I was 25 and she was 23. We had been together for six, or eight, months — depending on how you define together. At the time, I was living rent-free with my uncle and helping out at the pub that he owned at the edge of town. She, having moved to Prague about six months prior, was living in the center in an apartment that seemed nice at first but turned out to be occupied by sociopaths.
When the tensions among her roommates exploded in a drunken night of shattered glass, she took it as her cue to move out — security deposit be damned.
We met the summer prior on the edge of town. She was a Euro-tripping American looking to discover the authentic corners of Prague and I was excited to practice my English with a native speaker and serve someone who wasn’t a grumpy old man. Originally, she was meant to spend three days in Prague, then move on to Budapest and then travel through the Balkans and fly back home through Prague.
After the first night we spent together, she decided to skip Budapest. By the end of the week the Balkans were a purely theoretical place. When it was time for her to fly back home, she dawdled and almost missed her flight. It wasn’t until we were sweaty and out of breath at the security check that she told me that she had decided to move to Prague.
She didn’t want to rush things with me, she said. Right after graduation she had moved in with her high-school boyfriend and the blisters from that mistake were fresh. For two months of daily calls and e-mails and photos, we ironed out the details of our relationship. We were taking things slow. When her roommate turned out to be a bottle-throwing maniac, we sped up a bit.
We moved in together the spring of 2014.
That’s the first time I saw the painting.
I didn’t pay much attention to the décor of the apartment when we first moved in. I was just happy to be with her. I was just happy to feel like an adult in a stable relationship. It wasn’t until a lazy Sunday evening, when she fell asleep on the couch after we watched something streamable, that I noticed the painting.
A lush field of wheat on a bright summer day. In the distance, there sat a humble little cottage. In the foreground, a father and his three children worked at the fields. They stood on their hind legs and worked at the wheat with human tools, but the creatures were mouse-like in their appearance.
The painting didn’t fit in with the rest of the modern apartment. Everything else came directly off the discount rack in IKEA but the canvas that rested above our television was wholly original. Oil paint, detailed to an astounding degree — the mice people in the field seemed to move ever so gently.
I remember being taken by the painting for a while, trying to understand what it meant or how the artist had captured such life-like motion — but then she started to gently snore on my shoulder and I was far too in love to keep my attention steady.
The painting would occasionally catch my eye while I was cooking or ironing clothes. Whenever we were watching streamables and the question of whether we should let the next episode play or go to sleep came up — I would find my eyes drifting to the mouse-people, as if seeking their guidance.
They seemed happy back then.
The painting interested me, but back then it was just a passing interest. Life in the center took up most of my attention. I had gotten a new job and that was somewhat stressful, but I was beyond ecstatic to get out of the cement shackles of the outskirts. The art-nouveau, the bars, the concerts under my windows — my new address made me fall in love with the city in a way I didn’t think possible. I got to see Prague from a whole new different angle and she was there with me to experience every last bit of it.
A couple times, we talked about getting married to make the immigration process easier. It was usually meant in jest — but we still talked about it with straight faces. The first six months we spent in that small apartment were sheer bliss — but then… Well, something went wrong.
It could have been the product launch at work that nearly drove me into a nervous breakdown. It could have been our honeymoon period running out. It could have been that she was just getting tired of Prague. Either way, we found ourselves slowly becoming strangers to each other.
This all happened nearly a decade ago, so you’ll excuse me if I forget the details. I only vaguely remember the slow dread of drifting apart.
The painting is what I remember with painful sharpness.
It happened the first time I tried having a serious conversation about our future. That night, I asked a lot of questions and received a lot of sad shrugs in response. It was after one of those quiet stabs to the heart that I found my eyes wandering.
‘Weren’t there always three mouse kids?’ I remember asking.
For a moment her face lost its sadness and turned to confusion. ‘What?’ she asked.
‘On the painting, it was always the dad mouse and three kids, right? Now there’s only two.’
It wasn’t just the missing mouse though. There seemed to be a shift in the skies of the painting. The wheat no longer shined with the golden hue of the summer sun. Storm clouds were gathering off in the distance. The mouse-people no longer seemed excited about their labor and, I was almost sure of it, one of them was missing.
‘I don’t know. Never paid attention to the painting. Sorry,’ she said and then, with a sigh, she nudged the conversation back towards the topics neither of us wanted to discuss.
We broke up about a week later. I moved back in with my uncle. She stayed in the apartment. Most of my stuff was still in the center, so, about once a week, I would drop by to chip away at the sluggish task of moving via subway. I’d always go over when I knew she was at work and I’d make my visits as swift as possible as to not allow myself to wonder about how her life was going without me.
After a month of my periodic relocation all that was left in the apartment was a pot, two pans and a paperback or two. I went to grab the rest of my things on Czechoslovakian Independence Day, finding a nice bit of irony in it. I was so satisfied with my dramatic scheduling that I completely forgot that she’d get the day off from work as well.
To my surprise, she was in much better spirits than the last time we met. We got to talking about things unrelated to us and then we picked up a bottle of white from the winery downstairs. After a couple hours we grabbed a second. My books and pans stayed put that night.
For the next couple of weeks, we relit whatever spark our relationship had lost. It was as if the past couple of months had been spliced out of the film-reel of our lives. We went on trips out into the country together. We spent countless hours laughing and sharing the obscure details of our lives. The sex was as blissful as it was the summer we first met.
Throughout our little post-break up honeymoon, the painting stopped bothering me. It was still drawn with style and care which defied all expectations and there were still only two mouse-children in the field, but the wheat shined with a golden prosperity once more.
We were happy. For a while we started joking about getting married again. Yet, as is the tendency of post-break-up relationships, our moment passed. Like a morse code call for help, our time together became punctuated by empty silence. Eventually, that plea descended into complete darkness in another night of slow and difficult conversations.
As we sat on the couch and slowly shuffled towards the realization that we have no future together, I once again found my eyes drifting towards the painting. The hue of the fields turned cold once more. Off in the distance, by the cottage of the mouse-people, I spotted a little clump of rocks and a cross that had not been there before.
That night, our relationship breathed its last breath. That ending hurt, but it didn’t hurt as much as the first one. Perhaps, somewhere deep inside, I knew that we were not meant to last. Perhaps, it was the strangeness of the painting that lessened the sting of the breakup. It all hurt, obviously — yet as I rode my 2AM Uber back to the outskirts with my collection of paperbacks and pans, I didn’t think much of her.
I thought about the mouse people.
I thought about the little grave next to the cottage. I was certain it was never there before. I was certain the painting was changing in front of my eyes.
We kept radio silence for about a week. I retreated back to the outskirts and nursed my wounds among towers of cement. I had resolved to avoid the neighborhood in which she lived to keep the stitches around my heart from splitting, but soon enough that resolve proved to be pointless.
Prague had turned sour for her. She was moving back to the States. There was still six months left in the contract on the apartment and someone needed to replace her name.
The last time we met, the change in the painting was undeniable. The warm summer sun was blotted out by dark storm clouds. The fields of wheat which were once bountiful grew sparse and diseased. The father and his two mouse-children had ceased their labor and shed their smiles. The mouse people stood on the road leading to a broken-down cottage, their heads bowed in sorrow and their eyes void of hope.
Her bags were already packed and sitting by the door. She was not interested in talking about the painting. She wasn’t interested in talking at all. The changes in the art defied all reason and sent my mind down paths it didn’t belong. Briefly, I considered whether she was not changing out the pictures whenever I left the apartment.
I asked.
There was no motive for her to try to drive me insane and that sort of malice would have been deeply uncharacteristic of her, but I still asked.
She did not respond. She just looked at me as if I had turned into a complete stranger. We sat there in silence, our shared history slowly being wiped away by pain until her Uber notification went off. I helped her with her suitcases. After an anemic hug she got in the car.
I never saw her again.
The thought of the painting being a part of some bizarre prank didn’t seem likely the day I asked it. By the end of the week, it became unthinkable. The painting continued to grow darker and darker. The wheat turned sicklier by the day and the attention of the mouse family slowly turned from their dying fields to the world beyond the painting.
They stared at me.
They started at me with their beady eyes full of sorrow, as if I was responsible for their suffering. They stared at me and their stares brewed a deep guilt within my stomach. I wanted to remove the painting from the wall back then, but the break-up had sucked away all of my resolve. My diet started to consist wholly of ordered food and I scarcely ever visited the living room or kitchen anymore.
The painting was still in the back of my mind. I would still occasionally catch glimpses of its ever-worsening visage, yet life kept me busy enough for it to slowly fade from my attention. I had a job to focus on. I had a life to live.
It wasn’t until a season later that the painting took center stage of my attention again. I had attended the birthday party of an old high-school classmate and befriended his cousin to a degree where she wanted to visit my home after all the bars had shut.
I was not prepared for visitors that night. My bedroom was a mess. My new friend would be unimpressed by my growing collection of take-out boxes around my bed, so, to prevent any feelings of repulsion, I settled down with her on the couch in the living room.
For a while, things were going smoothly. My new friend and I had comfortably settled down and were drunkenly exploring each other’s bodies. But then, with a discomforting suddenness, I felt her body tense under my hands. When I asked her what was wrong — she slowly nodded towards the painting.
Even in the faint reflected light of the streetlamps outside, you could see them. The tortured mouse family stood at the foreground of the painting. They all looked hungry. Very hungry — yet the mouse children seemed to be balancing the edge between starvation and death. Their father had his skeletal arms around them, holding them upright. All three of them looked out to the world beyond the painting with hungry, sunken eyes — begging for deliverance from their suffering.
To ease her discomfort, I took the painting off the wall and rested it face down in the hallway. That did not help. All the sex had dissipated from the room the moment she noticed the starving mouse folk. Soon enough, she was ordering an Uber back home.
It was getting late, after all.
When she was gone, I cleared the take-out boxes off my bed and tried to get some shut-eye. When my mind refused to calm, I mixed myself a nightcap. When even that didn’t help, I gathered up all of the take-out boxes and took them out to the recyclables. Along with the countless greasy paper bags, I also disposed of the painting.
I had hoped that getting the painting out of the house would calm me, but it didn’t. Instead of going to sleep, I found myself hovering by the window, looking out at the containers. Even at a distance, I could sense the mouse folk looking at me. I could sense them blaming me for their suffering.
The presence of the painting in my apartment had made me uncomfortable for months, but the sight of it by the trash somehow felt worse. The thought of it rotting in some landfill made me nauseous. The mouse folk were harrowing to look at, but I was certain that they were alive. They stared up into my window from by the trashcans. They were pleading for help. I was responsible for them.
With the sun starting to rise over Prague and a hangover slowly hatching behind my eyes, I left the house one final time. I didn’t hang the painting back on the wall. Instead, I placed it in the closet, facing away from me. The thought of getting rid of the painting felt patently cruel, but I wasn’t going to let it chase away guests again.
When I woke in the late afternoon, my sheets were drenched in sweat and my heart was pounding. I dreamt terrible dreams that night. I dreamt, in discomforting detail, of the mouse folk. I stood with them in their barren fields. They reached out to me with trembling fingers eaten away at by hunger. They begged and pleaded with me in a soft language I could not comprehend. I stood in their broken world and, for a while, I feared that I would never be allowed to leave.
The dream was discomfortingly vivid and when I woke, it took me many breaths to find my bearing. Yet, once the terror of my sleep wore off and I got some coffee in my system, the lazy Sunday evening soothed my spirit.
Hidden in the closet, the painting stayed out of sight and out of mind. Whenever I was cleaning the apartment, I would see the back of the frame when retrieving the vacuum. I would never turn it around. I would never spare it a second look. I couldn’t abide by the painting ending up in the trash, but the less I knew about it, the happier I was.
The years passed on. It took a while for me to shake off the heartbreak and the general discomfort the past year had instilled in me, but soon enough the thoughts of my American affair — or the painting — slid away.
I met another woman — a woman who would soon become my wife. We lived together in the apartment and then, our little family grew. Our daughter wasn’t planned, but she was loved. Before she could walk the humble pad in the city center suited us just fine, but as time wore on it became clear that there were better places to raise a child. The air was smoggy and the trams were loud and the nearest park was too distant to be a daily attraction.
Eventually, my family retreated from whence I came — back to the outskirts.
We moved past the cement housing projects and into the quiet suburbia of family homes. Briefly, I considered leaving the painting behind — but it didn’t feel right. Without checking if the canvas had changed, I threw a tarp over it and deposited it in our new attic.
Hidden out of sight, the painting slipped my mind completely. For years and years, I completely forgot about my old relationship or the queer mouse folk. It wasn’t until this morning that I found myself looking in those harrowed eyes again.
I woke to a scream from the attic. I’ve told my daughter a hundred times that she’s not allowed to play up there, but she’s never been a particularly obedient child. The moment I heard her, I rushed up the stairs as fast as I could. I had feared an injury, but the moment I saw the tarp on the floor I knew something worse had happened.
Over the years, the painting had continued to change. The fields had wilted into dead earth. The humble cottage in the distance was laid low into kindling. The mouse father held his children in his skeletal arms, yet they no longer seemed alive. His tortured eyes stared out into the world. Bloodshot and sunken and pleading, the mouse father looked at me.
My daughter is still shaken. My wife insists the painting be thrown away immediately but I can’t bring myself to dispose of it. I can’t bare the sight of the suffering mouse folk peeking out of a landfill.
Something deep inside of me doesn’t want to get rid of the painting. Its existence makes my skin crawl, but the idea of it being thrown out is significantly more unpalatable. There’s a part of me that feels responsible for the mouse folk on the canvas, but now, there’s something significantly more disturbing that I see in the painting.
One of the mouse children looks exactly like my daughter.