Still a Life

Fumes and secrets filled the studio as Vincent held his brush like a magician’s wand, the place crammed with easels, paints, and a peculiar energy. A storm had smeared the sky gray, a palette knife slicing clouds to drizzle. He painted a bird—tiny, crimson, mid-flight—and later hung the canvas on the studio wall. When he woke the next morning, the bird was gone.

What the hell?

Chirping brought him to the windowsill where it perched, alive, with a glimmer of life dancing in its obsidian eyes, for he had painted them that way. The cardinal stretched its painted wings, shook them free, having left the former frame’s confines, and flew off into the storm. He heard its call in his dreams later that night, a singsong echo laced with trepidation.

By dawn the next week, Vincent’s fame began to crawl, first through whispers in the cobblestone alleys, then into the wine-soaked parlors of critics. Word spread of his paintings’ vitality, though no one believed it was literal. Commissions poured in: a bouquet that would never wilt, a clock with hands forever poised on now. He delivered his still-life paintings, grinning, pocketing cash, but his patrons never saw what he saw: a Labrador that wagged its tail and barked; a ship in a bottle rocking in imaginary waves; a glass of spirits bubbling with spectral fermentation.

It felt like a gift at first, but Vincent was no saint. The power thrilled him, yes, but it also unnerved him. Each creation carried a fragment of him—a breath trapped in brushstroke.

And what happens when you run out of breath?

Late one night, after too much whiskey, he painted over the red bird’s sky just to see what would happen. The bird returned the following day, wings droopy, eyes dull. It collapsed on the sill, feathers dripping into nothingness and becoming a smudge. A guilt-stain. His breath hitched as the studio dimmed, the scent of turpentine sharper than before.

Vincent vowed not to do it again.

But he did.

A woman named Alice came knocking, her voice sweet as lemon rind. She wanted a painting of her late husband’s pocket watch, and sure, he could do that, for a price. The man had died young, and Alice had aged alone. She gave him the watch to model—a tarnished heirloom ticking faintly with the slightest of heartbeats, like it knew something he didn’t.

“Can you bring it more alive?” she asked, eyes pleading. “I want the watch like it was before, when …” when she and her husband were still young in love.

Vincent smiled his salesman smile and agreed. It’s not like the watch was a living, breathing thing, after all, or could become a living, breathing thing, not like the bird on his sill that he’d brought to life by simply painting it. It was a watch, so maybe he could make it shine a bit more with a few paint strokes, or make its heartbeats tick a little stronger.

He painted the watch, its gilded face glowing, its chain dangling like the tendrils of time itself. When he finished, the pocket watch next to the painting ticked louder than the original, vibrating with purpose. Alice wept when she saw the painting, then wept harder when she brought the actual watch to her ear and heard the new life he’d given it, and finally hugged the canvas tightly to her chest one last time like it held her husband’s ghost, and told Vincent to hold onto it for safekeeping with his others, in case it ever needed any touch-ups.

Weeks passed, and then months, and then the painting of the pocket watch began to haunt him. An imaginary ticking invaded his thoughts, its beat throbbing like an unspoken regret. He dreamed of Alice holding onto the real thing as the noise grew louder, faster, until he imagined it bursting into an orchestra of countless broken clocks. The next day, Vincent painted over it.

His creations became hungrier after that moment, demanding more of him. A painted cat scratched the furniture. A vase spilled flowers that rooted in the floorboards. He tried stopping, but his hands betrayed him, reaching for the brush like an addict for a needle.

“I’ll paint them better this time,” he told himself. “More perfect.”

Perfection, however, like death, is permanent.

Vincent’s breaking point came with the mannequin. A department store commissioned him to paint one of their glossy models into something more “human.” He declined, then they offered more money, and after declining again, offered even more money, enough to get him by for at least six months. He gave the horrid thing daubs of freckles, emerald irises like cracked sea glass, and ruby lips curled into a half-smile. And when he finished, it blinked, then stepped off the pedestal and tilted its head curiously. It moved in jerks, as though its joints were learning to obey some cruel physics. When it reached out for him like a zombie in some old George A. Romero movie, he recoiled, spilling the crimson paint, the same paint he’d used for the bird. The mannequin gasped in surprise, though it had no lungs, and stumble-stepped out of the studio.

It returned three days later, and had somehow learned to talk, for perhaps he had imagined it being able to communicate while painting the plastic thing: “You gave me life,” it rasped, its voice a dry canvas stretched too far. “But now I want you to take it back.”

Vincent didn’t sleep that night, not with that pleading thing standing over him in his studio. Instead, he painted, driven by panic and something darker. He painted the mannequin’s frame into black oblivion with Black 4.0, “the blackest paint in the known universe,” and one of the most expensive, at that, and the mannequin’s limbs dissolved into shadow. He thought he heard it scream one last time as he covered the last of it—faintly, like the cry of the bird in the storm—but when he turned, expecting it still there, he found the room empty.

The next morning, Alice returned, crying hysterically. She held the watch by its chain, like holding a dead rat by its tail, its once-bright face again tarnished, its chain about to break from years of neglect. “What did you do?” she asked him, her voice brittle as watercolor paper.

Vincent tried to explain, but words failed him. He reached for the canvas he’d used for the watch, desperate to fix it for her, to reanimate what he had erased, but Alice recoiled as the canvas fell over and crashed to the ground, and at that moment the watch slipped out from her grasp, shattering on the floor. The sound was deafening—a crack that seemed to ripple through his mind and split him down the center. “You stay away,” she cried, leaving in tears, her footsteps fading like the last tick of the broken timepiece.

In the weeks that followed, Vincent’s paintings turned darker: a tree with blackened roots; a house without windows; a mirror reflecting a world he didn’t recognize. Each canvas drained him, leaving his fingers stiffer, his breath shallower. His hands trembled with every stroke, the brush as heavy as a gravestone. He tried painting light—flowers, fruits, sunrises—but they withered as quickly as they came to life, their colors fading from brights to ash.

He painted a door, hoping to escape, but it refused to open.

The studio itself began to change. Shadows stretched longer than they should. The walls creaked, whispering secrets he didn’t want to hear. His paints thickened to sludge, like a rainbow assortment of congealed blood. Even the air reeked of decay, the faint aroma of turpentine replaced by something metallic. Then came the knocking at his studio door. It started soft, but soon grew louder, insistent, rattling the walls. Vincent didn’t answer, couldn’t, so he painted.

He painted the knocking, its rhythm erratic and alive. He painted the door it pounded against, wood splintering under invisible fists. He painted the shadow of something standing on the threshold, waiting. And when he finally finished, the knocking ceased.

Vincent stared at the canvas, breathing shallowly. The shadow moved, its form flickering like a dying flame. Slowly, he reached for his brush. One last stroke, he thought, just one more, but before any bristles touched the surface, whatever he had painted stepped out of the frame.

It loomed over him, massive yet formless, an oddity smeared to life by his own hand. It didn’t speak, didn’t need to, for its presence was enough—a weight that crushed him.

Vincent tried to scream, if only he could paint that too, but no sound came out of him, and then he tried to run, but his legs gave way as the vile thing reached out with still-dripping acrylic appendages, its touch wet and oily and colder than death, and he felt himself unraveling at that point, his essence bleeding down his own canvas.

When they found his studio months later, the walls were bare, all the canvases blank, and no signs of his body. Only one painting remained among the empty whites: a self-portrait of Vincent at his easel, captured in time, face twisted in terror, brush hovering over an unfinished masterpiece. And in the corner of the room, a single crimson feather lay on the floor, faintly shimmering in the light as birdsong came to life at the windowsill.