STILL LIFE by Michael Wegener

She’s standing in her family home, in the door to one of her childhood rooms, the room she was in when she killed her father. It used to be something like a secondary space, the one she was allowed to use for drawing and painting, and is still holding all of her old equipment, paper and pencils and charcoal, easels and canvases and brushes and cans and buckets of various kinds of paint. She hasn’t set foot in this room since she was 15 years old.

She shivers and rubs her bare arms. It was only minutes ago that she woke from a black and dreamless sleep, induced more by the medication the doctor left than her exhaustion—controlled unconsciousness, really—the duration of which is unknown to her. Long enough to leave her bleary-eyed and with a head stuffed full of cotton. She listens to the unnatural quiet of the house. There’s no one else inside. On her way shuffling down the upstairs hall, she sees through one of the hallway windows her husband sitting on a lawn chair outside, as unmoving as the toy dog lying in his lap, and just as untroubled by the rain pouring down on him.

Before she realizes what she’s doing, she has stepped into her old room and propped a blank 30 by 35-inch canvas onto one of the easels. When the realization comes, she steps back and puts a hand over her mouth.

The last time she’d been in this room was on a storm-swept night eleven years ago. She’d just fled from a devastating fight with her father—the reason for their fight the only detail of that night she has long forgotten—running up the stairs with tears streaming, slamming the door behind her. Even today, she can still feel the sense of disappointment and betrayal boiling in her blood. Over the next few hours, she stood on almost exactly the same spot she is standing now, throwing and slashing the shades and colors of a dark forest scene onto a canvas in a kind of rage that only a self-righteous 15-year-old can feel. Outside, the thunderstorm was raging with her, spurring her on as she conjured up in frightening detail the edge of the forest just beyond their property. The last thing she added was the body of a man, prone and bleeding, at the center of the painting. When she was done, she collapsed onto an armchair in one corner a few feet from the easel and instantly fell asleep.

It wasn’t until morning that they found the dead form of her father lying outside, head crushed beneath a fallen tree branch.

Days later, right after burning the painting in the fireplace outside—and still a long time before even beginning to know how to move on with her life—she made a promise to herself that she’d never paint or draw or even doodle again, burying that part of her under layer upon layer of fear and guilt and confusion.

Now, at 26 years old, she is going to break that promise. She wipes at her face with her hand and sets about her preparations, heedless of the mess she’s making of her nightgown, feeling distantly surprised at the endurance of her muscle memory.

When her palette and brush are ready in her hands, she begins without hesitation. The scene she is painting—the first in eleven years—is a room in this very house. In fact, it is the room next to the one she is working in now. She is composing a part of it—as if glimpsed through a partially open door—in warmly colored oils with the slightest whirls and twists of her wrist. She is taking particular care with the myriads of cartoon clouds covering the sky-blue wallpaper of the room, careful to get the spill of the light that is streaming in golden shafts from the double window just right. Outside the window, the outstretched arms of a beech tree lean into the frame, making shadows of its reaching leaves sprout on the hardwood floor inside, as if beckoning the dead wood back to life. The brush in her hand, working faster and more confidently with every passing stroke, moves on to furnish the room with parts of a cream-colored dresser, a shaded lamp on top of it waiting uselessly for the sun to fade, and a rocking chair next to it that, to her, looks almost vulgar in its stillness. The last two things she adds this time are a white wooden cradle in the room’s corner, and an infant nestled inside of it. She envisions the infant’s tiny figure so finely painted you can almost see it move as it cries with life. But while the cradle turns out as perfectly rendered as the rest of the room, the craft seems to bleed from her hands as if from open veins the moment her brush touches the canvas to tuck in the baby—her final strokes leaving nothing but a blurry smudge of brown and black trapped behind the white bars of the cradle.

The certainty of her failure already coiling around her heart like barbed wire, she steps back and waits and listens. Still, there is nothing but silence echoing through the house, emanating from the nursery behind the wall next to her in deafening waves. She buries her face in her hands. Exhaustion is looming over her again like the crumbling ruins of an ancient tower. But then she dries her cheeks once more and removes the painting from the easel and puts it on the floor, leaning it against a free spot on the wall. With legs and arms and hands a little weaker than before, she picks up another blank canvas.

As she works, a daze is settling over her that grows heavier and heavier with every minute, as if her mind is being buried alive while her body keeps going, somehow. By the time the third painting is standing on the floor, putting up a new canvas has become a physical strain. And yet, each time she braces herself and starts anew, with the shadows in her room crawling still further up the walls, until even light itself is failing.

When it has become too dark to see, she drops her brush and palette to the floor and curls herself up on that same old armchair and closes her eyes, longing, in this moment, for nothing but sleep to take her.

She only knows that sleep was mercifully quick to comply when she’s woken again by a noise—the creak of a floorboard from beyond her door. It takes her a few seconds to be certain that her eyes are open; this night’s impenetrable darkness has flooded the last nooks and corners of the room. She gropes around for the floor lamp standing next to the armchair. When it comes, she squints against the light.

As her eyes adjust, they are drawn to the paintings neatly propped against the walls and furniture in an uneven line. For a moment, she squeezes her eyes shut again with one thumb and index finger, hardly remembering anything after setting aside the first painting.

She pushes herself into a sitting position with weak arms.

She blinks and stares.

In the painting furthest to the right, the dark shape of a man is sitting in the rocking chair. The figure seems to be untouched by the light shining from the shaded lamp on the dresser next to it, almost as if it has grown from the darkness of the night outside the double window, which in the painting is as deep and black as it is outside her room. Heart in her throat, her eyes move from one painting to the next—right to left—and the scene is always the same. Almost. Like individual frames from a film reel, the sequence of paintings shows the shadowy figure

rise from the chair—

stand in front of the cradle—

grow larger as it moves toward the door—

until it occupies most of the canvas, leaving just enough space to glimpse the wet shoeprints in its wake, and the familiar shape of a gun in one hand.

There is another creak, right in front of the door.

She knows, then. How wrong she’s been.

It never was something she did. If she still cared—if it wasn’t too late for her—she might have smiled at the feeling of guilt being lifted from her like a bad dream at sunrise.

I’m sorry, Baby, she thinks. If only I’d known…

 From the other side of the door, a voice she used to love before love died whispers her name like a question. As if it were a siren’s call, she rises from the chair and starts toward it—then stops herself and turns her head to look at the last painting, the one still standing on the easel. She realizes that it’s actually the first painting she did, but with additions she can’t remember making. The brown and black shape nestled inside the cradle is now detailed enough that she recognizes it as that of Shaggy the stuffed dog, one paw dangling between the cradle’s bars like a hand. In front of it, two bodies—a man and a woman—lie on the hardwood floor, entwined under the caressing shadows of the beech tree, resting in a shared pool of blood that’s gleaming crimson in the warm sunlight. While the man is easily recognizable to her now, the shape of the woman is fuzzy, less refined, as if painted in a rush.

Something else in the painting catches her eye. When she realizes what it is, she looks down at the various cans of paint waiting on the floor next to the easel. Lying on top of one of them is the box cutter she uses to pry open cans and cut through dried paint if necessary. She reaches down to pick it up. Pushes out the blade to its full length.

Turning back to the door, she says, I’m coming, Baby.

Not quite sure who she’s talking to.

xx

Michael is a chemist, consultant and medical writer currently located in Brunswick, Germany. He made his fiction debut with his short story "The Violence of Her Touch" in Mickey Finn Vol. 3: 21st Century Noir (edited by Michael Bracken).

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This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs.

No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.

STILL LIFE © 2025 Michael Wegener