The room where the Artist painted me was weathered and grey. There were smears of color left on the walls, but they were unsure about what shade they desired to be. The white wasn’t completely white, the green was mixed with bits of blue, and even the light that leaked through the cracked window seemed stained with a pink. Refracted slices of light would scurry around the walls in jagged circles, unsure of their place. 

The Artists’ eyes, however, remained a damp hazel. Light avoided him. Every time a new storm of strokes would arise from his wrist, his eyes would chase them to the edge of the canvas until they flashed and burned. Then in a swift motion, he would pour water on the canvas and the stormy sky would dissolve away too, to be replaced with yellows and light oranges. I must have sat under a thousand skies. The one I remained stuck under was a cloudy one, grey like the slush that forgets to melt away after winter. 

As for me, the girl under the sky. I remained the same. He painted my skin pale and white. My hair a soft brown with violet streaks folded in, and my eyes a dusty green. Unlike me, my clothing was hideous. It was a chiffon lace dress at the top where the folds were drawn with care, but the detail on the dress faded as it fell to my toes. Before forgetting me, though, the painter was generous enough to impart a shadow of a smile that lingered on my lips, like I had stupidly decided to be stoic and that was the last smile I would allow myself. I hated that face.  I’d stretch my lips and make them laugh, cry and beg the artist to repaint me. The Artist would glare at me, then run a stroke of black dangerously near my face.  

One morning, the Artist decided he was finished with me. He picked me up, inserted a nail in the wall and dangled my wooden frame from it. He did the same to the painting of the mountain, and then the one of the river and the one of the tree branch. Within a short while, shiny people would come into the squalid room, hand the artist a couple coins, then take the painting off the wall and into a golden carriage. The carriage looked awkward on the weathered road that resembled its travelers. The important faces would protrude from the rows of tired ones. Because the important ones had more to eat, they were wider and more angular, almost like a box. Shiny fabric was fixed around their bodies and their eyes were high and unexpressive. Their houses must be tall like them too, and golden like the carriages the men were ferried around in. I stared at a sliver of pink light in the corner of the room, and realized it was the only thing not stained with dust in the room. I think I doomed the pink light, because within a moment of my having the thought the artist let out a breath of smoke from a rolled up paper, and dirtied it. 

As if on cue, there was a dignified knock at the door. The artist stuck the cigarette into the chair and hobbled forward to the door. He gave an elaborate bow, however the dignified face remained unimpressed.

“Where is the painting?” He said through barely open lips. With his body still folded, the artist pointed at me. I did not bother fixing my expression, because only artists could see the people in their drawing as alive. And stiff, important men were never artists. The dignified man examined me. He gave out a groan, pressed a finger against the canvas. My heart pounded a little, then a little more. “Looks just like my daughter” he said through a half smirk. Before the Artist could speak, he handed him a pile of coins. “Thank you” the Artist started, “Thank you sir for your generosity, I drew it in the image of your respectable daughter and--”. The stiff blue arm of the man hit him in the back of his head. The Artist hobbled forward, and amazingly, his body was still folded. With the other arm, the man picked me up and stormed through the thin wooden door. The day outside was blazing, and the light poured into my eyes like it just escaped prison. It flooded in from all sides and I never knew that so much of it existed, and everything was drenched in blues and purples and greens, and other authentic colors, not just the shadows and memories of them, and there was more I could describe, but the tight arm placed me face down in the back of the carriage. 

He must have gone away to get a drink. But important men don’t drink at tired pubs. He must have stopped to smell the flowers. But important men don’t like flowers. And besides, he had already seen them before. Maybe something touched his stiff shoe, and he went to rinse it off. 

Or maybe not. 

The important part is that when he was gone, a small, loose set of hands wiggled me out of the spot I was wedged in. Maybe it was the daughter, I thought, and my heart began its rhythm in my chest. I indeed had a heart, which means that my Artist had imagined me with one. I wondered if my heart had cost him more than a thought, and if he felt empty without me. I didn’t really care because I was about to become a beautiful painting in an important house, but idle thoughts and other people's misery were fascinating. The artist must be miserable without me, with only a nail on the wall. Out of the corner of my eye, I realized that the girls’ finger tips looked a little brown, but I imagined that was simply the light. I heard a small grunt that I did not sound like the noise girls made when they played outside the Artists shack. I reminded myself that important people had stiff necks so they would have different voices. Suddenly, the girl shoved her elbows under the drawing and pushed it over until I lay flat on my back. 

When I saw the face of a young boy with a dirty chest and loose shirt instead of the face of a young girl with a high collar and green eyes, I did not mind. I had never seen a young face so near me, and it was delightfully pink. His fingers gripped the frame rashly, and I wondered if they were pink too, but they were brown with dirt. I looked up, and the delicate grey of my sky was brown. My canvas dented from his fingertips. Stop it. I whimpered out. The boy stared at me. Stop it. I said louder and moved my hands, violently, like the Artist would when he painted a storm. The boy lifted his fingers off the frame to clap his hands at the same rapid pace as the rhythm in the chest. It took me a moment to realize that without knowing it I was clapping too, and as I looked from my hands to his, and the curve of my fingers to his, and across both our twisted wrists, I found he was imitating me. One of his hands stopped clapping and it lifted a stubby pencil from the ground. Mouse? He asked gleefully. He shoved the jagged pencil tip into the paper and stretched it across and down before making lighter indents in the center. Mouse he said, and clapped his hands again, although mine fell paralyzed into my lap. 

The boy lifted me off the pavement and dragged the sharp frame of my painting on the grainy ground. It made a line in the dust that curved a little bit, stopped when the boy dropped me, started again at a different spot, tripped across twigs and other protrusions. The back of the dark carriage waned from my sight. Suddenly, the boy found a shiny orange ball on the floor. He pushed me to the dust and ran after it. His white feet made an awkward trail in the ground, then he was gone. 

The place he left me was like the space between the Artists eyes. It was wrinkled and grey, and if I looked at it closely I would notice it contorted in pain. But silently, because that space did not want to disturb anything. I would rarely look at that part of the Artist, because his damp eyes suffered a lot more and very openly. The eyes watered and fluttered, and that pain was more engaging. The one in the space between his eyes was dull.  

In the place where the boy abandoned me, I saw silhouettes of people struggling to pick up their four children, the backs of cracked heels and the sounds of soft crying. No one cried loudly, no one stopped breathing, and sometimes there was even a quarter smile. Suffering out of the corner of the eye. It was unimpressive. The sun rose and the sun set. It got old. I felt old. 

When the sun was only halfway set on my seventh night, I mustered up the courage to glance at the atrocious item the boy had drawn. It was only until night time of that day that I admitted it was not quite as atrocious as I imagined it. The boy drew a chubby, charcoal colored mouse with an indented back and curvy tail, elongated whiskers and low, wide eyes. I extended my arm forward to see if the boy had given the mouse life in the moment he drew it. No sooner had I put my arm forward that the mouse trotted over, young and carefree like the boy who conceived him. It whimpered, played on my lap a little bit. To passersby who couldn't care less, they saw a stoic girl who also could not care less. But I spent a lot of the eight and ninth day with the mouse in my arm, or watching it scurry up the trees. 

On my eighth night, I realized that in my misery and then nonchalance, I had forgotten to notice that the boy saw me. At least the one who doomed me to this wrinkled landscape was an artist. 

Around the 12th night, Mouse was sitting on my lap and twisting the chiffon pieces in its stick-like limbs. I was staring at a woman lifting her whimpering child. Because I had nothing better to do, I imagined her sadness. Tried to feel her numbness on my face. As I attempted to make my eyes water, the mouse whimpered around my mouth. I felt a twinge of something I later learned was called restlessness in my chest. The ground under me vibrated a little, and the footsteps of a scraggly boy ran to the woman, lifted her whimpering child and pressed a bottle of fluid into her mouth. He said something I could not hear, and he trudged around the dust. I no longer found it entertaining to look him in the eye, so I focused on the ground. At some point, he must have caught sight of me, because he moved towards me. He bent towards me and wiped off a layer of soot from my frame. When he met my gaze, he smiled with only the left side of his mouth. The girl started crying again, but I noticed him glancing at me between paces. He must have wondered all the things I did, like how a beautiful painting like me was lying on the ground. Or perhaps I wasn’t even a thing, and he was imagining this existence for me. Maybe he became me and imagined my story. After all, paint is not human. I never even had a name. Maybe I am him. 

Then again. Maybe not. 

But regardless of how I exist, I do not deign to suffer. He will see, or imagine with his mind, a girl with high eyebrows who is above this world. He hasn’t glanced towards me for a while now, patting the young girls back as she heaves breaths into her chest. He attaches one hand to the other one, and mumbles sounds in an act called praying. I didn’t choose to feel sad for him, but there was a pang in my chest and a heat behind my eyes, and I couldn’t describe it in any other way. I don’t know why it was happening all of a sudden, but maybe it's because when the girl's head was turned, her soft dark hair reminded me a bit of Mouse. 

After the sun had gone down for a fourteenth time, it struck me that I might actually be God. Think about it. I was placed above the place where the boy begged, I listened, and most importantly, I couldn’t help. I just sat there. 

Around three days before this realization, the breath in this girl's body left. I remember how the boy's eyes were closed and his feet locked into the ground, and his torso rotated with her in his arms. The girl grew pale and looked cold on his shoulder, but he had already pressed as much of her body as he could manage his shirt, and his own skin was growing blue. Suddenly, his eyes opened. He yanked the girl from his shoulder, where there was a dent in her cheek. He shook her, a little bit, and her limbs moved like they were barely attached to her object. Loosely, and not particularly affected by the concept of bones. A horrible sound arose from his throat, and it kept coming out, even when some people around him came to take the girl from his arms and press onto her chest, and when that stopped they pressed into her mouth, and when her body remained limp, they took her and pressed them amongst themselves, crying softly. They lifted her towards the sky, tilting her head a little so the light of the moon bounced off her, and I could only see the pink in her lips, not the blue. 

If I was the only piece of the boy who was not suffering, then maybe I should remain unaffected. A small slice of him that was and not labored. The rest of his mind would visit me when it wanted to feel unafraid. But if I was God, maybe I should cry with  him. I moved on shaky limbs to a dark outline of a tree. I lay unconscious on top of a branch. For the first time in my life, or whatever my existence was measured in, I let myself feel desperately alone. Suddenly, I felt a gentle tug on the chiffon dress. Mouse was climbing up it, his determined face arched high in the air. He crept up my dress and made a final leap onto my lap. I nestled my wrist in the indent of his back, and we both lay there suspended. I looked closely to find hints of purple protruding from the grey sky. Mouse nuzzled himself against me. Whether it was on the top of the world or the back of a mind, Mouse existed there with me. 

It isn’t much, but I think it will suffice.