Paintings

• Phoebe Taylor-Thompson, Grade 7
• Short Story
• 2016

It’s been four years since the girl and I have been stuck here and I still don’t know her name. We celebrated her eighth birthday but she had no presents. Unless you count a tattered doll as a present. I had found it near one of my paintings. It all started what I think was a few years ago. A new gallery, full of new paintings. I was walking through it after it had closed. I was the artist after all. But, I came across some weird things. It was like my paintings had come alive. I could smell the sea breeze. I could hear my mother’s own personal lullaby. My dead tabby cat with the torn ear was standing in front of me. A few years before I had noticed that one of my paintings was looking a little strange. On closer inspection, I had noticed that it was see through, making the worst mistake of my life I had stepped into it. When my tabby cat found me and the girl, we decided to stick together. My tabby cat has been showing us the way, to safety or to our deaths, it’s all the same here. Countless things have happened here, I don’t know how to explain them. Every time I look into the girl’s eyes, I see an unmoving emotion but I don’t know what emotion it is. Her eyes are always looking forward, never backwards. My tabby cat has been acting strange lately she’s been more alert and aware. Her eyes flicker across the hallways, she flinches away from walls, hides when she hears an unknown sound. When my tabby cat was alive, she was always ready to jump into danger it was second nature for her. We had encountered many dangerous things in these halls; people from my paintings have jumped out to attack us with undying rage hidden in their eyes. Secret doors are the only things hiding us from them; the places the doors take us are extremely dark. Today we my tabby cat walked us down a dimly lit hallway that ended up leading us to a dead end. On the wall in front of us, a painting was hanging up, but it wasn’t mine. The painting clearly showed a person dressed in the same clothes I was wearing, next to the adult a little girl holding a flower stood. A tabby cat with a torn ear was positioned at the side. It was a perfect replication of us, these people were us. It had the same setting, they were wearing the same clothes. On the side of the painting it had a heading that said only one word. The girl spoke the first words she had said in four years.
“End.”