The woods are darker now than they were this time last week. This disturbs her. Something she can’t quite put a finger on. The way it feels like every thing is always changing? Getting away from her? She wants it all to stay the same, her deepest wish is to freeze time. To hold her moments in the palm of her hand. She wants to scream when the leaves change color.
Her paintings are in green, not orange.
Forever green.
She specializes in landscapes. Her use of lighting so specific. So exact. There is no mistaking the time of day.
She is an afternoon given flesh.
But evening is coming. She feels it in her bones. The pain’s been getting worse since the operation.
Always changing.
She wishes for stagnation. Death escapes her here in this place where she’s always watched. Eyes hidden in their newfangled technologies. Seeing everything.
Outside, the woods weep for her return. They miss holding her in their photosynthetic embrace. Veiling her from the sun and the rain. Her name whispered among the leaves overhead.
The door to her room opens and in walks the gray-haired head nurse holding a clipboard and jotting down unseen notes. Behind the nurse an orderly wheels in her easel and a fresh canvas.
“Already awake, I see,” the nurse speaks with false sincerity.
“Just leave that by the window.”
The orderly is slow to obey, avoiding eye contact. He hurries out of the room like a child whose’s mother’s called him home for supper.
“Now what do you feel like painting for us today? Something green, I suspect?”
She lifts herself off the bed. To move is to provoke pain. The stubs on her back may be bandaged but they’ve given her no relief. She’s overheard the nurses whispering about her unknown physiology. Medicating her would be too risky. Yet she understands the truth is they want her in pain. The head nurse most of all.
It’s her way of enforcing her power over the unknown.
The nurse observes as she selects her colors. Only leaves once she has begun. She watches out the window, takes in the forest that was not there only months ago, and paints another tree.
She watches as the seedling emerges from the ground, bursting forth from the hard-packed soil from which nothing should grow.
How many such paintings has she created? Not just in this facility wherein she’s trapped but across the centuries of her existence? How many forests has she raised and nurtured through her brushes?
Too many to count.
Enough to grow tired and bored. Enough to crave sleep over the act of birthing creation. Over the act of maintaining balance for these foolish creatures.
The nurse returns with a different orderly to remove the easel and her latest work. She knows not what they are doing with them. Are they kept somewhere in the facility? Sold in exchange for the present currency? She would prefer they chuck them into the fire. They know not what power they hold, do they?
Perhaps it was time for a demonstration.
Wilma doesn’t trust the thing in room 207.
When she first heard about it, she didn’t believe it. Who would? It was just another modern-day freak engaging in a fashionable trend like the piercings and cutting her daughter did. What the kids called “emo.” Then she was tasked with changing the bandages on its stumps.
Piercings went through the flesh. Not the bone.
That’s when she started drinking again. It wasn’t like she was a recovering alcoholic or anything like that. She just hadn’t seen the need to drink. Now she did.
Simple equation.
She’d stop by the pub on the way home and have a couple. A few. That’s all it was. Until that wasn’t enough. Then she’d stop on the way back from the pub to pick up a bottle of vodka for a night cap.
She knew she had a problem when she started started slipping a couple fingers into her morning coffee. But who would say anything about it? She was in charge of hiring and firing the nursing staff. And the doctors? They didn’t understand how the hospital worked at all. They couldn’t afford to say anything.
Wilma takes today’s painting into the doctor’s lounge and places it alongside the others. It loves painting its damned trees. All it ever seems interested in is trees. There are a half dozen other such paintings in the lounge, those that hadn’t yet sold. All but one of them are of the wilderness along the backside of the hospital.
It’s the only one hung up and the only one that depicts something other than trees, though those were still present. This painting was of the hospital itself, as seen from the bench out front. Which was odd, considering it only seemed to paint what it was looking at and it was stuck inside its room. Dr. Lubrick assured the staff, those who had seen the painting, that the angle was just a memory from when it was originally brought to the hospital.
That seemed logical enough. If you ignored that it was the wrong season. And that Dr. Lubrick’s new car was in the parking lot. Ignored that he had only just bought it the day before the painting, and that there was no way to see the parking lot from the room where it was painted.
A glance at the clock.
Quitting time.
Wilma takes the long way to the parking lot. The way that doesn’t go pass room 207.
The drive to the pub is a blur, as are the pints she drinks. She doesn’t remember stopping for vodka, but the bottle’s in her hand when she walks through the door. This she knows by the look her daughter gives her. Wilma doesn’t hear the words she says to the girl, nor the slur they’re hidden within. But she recognizes the pain in the girl’s expression as she runs off to her room to cry and cut.
And it feels good.
God help her, it feels good.
They started tying her to the bed at night when they realized she doesn’t sleep. Not the way they understand the concept.
In the morning they let her free, but she doesn’t move until they bring a new canvas. Only then does she spring to life with a verve previously unseen, though the orderly seems not to notice.
She reaches for her paints. Green. Brown.
Red.
Angelo is exhausted. He’s spent most of his day hauling boxes of equipment from the loading bay to the various storage closets littered through the building. He wasn’t even allowed to ask what he was carrying. Not that he really cared.
Working as an orderly he was used to doing things without knowing why. It was a lot like the rest of his life in that way.
But there’s somethings you don’t need somebody to tell you. Like the fact the head nurse has a drinking problem that nobody’s willing to mention. Or the way she gets scared when it’s time to get the paintings from room 207.
Angelo doesn’t understand what’s going on in that room. The patient never speaks. He assumes art therapy must help to bring somebody like that out of their shell. But that doesn’t explain why the head nurse is so unnerved. Was the woman in there a criminal or something? They were sometimes brought prisoners from the nearby penitentiary, though they were always kept handcuffed.
Regardless of what was wrong with the woman, Angelo has no problem with her. He likes her paintings, though the head nurse seems put off by them. But Angelo had always felt more comfortable in nature than he did indoors.
Angelo didn’t need to look at the clock to know what time it was. The nurse was already in the hallway with that impatient look on her face.
“Where have you been?” she said as he approached.
“They had me moving box-”
“Fine, fine.” She set off towards room 207, Angelo following behind.
“What do they do with them?” Angelo asked while the nurse paused to catch her breath outside of the door.
“Do with what?”
“Her paintings.”
The nurse shook her head. “Not my responsibility.”
She pushes open the doorway to reveal something unique. The patient’s still sitting in front of the canvas. Normally she would be lying down already.
“Well, well, well,” the head nurse steps up behind the patient. “Still hard at work, are you? It’s time to put the paints away now and… OH MY GOD.”
The nurse’s head shoots up to peer at something outside.
“Oh god, oh god. No.”
Then she’s pushing Angelo out of the way and running off down the hall before he can open his mouth.
“Well that was different, wouldn’t you say?” he asks the patient. In the silence that stretches out he twiddles his thumbs, unsure whether or not he should still remove the easel. Until somebody tells him otherwise, he figures it’s best just to wait. He steps inside proper to see what the patient has painted today.
At first it looks like the rest of her paintings. Green and brown trees encroaching upon the perspective. It seems to Angelo that the forest was getting closer each day, though how that could be he didn’t know. A trick of the light, perhaps.
Then he notices something that her other paintings lack. A splash of red on one of the trees. Not autumn red but crimson red. Blood red. This makes him lean in to get a closer look.
He sees what the head nurse must have seen.
There, dangling from one of the trees in front, is what looks like a young girl’s body. She is hanging by a noose tied around her neck. Streaks of blood seem to be pouring from the noose as if it has cut into the flesh, suggesting that the girl didn’t die of a broken neck but a slashed throat.
Angelo’s throat constricts, his mouth dries. Then he remembers how the nurse looked out the window and despite everything his brain screams at him, he, too, looks.
He yelps and turns to flee, to get help, but a hand shoots out and grabs his wrist. The skin frail and see-through like his grandmothers.
“Wait,” says a voice as ancient as time itself, ushering from lips as cracked and dry as the Mojave desert he once visited on a family vacation.
“Watch.”
Outside the window the head nurse comes into view. She rushes towards the body, grabbing it by the legs and lifting it up as if it could still be saved.
The patient lets go of Angelo’s arm, grabs the paint brush and starts to add details. The figure of the head nurse slowly emerges. One arm reaching out towards the figure in the trees, the other clutching at her heart.
Outside, the head nurse is still fumbling with the body. Other figures appear from around the sides of the hospital. Angelo recognizes Dr. Lubrick, a couple of the other orderlies. The head nurse is screaming and yelling at them and despite the distance, Angelo could make out a few of the words: “Help.” “Fault.” “Daughter.”
Then, just as he had seen a moment previous, the nurse points at her daughter with one arm. Her other grabbing at her chest. Her face turning a sickly shade of blue. And she collapses onto the ground beneath her dead daughter’s feet.
Angelo can only stare. His eyes wider than he would have ever thought possible. At some point his body begun to back up, away from the window and the painting. They were like the end of a tunnel growing ever farther.
The patient places the paint brush down. Slowly rises and faces Angelo.
“It’s time for us to go,” she says.
After a moment, Angelo nods. He leaves the room. Comes back a moment later with a wheelchair. Helps the patient down into it.
In the commotion, nobody stops to ask them where they were going. Loaded up with art supplies as they were, who would even question it?
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