the locket?”
“I’ve always loved her as the person in the picture.”
I admitted, “But the locket has also been a mystery.”
Looking back at me, he snorted, “I’m sure
you have your ideas of trying to get out of here, and believe me, I’ve tried
everything to get out – and everything you do fails.”
“But we’re in the print of this.”
He shook his head, “No, we’re not. You came
back to the art museum and stole the painting and hung it up on your wall last
week; they don’t know you have it yet – or they won’t, not until you don’t show
up for work tomorrow.” The man smiled, “I have figured out one thing though.”
“And that is?”
“I have forgotten who I am. But I know I am
you... and you are me; because we both love her for the same thing.” He smiled,
“And at long last, I’ve figured out how to get out of this.” He pulled a brass
dagger from his belt, “And believe me, it’s not going to be pretty.”
I woke in the local hospital after
undergoing emergency surgery. My next door neighbour had heard my screams of
pain and called the police and ambulance and they found me next to the painting
with a knife sticking out of my guts and blood everywhere. The painting was
back up on the wall and when they rushed me out the door, I spotted her. She
wasn’t at the window anymore; no, she was sitting on the bed with her face in
her hands weeping.
It took me while to figure out what happened
to me, but I didn’t want to tell anyone about it – I mean, who in the hell
would believe me? So, I healed and went home to find the painting was still on
the wall of my bedroom and she was sitting on her bed still weeping.
I wondered if she thought I was dead or if
the other man escaping had broken her heart; in truth, I wasn’t sure. What I did have to do was call the art museum
and tell them what I had done – but really how could I tell them that I had
done it when I don’t remember doing it?
The curator came into my house with a few
other people and walked over to the painting. They did some tests on it and
confirmed that it was the original as she had returned to the window, looking
out with her hand on the chain of her locket.
“But how did you do this?” the curator
asked, “We have so much security around the basement and the art museum, I’m
still not sure how it works out that you did this.”
“Neither do I.” I shook my head, “If you don’t
take it away from here, I’ll do it again; and I’ll...” I looked at the painting
and motioned the curator away from it, outside into the hall outside my place, “...I’ll
get trapped in it again. And I’m worried she won’t let me go.”
At first I thought he didn’t believe me by
the look he gave me, then he nodded, “So the rumours are true. People are
getting pulled into her dimension through the window.”
“I’m not the first?”
“No, and the man in the picture who isn’t
there now is somebody who was trapped in there last time. He really didn’t like
her doing that as it destroyed a family.” He smiled, “Now, we have proof!”
“How?”
“You survived it!” he gripped my shoulder
smiling like an idiot, “We’ll take the painting away and you won’t be bothered
by it anymore.”
The security system was improved in Chicago
as I raced through the darkened galleries of sculptures and paintings and found
the doors to the basement, nearly fell down the stairs to where I could smell
the dankness of the sponges sucking up the moisture down here... where she’d be
always placed so she couldn’t pull in anymore people.
I turned a corner, hearing her siren song,
knowing it was time for us, for me to free her. I knew what to do this time. As
I approached ‘The Love Triangle’, I spotted more than just her in the painting.
There were other men, other women, in this piece. They all sat around the table
waiting to be released. I pulled out a replica of the dagger the first guy had
used on me, and sliced my hand.
As my blood oozed from my wound, dripping to
the floor and onto my shoes, I smeared it across the painting and onto the
locket – which became real in my bloodied hand as I swept across it! Closing my
hand around it, I ripped it off the painting and turned to find five people
standing around me who had been in the painting only moments before.
“It’s mine, the locket is mine!” I said.
“Actually you are mistaken.” A woman’s voice
said next to me, “It’s mine and you are the proof of how your envy makes you
into your own worst enemy.” Holding out her hand, she smiled, “Now, that’s
mine, along with your soul, because envy is a sin.”
I sat at the table looking at the food she
had prepared for me. She sat at the window looking out at the people looking
around the corridor. They were looking for me, but would never find me.
Now I was the man in the painting sitting at
the table wondering if I’d ever get out. But I knew how to get out. There was
one tiny problem...
