I sit here, staring at a blank canvas.
I haven’t been able to finish a painting in weeks. As I sit here, bored to death, Christine comes in and drops off a sandwich and coffee. To get the juices flowing, she says. But I have nothing to show her except a blank canvas, brushes, and paint on which I spent my last paycheck, and I tell her it isn’t ready yet. I sit like that all day, trying to think of something, and when that doesn’t work, I scroll for hours, willing the internet to show me something that might spark even the tiniest bit of inspiration. But nothing does, and I waste the day, leaving my studio well into the next morning. As pink dawn cracks through the black sky to end twenty-four hours with no progress to show for it, I stumble to my bed, and fall into the sleep you can only have after being up for a full day.
My dreams are barely coherent, the way dreams are. In them I stumble through one white room after another, as if the wallpaper and tiles were bleached and not touched since. The lamps and chairs are white, and even the sky beyond the pale windows is white. I reach a door at the end of a colorless hallway, grab the knob, and snap awake.
All I can see is white.
And then I roll over, and the bedsheet pulls down and blasts me with the happy blue sky, chalky clouds floating across it. After breakfast, Christine stops by again and asks to look at my painting. I tell her I’d rather keep it a surprise until it’s done, and we chat about her parents and politics and other things I don’t care about. The whole time she talks, I think about how if I could just see my canvas, I would be able to finally see what I need to do. Eventually, she takes the hint and stops mid-thought halfway through her story, and when she is finally gone, I put on my smock and grab my supplies.
I was wrong, and have been sitting silently in front of my canvas for an hour. I am so tired.
I’m only aware I‘m asleep again when I realize I’m dreaming. I can’t wake up and am once again in the all-white room, different from any last time. This one is tighter, and the ceiling is only a few inches from my head. I walk to the door and nearly trip on a rug that’s near impossible to determine from the snow-white floor it lays on. Through the door is a hallway with ceiling to floor windows, nothing but a white abyss beyond them. At the end of the hallway lies a room so white I almost don’t recognize that it is my studio.
On my stool, looking at my blank canvas in my blank studio is an entirely blank man.
I wake up, the face of my empty canvas bearing down on me. I’ve fallen asleep in my chair, and my neck is stiff, and my arms are tired, but a wave of hunger hits me so hard that I crawl to the kitchen instead of returning to my bed. I turn on the weather and eat, listening to a man more excited about a snowstorm than a man his age should be, tripping over his words in anticipation while blue snowflake graphics float behind him on a green screen. It has been a while since we got a good coating of snow in the city.
I go to my room and watch the snow fall from my window. On the street, as it is slowly covered, I watch people come out and play in the flurries. Kids build snow forts and throw snowballs, and I watch a woman walk a toddler down their front steps. He sticks his tongue out, catches a flake, and stumbles, landing butt-first in the snow. His mom laughs with him as he flails around, watching him make his first snow angel.
When everyone outside goes back into their warm homes, I collapse into my bed. I toss and turn but cannot stop thinking about the snow, rooms, and canvas. When do I fall asleep, I return to the white hallway, where there is movement beside me for the first time in any of these dreams.
Behind me, the blank door to my studio has opened. The blank man has his hand on the knob and is looking at me. He has eyes now. He lifts a hand that drips fat, thick globs of white and beckons me.
We walk together into the studio, and he pats my stool telling me to sit, leaving sticky pale handprints where he touches it. He walks behind my canvas, which matches the rest of this room, empty and colorless, and tears at it until there’s nothing but paper, wood, and staples crumpled together in a pile at our feet. He kneels, picks up a piece, and puts it in his mouth. It’s only then as I hear the wood snap and pop in it as he grinds the staples between his teeth that I realize he even had a mouth. There is paper sticking out of his chapped, white lips, and as he swallows the wood, he pulls in the paper with a tongue that seems to stretch endlessly back into a deep, pale throat. I see it bulge against his neck as it struggles down, I see the prick of the staple point from inside his skin as it falls.
He looks up and hands a piece to me.
I only put it in my mouth because I am sure I’m dreaming. He smiles, and that pale tongue again emerges and licks those chapped lips as I begin to chew, grinding the frail wood the best I can, the paper going down first, and quickly. My throat is filled with a million splinters as the frame travels down to my stomach, and it does not stay down for long. As soon as I swallow, my stomach begins to reject it. I fall to my knees and retch up the canvas, a pulpy mess of curdled liquid white erupting, the thing behind me watching thoughtfully. He limps in front of me and drops to his hands and knees, paralleling me. He looks straight into my eyes as a river of color screams out of his gaping lips. Reds, blues, purples, and yellows slam out of its mouth, collecting on the floor in a chunky, runny mess. Orange, pink, and green tears leak from his eyes as his stomach bulges and pushes more and more out. It spreads towards me and coats my hands in its slick, viscous contents, meeting, mixing with, then overtaking my own puke. When it’s done, the thing is now splashed with color where it coated his hands, and lays face down in his bile and rolls over. Then again, and again, soaking his arms, legs, and scalp with what it has just regurgitated. As he collects it in his hands to slurp it back down, flakes of solid color dribble out of his mouth and down his arms, and he just as quickly sucks them back in. He cackles as I try to stumble to my feet and begin to crawl away, and moves towards me with hands that drop clotted lumps of muddied colors. His fingers touch my mouth, and as they begin to break through my tightened lips, fingertips dripping with a mixture that fills my mouth until I begin to choke, I finally wake up.
Outside my bedroom, the snow has stopped. I walk to the fire escape in a daze, and my hands shake in the cold. The storm has done its job, and the street lights illuminate nothing but a sheet of pure white. I breathe deeply, forget my dream, and watch the street as a plow truck hauls through, throwing mountains of snow on the sidewalk.
The colorful thing from my dreams is lying in one of the piles the plow has formed, staring right through my window at me.