A Visitor in September

It was the eyes that bugged me the most.  Scribbled black ovals that looked as if a child had filled them in.  When they first appeared on the figures face I couldn’t help but get close to the glass and stare into them.  Every day the lines that filled those ovals would change. 

I guess I should start at the beginning.  I, like many of you, have been spending a great deal of time in my apartment this year.  Like many of you I have spent a lot of time cleaning and rearranging furniture.  Anything at all to change up the pace.  I just wanted a fresh feeling every week.  At the beginning of September I decided it was time to shift the walls around.  I took all my artwork and shuffled them throughout each room, which is how the picture made it’s way into my bedroom.

It had replaced a colorful fish painting I had.  One that had hung over my fireplace in the bedroom since I had moved into this apartment. This painting was of an enormous rainbow trout that looked up through the water at a boat.  Two small figures gestured in the boat at the size of the thing they had just hooked.  I loved this picture and wanted to see it more since I spent little time in my bedroom.  I swapped it with the drawing I had in my office.  The one that hung in the background of conference calls for the past seven months.  

It is a charcoal drawing of a snowy tree line.  The paper itself representing the snow.  A collection of black hackles divide the page representing the trees.  In the foreground taking up the majority of the page are two leafless ash trees.  They fork from one another as they go up and out of the frame.  

I didn’t care much for the drawing, nor did I hate it.  My friend Kyle had given it to me last October, after we drank whiskey and listened to records at his house one fall evening.  He had too much art anyways, but had just purchased this one on a whim at some antique store in Medford.  With no place to put it he just handed it to me as I was walking out the door.  I laughed and put it on my feet in the Uber.  I had been so drunk I thought I had left it in the car, which now maybe would’ve been for the best.  Instead I found it on the floor of my office and hung it there. Where it had been until the beginning of September.  Until I decided to move it into my bedroom. 

I now found myself staring at it every morning.  It was pleasing to look at.  One morning I can’t be sure when, but I noticed one of the black hackles had separated from the rest.  It had grown closer, moving down the page.  It was curious but I went about my day and soon forgot about it.  Maybe two weeks later as I rolled over one morning I was shocked to see that it was now past the roots of the ash trees.  The black line had grown wider and taken on more shape.  I nearly fell out of bed and scrambled to take another look.  Sure enough the figure was now very much on the page.  It was pitch black and in the shape of a bell.

I had taken the painting down that day and put it in my closet.  With everything else going on I did not want to stare at it anymore.  When I went to bed that night the blank spot on the wall reminded me about it, but I shoved my head into my pillows and slowly drifted off into sleep.  When I woke up I looked over at the wall and there it was.  The picture was back.  I don’t have any way to explain this, but it was there.  Hanging in its place as if it had never been moved.  The figure now had a dash of white in the darkness of it’s shape.   

I moved the painting again this time into the hallway closet outside of my apartment.  I placed it behind cardboard boxes from when I had moved here years ago.  Locked outside of my apartment door would have surely put an end to it, but when I awoke in the morning there it was again.  Back hanging over the fireplace.  The figure had moved much further than it had in the previous days.  It was now close to the bottom of the frame and this was the first time I could see it’s eyes.  The black swirls that stared out of the frame… they stared at me.  

I didn’t move the painting anymore.  I left it hanging in my bedroom, and I slept on my couch instead of going to bed.  When I got dressed one morning I tried very hard not to look at that picture, but one day I couldn’t help myself.  I looked up at it through heavy breaths.  

A feeling of relief washed over me when the figure was gone.  The picture had returned to normal.  In a sigh I put the picture out of my mind and went on with my day.  That had been last week.  

To my chagrin last Wednesday morning it became apparent as to why it had disappeared.  It dawned on me as I stared at the picture in the morning and noticed the black line arising from the bottom of the page.  By Sunday the line was a thick arc and blank white underneath.  A head slowly raising from the bottom.  The ash trees now adorned the arc and where they forked out resembling antlers.  The eyes came next on Monday morning they were more sporadic this close.  They appeared out of the white as if it had just opened them.  Yesterday they had grown wider and the lines that filled them in were sharply scribbled.  

This morning though I could see the beginning of a new dark arc.  What looked like it could be a mouth?  A black sun rising from underneath it’s eyes.  All thats left of the original painting are the ash trees.  They still stick out over the head of the figure like horns of a great deer.  I maybe have the rest of the week until it’s face will take up the page.  There is only one question that continues to bounce around my head.  What will happen when it finally takes up the whole frame?  

I guess I only need to wait a few more days.