A Thousand Words

It was a fine thing, living in the city. It was an even finer thing living away from it.

Her apartment was warm and smelled like fresh bread, the windows were closed and frosting in the sunset. She took her oven mitts off and brought the plants from the windowsill onto the carpeted floor. The painting on her wall was the opposite of her apartment - a small gentle house, resting on layers of packed snow with trees dotted in the background. No colors but the green of the pines, the white snow, and the yellow light from the windows.

But she had put it up purposefully, a heart-tug reminder of what made life feel good. A guiding source to look at while she sat on the floor with her houseplants and ate warm, buttered bread.

When morning came, the rest of the bread put away and her sleeping bag rolled up in the corner where she had slept that night, she tied her hair back and scooped the plants up one at a time, tucking them in her arms before bringing them back to the windowsill. It was covered in snow and ice.

"Oh- man." She put her plants back down on the floor, came back with a roll of paper towels to clear the slush from the ledge. She inspected the seals of the window, double checked that it was closed, but it looked airtight. In perfect condition, if it weren't for the white paint that was somehow coating the palms of her hands. It was like the window melted and froze at the same time.

She washed her hands and grabbed her keys, wishing she didn't have to worry about apartment landlords, passing the painting of the cabin on the brown dirt ground.

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When she came home from work, it was dark again. Which was something that should make her feel happy - the shorter days, the cold and the snow, the seasonal drinks and music. And it would, if she weren’t stuck at work all day, sunrise to sunset.

She squeezed in awkwardly through her front door, walking sideways and maneuvering a painting almost her height. She had brought it home more for the frame than anything else, the elegant silver wiring fitting of the vintage store she got it from. The actual painting was fine - summer birds eating seed scattered across a simple dirt path, some budding trees sparsely scattered around the corners. Maybe after the season change just around the corner, she'd hang it up, but not for the winter.

She set the painting down and locked and latched the door behind her before heading into the kitchen, pouring water into the kettle for hot apple cider.

Despite the cold, she opened her window before going to sleep that night, pulling her sleeping bag tighter around her shoulders. Maybe stopping by an old art store instead of any place that sold decent blankets was a mistake, and maybe more than that, sleeping with the window open just wasn't worth it. But there was something about existing inside the seasons that made her sleep easier, and she went to sleep that night dreaming about bird songs.

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She couldn't sleep. She lay in her bed, staring up at the wall, shifted to her side and gazed out her bedroom window, pretending she could see stars past the noxious city lights. It didn't help.

She groaned and switched to her stomach, pulling her pillow up and smothering the back of her head with it. She thought about getting her phone from outside her door in the living room where she always left it charging during weeknights - an aggravatingly effective way to coax her out of bed in the morning when her alarm went off for work - but she was so tired. Maybe just staying in bed, rolling over again and following breathing patterns would finally send her to sleep.

It took the tenth car's headlights coming in through her window, lighting up the room in shadows and slats of light for her to swing her legs out of bed and sit on its edge. She leaned over and switched her lamp on, the soft yellow light setting an artificial glow over the room.

She got up and settled down cross-legged on the scratchy carpet in front of the latest addition to her wall - a messy-haired boy, maybe a teenager or maybe older, with his arm thrown over his eyes, tangled in white sheets that looked more like a cold blue from the morning light coming in through his window.

She looked at him, wanting to use him like a mirror - another sleepless kid just trying to do what they're supposed to - but he looked different. Better.

Tears burned her eyes, her hours of overtime and exhaustion balling up in the center of her chest as she looked at his calm, sleeping face, a face she could've sworn looked like how she felt when she had brought it home.

She didn't sleep that night. Or the next. She finally dragged the boy out to the dumpster in the middle of the third night, unwilling to pretend anymore that she wasn't saturated with envy and sleep-deprived rage every time she saw him sleeping peacefully on her wall.

When she came back, she didn't even have time to pull the covers up before she was passed out, in a dreamless deep sleep.

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It was green and lovely outside, a perfect late spring crosswind breezing through all the windows in her apartment, slid open as far as they could be.

"God damn it."

And there were ants. Everywhere. Crawling along the walls, her plants, her art, the peeling cracks and crevices of the kitchen counters and cabinets. They were swarming around the frame and canvas of her picnic painting like they were attracted to the wicker basket and red-checkered blanket.

It had replaced a painting she had remembered looking forward to, but once it was finally up on the wall, it seemed boring - a plain dirt path with a few trees along the side and back.

Maybe bringing the painting of the summer picnic in and acknowledging the existence of warm-weather pests was just tempting fate. It didn't seem fair that she ended up with only the ants - hundreds of them spreading through all three rooms of her apartment - but not a picnic on top of a grassy hill.

She brought her hands up to grip the frame of the painting, the place where most of them seemed to be congregating, but hesitated, bringing her hands up and pulling them back down over and over, unable to find a spot to grab that wasn't covered in the tiny, black, moving specks.

She finally gave up and called her landlord, throwing the least ant-infested changes of clothes she could find into her bag before leaving for a hotel and locking the door behind her.

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It seemed terrifying at first glance. But the longer she looked at it, the longer it seemed to fit in place. Like an optical illusion that was just starting to make sense.

She didn't think it was a wolf inside the painting, brushed with tiny strokes of dark browns and grays. It looked more like a dog, mangy and wild, untamed and untamable, separated from its pack. It stood aggressively, its two front paws spread far apart with its head low to the ground and angled towards the viewer. Its teeth were gleamed with red, the blood staining its fur and dripping down onto the mauled carcass of a stag, torn open in the middle and lying almost lifelessly on the rough forest floor where it was going to die.

The picture seemed unapologetic, honest. A simple story of a dog surviving.

She adjusted it on her wall, tilting it a little to the left so it hung in the center.

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She woke up to scratching at her bedroom door. She opened her eyes and stayed in bed, waited to see if it was anything worth actually waking up for. Maybe it was rats and she was in for another week-long hotel stay. Maybe it was her neighbor attaching something to their ceiling.

She turned over and closed her eyes. She really didn't care.

The door rattling on its hinges with a bang woke her again, and this time she bolted awake, sitting up in bed.

It stayed quiet for a second. Then the scratching started again. The door shook and creaked, and she heard a faint whine come through the thin wood.

She started again, swinging her legs over her bed and freezing. What was she supposed to do? She instinctively patted her night desk for her phone, looking for it in the dark, but a burning fear washed up to her ears as she remembered it was charging outside her door.

The scratching stopped. Maybe completely, maybe just quieter. She couldn't tell past her heartbeat pounding in her ears. She stayed still, too afraid to move and too unsure of what to even do if she did.

She lived on the fifth floor. Even if she might survive escaping through the window, it wouldn't open all the way, some stupid child-safety feature she'd hated since she moved in.

The floor creaked outside her door. It was still for a second, then a clatter from farther away, deeper into the living room. It was a familiar sound, the gentle clattering of glass vases and baubles on a wobbly bookshelf getting bumped into.

She got out of bed before even thinking about it, pressing up against her door and listening. It wasn't locked, it didn't even have a lock. Why didn't they just open it?

She had to get to her phone. Or she had to make it to the front door. The door was closer, and she didn't have to stop except for to open it. She couldn't fight, but she could run.

She stepped to her closet, carefully avoiding the creaky spots in the floor, and slid the door open, as slow as possible to not make it squeak. She slipped on her shoes and went back to the bedroom door, stood with her hand on the knob, and waited.

It was quiet.

She stayed still, braced and ready, fighting to not just go.

It was quiet.

Scratching started again, pawing and scraping outside her room, this time at the wall between the bedroom and the living room, around the corner from where was standing.

She twisted the doorknob. Slowly, carefully. She pulled the door open, just enough to squeeze through, and slipped out. She glanced down behind her - the outside of the door was completely splintered, the paint chipped and torn off, leaving shreds of exposed wood.

She didn't stop to think about it. Didn't have any time or presence of mind to. She had to get to the front door.

She took a step forward, pale white light coming from the street lamp outside and illuminating the apartment, casting flowing shadows through the sheen curtains. She could see the door, still locked and closed, shining just above where the light cut off, leaving the floor in the dark.

Another step forward. And another. Until her foot kicked into something, pressed into it with a little give.

It was a deer. A stag. Its giant antlers pressed jaggedly into the wall, dented and scraped and bloody. Its eyes were open and its body hardly looked like a body anymore, and it wasn't breathing.

She was frozen. Standing in front of it and staring down, unable to move, unable to even think.

A growl came from behind her, a deep snarling that must have been loud for her to hear it over the panic roaring in her ears. Her eyes came up to see a shadow against the wall in front of her - a tail hanging low to the floor, a slim body elongated over four legs, the unmistakable shape of a dog's head.

She flew forward, tripping on the stag and desperately trying to crawl over it, trying to get back to her feet and slipping on the blood, covering her hands and clothes and shining black in the dim light.

She scrambled up and ran to the door, unchained it, unlocked it, pulled on the handle, once, twice, but it didn't budge.

The shadow wasn't on the wall anymore.

She pulled on the handle, screamed and slammed against the wood, pulled again.

The door was painted shut.