Art from the Other Side of the Universe
Mermaid with bones — ink on smooth bristol — May 19, 2013
Part Four
Margot woke up the next morning wearing a t-shirt inside out and backward with a sour stomach. First she remembered that she should probably stop sleeping shirtless, and then she remembered why her roommate had come to visit in the first place ̶ that nightmare. She could still see those haunting white eyes glaring at her, the pain and the desperation…and the dream before that, it had been even weirder.
What was happening?
She rubbed her flushed face and crawled out of bed. She opened her bedroom door and looked around a while, making sure her roommate wasn’t in, then wandered out and over to the bathroom. A shower ̶ that was what she needed. That would make her feel normal again. She turned on the hot water and let it hit her extended palm until it eventually reached the correct temperature.
As she pulled her shirt over her head, she saw something just at the edge of her range of vision in the medicine cabinet mirror. Through the transition of the fabric over her face, however, the image was gone. Her eyes lingered there awhile, hesitant, before she slipped out of her underwear and into the shower. The curtain rings moved slowly across the plastic support pole as she tugged it closed, and her environment became a garish coral as light filtered through the tinted plastic.
She closed her eyes awhile and let the sensation of the water running over her skin become her everything. Everything was going to be OK, she told herself. In fact, by looks of things, everything was getting better. Maybe that was why she was freaking out like this, having nightmares ̶ because she couldn’t let herself enjoy a good moment. She was going to be graduating soon, and she didn’t know where she would be going from there…so the uncertainty of the future was clouding her present.
She shifted the weight from her left foot to her right foot to her left again and rubbed her neck and shoulders with already pruning finger pads. It was going to be all right. For the first time in a while, the things that were on her plate were neatly organized and made sense. She took a deep breath.
Clack.
Margot knew that sound well enough ̶ the sound of someone pushing a little too hard on the bathroom door, which had a tendency open without the handle being turned. “Hey, I’m in here, OK!?” she said, opening the shower curtain and glaring at the door. She saw that it was open just a sliver. “Alex!”
Silence.
Her heart beat began to quicken, and she remembered all of the times that Alex had left without locking the door because she had forgotten her key somewhere or the other. All the possible horrible scenarios entered her head as she reached out to grab her towel before quietly stepping out of the shower. She wrapped herself quickly and padded across the bathroom slowly before she reached the door.
What should she do? Should she swing the bathroom door open boldly? Should she lock it and stay inside. Where was her phone? In her purse, probably dead by now…and her charger was clear across the apartment. A weapon? There was the wine bottle, and she could break it against something…but she wasn’t even sure how hard you had to hit it against a surface to get it to break…
Her mind was racing, and her pulse was picking up to a break neck speed. The last thing she felt before she recklessly decided to swing open the bathroom door and scream for her would be attacker to leave was the heated feeling of the veins in her neck throbbing ̶
The apartment was silent and still.
Her bravery growing, she walked throughout the entirety of it, grabbing as she checked each room first her cell phone (resting in her neglected purse on the living room floor) and second her charger (which was on her dresser) before she determined that there was no one there. The most reassuring part, of course, was that the front door was completely locked. She let her still wet fingers rest on the metal a moment, physically recording the idea that, yes, no one was inside the apartment with her before she went back to the bathroom.
She locked that door, too, pulled her phone charger into the wall socket above the sink and then the phone into the charger. She watched it click back to life and display the battery charging graphic before she could safely resume what she was doing. The sense of stillness and calm, however, was lost.
*****
An hour later, Margot was clean as humanly possible and sitting in the living room watching the midday news to a cup of cheap coffee. It wasn’t perfect, but it was normalizing. She could still feel the tension in the back of her neck (thinking an intruder in the apartment after having a night-ruining nightmare wasn’t exactly ideal), but she was OK. Really. She took a deep breath through her nose and let it out through her mouth with a sigh.
She made herself focus on what was happening on the television. It was a slow news day, and so she was being made to suffer through the political plans of people who couldn’t possibly run for office for another three years. Over the rim of her coffee cup she watched women with over styled hair desperately try to keep the audience’s attention as nothing continued to happen. The irritation she felt at that was also normalizing. Everything was just the way it was supposed to be.
Her phone vibrated and made a little chirp. She put her coffee cup carefully down on the floor and looked at the illuminated screen. She chuckled to see that he was still entered into her contacts as Professor Smith. She wondered if she should ever change it. “I know I said I would see you in class, but what about we meet up later tonight and catch a movie tomorrow night?” She smiled and typed her response, then hesitated at the send button, deleted what she had written, and wrote it again: “That sounds like a great idea. What movie were you thinking of?”
Margot looked down at the screen awhile before hitting send this time. For the same reason that her first response had been no good, she couldn’t let herself reply too quickly. He hadn’t grow up with cell phones as a teenager, but she was sure he still knew about the unspoken rule of never responding too quickly to a text like that.
She let her eyes drift from the phone to the television ̶ and without her notice something very peculiar happened behind her. Delicately, and in a way that could not be supported by ordinary air flow, a few stray sheets of paper floated down the hallway and into the living room. Whatever kept them aloft gave them only enough momentum to drift into the first few feet of the room before they gently came to rest on the carpeted floor.
Finally, Margot hit send.
She put down her phone and looked back up at the TV, which proved to be completely uninteresting now that she wasn’t having a slow news day. And suddenly she became aware of the fact that she had become quite cold. She peered over at the thermostat and wondered if her roommate had decided to start turning on the AC unseasonably soon. She got up, mindful of her cup of coffee, and walked around the sofa to the hallway.
As she took a step forward, her foot landed on one of the stray pieces of paper. It slipped out from under her, and she had to grab onto the wall to save herself from slipping.
“What the hell!?”
Margot saw that, had she not stepped on that one, she very easily could have stepped on any of the others ̶ four in fact. She was momentarily angry with Alex before she looked them over and realized that they were hers. It was the unstapled syllabus from Jason’s class. She picked all of them up and walked over to her room. The door was open. She tried to remember where she had placed them. Had she really just left them out? And how could they have even gotten over there?
She put them down in her bed, shut her bedroom door behind her and walked back over to the thermostat. The air conditioning wasn’t on.
For a moment, Margot lingered there in the hall. The sound of the television was drowned out by the sound of her own heart beat. She was afraid, but she didn’t know why. Everything was just slightly alarming, just slightly unusual.
She jumped slightly when she heard her phone vibrate. She cast one more glance back at her shut bedroom door and then went back into the living room. “Anything you want, Margot. I just want an excuse to see you again.”
She smiled.
The One He Had Forgotten: Part 3
With a start, Margot woke up in room. She had slept a still, motionless sleep and found herself in the same position she had flopped down into. She turned over onto her back and rubbed her neck as she tried to regain composure. Her heart was beating so quickly.
She could still feel the radiant heat from the horrible eyeballs. The thought of it gave her chills and made the partially digested wine churn in her stomach.
When was the last time she had even had a nightmare? She guessed when she first moved away from home ̶ being away from people who cared about her and surrounded by people who didn’t and couldn’t muster the ability to be considerate had triggered a serious of stress nightmares that had made her freshman year pretty difficult…but here she was in her senior year, comfortable and content with the indifference of her peers. Where was this coming from?
And then she looked up.
What was before her had not come suddenly ̶ it had been there the whole time, smoldering silently. A great billowing pillar of white smoke and light boiled violently from a dark spot in the ceiling. In the midst of all wildly undulating fog was the figure of a woman, small and desperate, clawing at the air down toward Margot but never quite reaching her.
Her heart sank, her stomach lurched, the blood drained from her face and a shrill screech formed in the back of her throat.
The woman in the midst of the fog jerked her head to the side suddenly and fixed her eyes at Margot ̶ two white lumps in the middle of her face without definition. She swiped viciously at Margot with clawed fingers, but she missed by a foot and appeared to be pulled back up into the ceiling further.
Margot screamed again and found mobility once more. She kicked back from the bed against the wall. Unable to go back any further, she fell off the bed half intentionally and half out of panic and began to fumble on the floor across the room to her bedroom door. The creature turned to follow her, though still bound to her position at the ceiling, and tried to pull herself across the air to get to her.
She made it to the door, on the wrong side, and tried to grasp the knob blindly ̶ her gaze fixed stubbornly on the nightmarish creature in front of her. When her hand finally connected, she attempted to turn it and was met with resistance. Someone on the other side was trying to get in. Faced with the choice of handling what was happening in front of her or what was happening on the other side of the door, Margot did the only thing that made sense to her ̶ she screamed again.
She put her hands over her mouth and resisted the overwhelming urge to vomit. The woman in white peered down at her with unbridled hostility, still struggling to fully emerge from the ceiling. The white tendrils of mist and fog and smoke pulsed inward and outward, sometimes getting so close that Margot could feel them brush against her ̶ an icy mist. The door knob continued to giggle, and then ̶
“Margot? What are you doing? Are you OK?” came her roommate’s voice, groggy and thick from having been woken up in the middle of the night.
For a split second, her eyes darted to the side, realization washing over her ̶ and then in another panicked moment she remembered her vigil…but found the tormented corner of the room empty.
Her roommate put her shoulder to the door, turned the knob and pushed, knocking Margot forward a foot. She stumbled onto her knees and then awkwardly moved out of the way of the door fully to allow her roommate clearance enough to fully open the door. She reached in, turned on the light and then entered baseball bat first. Her eyes darted across the room until she found Margot on the floor. The muscles in her neck and shoulders visibly relaxed, and she sighed.
“What the hell are you doing? What happened?” She realized she was asking a woman without clothes on these questions and looked away.
Margot shook her head and wiped her face with her shaking hands. “I ̶ I don’t know… A nightmare?” For good measure she glanced back over her shoulder, then back to the door. “Yeah…a nightmare I think.” Then she looked down and realized that she was still, for the most part, rather nude. She flushed all over and reached back behind her for a garment. The first thing she found was an old t-shirt, which she pulled over her head. Only then did she look back up at Alex.
“Sorry, I hadn’t planned on screaming bloody murder in the middle of the night, so I didn’t really dress for visitors.” She shakily stood up and looked over her shoulder again. There was no hint of what had just happened.
“I thought you were being murdered in here. Are you sure you’re OK?”
Her hands on her mouth, Margot eyed the room carefully, looking for any sign of what had just happened. “Yes,” she said slowly, “I’m sure I’m OK. It ̶ it was just a…bad dream.”
The One He Had Forgotten — Part 2
A young woman sat on an empty park bench in the darkness of the early morning. She was dressed well, as if she had been on a date that night, in a cute red dress. Posed like a doll, all grace and composure, in the middle of a black, black emptiness. A cigarette rested in her hand, smoldering and heavy with ash. A thin trail of smoke swirled around her lazily in the stillness before dissipating into the night.
Margot had the sense that she was surrounded by what would, in daylight, be a pleasant and welcoming park. Yet in the night, encircled by darkness, there was nothing but a steady inky void—warm and stifling.
She stood in front of the woman, who had not yet realized Margot was there, concerned and also confused. She did not know where the compassion came from, the desire to help this woman out, but it was overpowering. Tears began to well in her eyes, and she felt her hands begin to reach outward, reaching toward her. She did not even know where the fear came from—for here was a woman, serene and undisturbed. But there was a foreboding in the darkness. Something awful, eventually, would happen.
Slowly, the woman began to lift her gaze. For a moment, she looked right through Margot, unseeing, and then let her eyes trail slowly to the side. Her chest swelled and receded as she let out a silent sigh. She was waiting, but Margot didn’t know for what.
In the darkness behind her, a green shape began to form, catching her attention. Fuzzy green slits of light, peering through the haze. The longer she looked, the more she was able to see what they were. The realization brought with it a great sense of dread—great green eyes were glaring out from behind the darkness, looking here and there and occasionally pausing on Margot. They knew she was there, even if the strange woman did not.
“Look,” the woman whispered, her voice piercing the buzzing silence. Margot made herself look away at the eyes and back to her. “Look,” she repeated.
“I don’t understand what you mean,” Margot wanted to say, but her lips would not form the words. “Look for what?”
The woman did not say.
Margot lifted her gaze back up to the great green eyes before her, finding that each and every one was fixed solely on her. Piercing, fierce eyes that bore straight through to her psyche. They began to grow in size, to swell up and rush her, and she became aware that they were behind her too. She turned around to verify and, to her horror, that these were even closer. Surely, if she reached out to touch them, her fingers would graze against their odious corneas.
Their presence was overwhelming and mortifying. Vomit threatened to come up, and her knees were getting weak. Before she could lose her composure—
Two firm hands grasped her shoulders from behind, and a rasping voice whispered in her ear: “You need to look, to watch, to see.”
The One He Had Forgotten: A Ghost Story — Part 1
(A brief introduction: So this is going to be a heavily illustrated short story about ghosts. Sometimes there will be quite a bit of text, sometimes there won’t. This time I kind of had to introduce the story so there’s a lot. I’m pretty shy about my writing, and a big part of me wants to put it under a read more—but I’m being brave OK!? I’m going to try to update as often as possible, and those updates will be under the tag “The One He had Forgotten.” We’ll see how it goes!)
A faint fog of smoke followed Margo into the apartment, even after the door was shut. She closed her eyes and smiled to herself. It had gone well. It had gone really well.
The living room, piled with clutter from her and her roommate, usually acted as a depressing greeting to her mediocre life, but tonight…after that date. It was refreshing to look at. This had been fun! This had been great!
Too embarrassed to handle her own emotions, she wandered into the kitchen. A week old pile of dishes and old food glared up at her, and without thinking she started cleaning. She went about the task without really noticing, pausing occasionally when she would realize that she had cleaned half of the dishes without any recollection of it. She hadn’t been flustered like this in a long time.
But, honestly, she hadn’t felt anything like this in a long time either. It wasn’t love (that would be premature) but infatuation and deep flattery. No one had ever made a point of making her feel so special and mature. He was her professor…and that wasn’t ideal. But that didn’t make it any less exhilarating.
Margot opened the refrigerator and looked at its contents. A few unmarked take out boxes, none of which were her own, and a half finished bottle of wine. That wasn’t her’s either, but she grabbed it anyway and pulled a still wet glass out of the drying rack.
She wandered back into the living room, poured herself a glass of wine and watched the DVD that was already in the player — it happened to be one of her own, but it didn’t really matter if what she was watching was enjoyable. She was too distracted anyway. She watched the images flicker as she drank the sour wine. She pulled her phone out of her bag and saw a text from him and her friend.
“Tonight was fun. We should do it again very soon. I’ll see you in class on Tuesday, Miss Parker.”
She smiled to herself and took another drink of wine. The sound of her typing back her response was not entirely obscured by the dialogue coming from the screen.
She put her phone down, leaned back and stared at the screen. It was a random DVD in the third season of a television program she was only mildly fond of, and she couldn’t remember what had happened in the last episode. Her eyelids started to get heavy, and her muscles started to relax. Images of just a few hours before danced in her mind, the smell of his cologne, the way he would smile when she made a terrible, awkward joke…
The heaviness overtook her.
—
The DVD player clicked to a halt, having returned to the starting menu and sat idle for twenty minutes. “No input” flashed on black screen, on and off.
A soft sound began to fill the room, as if someone were inhaling slowly. A few strands of Margot’s hair lifted from her face.
Louder this time, a great exhale. The screen of the television turned to white foam, and what appeared to be smoke began to leak from the glass. Still more hair lifted from Margot’s head. Her hands started to lift from her lap, the few remaining drops of wine lifted from the bottom of the glass and hovered inches above the lip.
Another inhale, and smoke began to billow out of the screen and swirl wildly about Margot, who was now beginning to lift from the sofa completely. The smoke thickened, and in front of her the faintest hint of a face began to form.
Another exhale, this time very loud, and Margot was now a full foot off of the sofa, completely surrounded by thick tendrils of smoke. The face, fully formed, was that of a young woman, her milky white eyes glaring back at the sleepy face of Margot. Her foggy lips parted, and another exhale ̶ the sound filled the room.
Suddenly, a click and a rustle from the front door. Like the clenching of fists, the smoke returned to the screen, which then clicked off. Margot fell back down onto the sofa with a start, instantly awake.
She looked around, her eyes wide, confused and disoriented. It felt like she had just fallen down, a sensation akin to falling asleep in class and falling forward onto her desk, and she could not recall having fallen asleep in the first place. Her roommate stood in the doorway with a bemused look on her face. The apartment was dark, and by all appearances Margot was drunk.
“Is that my wine?”
Margot looked down at the glass in her hand and blushed. “Yeah, sorry. I’ll buy you another bottle when I go to the grocery store tomorrow.” She got up and shuffled into her room as her roommate shut and locked the door and retreated into her own bedroom without a word.
She pulled her dress off, unhooked her bra and collapsed onto her small twin, which was more piles of clean and dirty laundry than comfortable sleeping area. She sleepily kicked most of it off and pulled the blanket over most of her body before she began to fall asleep again.
Saturday out Shopping for Flowers — watercolor and sepia ink — August 28, 2011
His Head — the last remaining token of their love — April 23, 2013 — watercolor — image for sale on etsy
There was probably a better way to revisit her love lost but, alas, it was all that was left.
Experiments with acrylic —
Sometimes it’s fun to pretend I’m not obsessed with form and detail and preciseness.
Pierced — watercolor, white paint and ink — October 2012
I recently sold this piece to a very awesome person, and I had almost forgotten I had made it.
The View from Outside
He told her it would be forever, that he would never leave her.
There are seven sets of these available for sale in my etsy shop for $15 (less if you use the coupon code SPRING13) and they are gorgeous and I am so excited. :>
“Downtrodden dappled delinquents” — drawoutyourlife.
(Source: other-side-of-the-universe)
A mermaid wearing a seeweed dress, suggested to me by symphonicrevolution.
(Source: other-side-of-the-universe)
A “snailien” for anonymous, who is more than likely my friend Alanna because we were just talking about them.
(Source: other-side-of-the-universe)
The ones I like, naturally. Some might be just quick sketches, and some might be fully fleshed out watercolor paintings. I’ll credit you for the idea on the finished image.
I just want to draw something without thinking too much when I get home from work this afternoon. haha
Deadline: This afternoon I guess!
(Source: other-side-of-the-universe)
