Life in Paintings

Chapter 4 - Adieu

Chapter 4

Adieu

I’m curled up into fetal position when I regain consciousness. I’m shaking uncontrollably and I don’t want to open my eyes. I don’t want to know that I’m being digested by some gargantuan caveman.

But I’m not there anymore. I know it almost automatically because when I breathe through my nose, I don’t smell the putrid smell of the black hole. I smell sea water and wet wood.

“Ava, quick, I think she’s waking up,” a man says from beside me.

When I lift my eyes, the ground starts to shake. Quickly, I slap my hands on my sides, trying to find my balance and stop the ground from moving, and that’s when I realize the ground isn’t moving, because I’m not lying on the ground. I’m lying in a boat. And my clothes aren’t wet because of my dripping blood drenching them, or because of the monster’s gastric fluids, but because the water keeps hitting the side of the boat and coming overboard.

I must be quite a sight to these strangers, my hair plastered against my temples, my pale jeans muddy and wet and bloody. My light pink shirt turned red because of my blood that splattered against it.

A train wreck is pretty much the perfect fit.

I try to sit up, to get a better look at my surroundings, but a hand presses down my shoulder. “Don’t move too fast, you seem to be bleeding and I think you bumped your head,” a gentle woman’s voice says.

I had it eaten actually…

Nevertheless, I listen to her and sit down slowly, careful of not making the boat move erratically again.

When I do I come face to face with a brunette woman, probably in her mid thirties, wearing a lilac dress, her facial features as gentle as her voice.

“You doing okay there, deary?” a man’s voice asked from behind me. He’s the one sitting at the back of the boat, steering it. He has a long brown beard and is wearing what looks like a corduroy suit. It would be a funny sight in another context but right now he just looks like he comes out of that Les Misérables’ movie.

“Yes, I’m fine thank you,” I assure him, though I’m really not sure about it.

Am I okay? Honestly, I’m the farthest thing from okay. I just saw a man get eaten—alas some painted man, but still a man. I just had my skulls crushed between a giant’s teeth. I’m an not okay.

How is any of this supposed to make me appreciate art? All of this just makes me hate it more. It makes me not regret to have burn that stupid museum.

“But all the blood…”

I’m about to say, ‘not my blood’ but it is my blood. It was my blood in another painting. I don’t get this. I don’t get why I don’t start new in each dream if I’m not really dead. Why do my clothes keep the stains they previously got?

Maybe that’s just a way to make me feel even worse.

“Those stains are just from…”I take a second to continue that thought, “old wounds. I haven’t had the chance to change in a while,” I try to explain.

“Did you steal the clothes off a dead man’s body?” the man chuckles.

I wrap my arms around myself, trying to get warmer. The wind is cold and the sky is clouded and there’s a storm on its way. “They’re my clothes…”

“Peculiar choice of attire,” the woman says softly, a little smile on the edge of her lips.

Oh, so now I’m going to be ridiculed by painting people because I’m wearing pants? Great, just great.