The adrenaline was potent. It buzzed in her teeth and danced in her fingertips—convincing her that if she just kept moving, the void beneath her feet would solidify. Serena worked on the painting with a frantic,
desperate energy.
She added more. A cascade of luminous moss dripping from the silver branches. A sky now crowded with unfamiliar constellations, each star a precise, sharp point. A number of mystical creatures, peering from behind the trees.
She mixed colours until her palette was a chaotic mud, adding and adding, layering the canvas with a thickness that began to look less like art and more like a plastic barricade. Every new detail was a brick in a wall against the coming dawn, against the feeling of her own mind turning in on itself.
Then, she stopped. The brush hovered. There was nowhere left to go. The painting was full and crowded, suffocating under the weight of its own embellishment. The vibrant escape had become a claustrophobic prison of her own making.
And in that sudden, terrible stillness, the adrenaline evaporated.
It left her hollow. A profound, nauseating emptiness rushed in to fill the space where the manic energy had been. It was more than tiredness; it was a despair so complete it felt like a physical vacuum in her chest, pulling everything inward—her breath, her thoughts, her will. The anxiety began to coil, a serpent uncurling in the silence of her apartment.
This is it, it seemed to whisper.
This is all there is. The cycle. Forever.
'No.' She couldn't sit with it. She was quick, desperate—a drowning woman clawing for any piece of driftwood.
Her hand, acting on a primal impulse before her mind could object, dove into the crimson. The alizarin crimson, the one that dried to the colour of old blood. She didn't think. She just painted.
The first stroke was a violent slash across the bottom of the canvas, a wound in her silver amethyst world. Another followed, and another, building a form that was both familiar and alien, a shape her mind had only glimpsed in a terror-filled alley—but her subconscious knew in intimate, horrifying detail.
The fetus.
It bloomed under her brush with morbid, obsessive detail. She mixed the crimson with blue to create the livid purple of bruised flesh. She used a palette knife to layer on coagulated textures of gore. She painted the thin, horrifying trace of veins beneath translucent skin—the limbs curled in a pathetic unnatural rictus. The head was too large, the features half-formed—she gave it a mouth, a dark'open O from which she imagined a soundless wail. A portrait of pure, un-lived pain.
Tears streamed down her face, hot and silent at first, then turning into ragged, body-wracking sobs. But she couldn't stop. The brush kept moving, layering on more blood, more viscera.
This was her only form of escape now—not into beauty, but into an externalized horror. If she could put it here, on the canvas, maybe it wouldn't be inside her. It was the only way to stop another day from beginning.
However, in the haze of her tears and the room's artificial light, it moved.
A twitch. A pulsing tremor in the bloody form. Serena froze, brush mid-air, her sobs catching in her throat.
The dark O of its mouth widened. A sound emerged, not from the canvas, but from inside her own skull—a high, thin, piercing wail that was the very essence of anguish. The limbs contorted. It was alive on the canvas. She had given birth to this thing, this disgusting, screaming effigy of her own torment.
A wave of pure, unadulterated rage, obliterated the despair.
How could she?
How could her hands, the same hands that once painted wildflowers from her memories, that crafted dreamscapes of impossible beauty, create something so profoundly ugly?
This wasn't her. This was the other thing, the sleepwalker and the monster, infiltrating her one sacred space.
With a guttural cry that tore from her throat, she lunged forward. Her hands, not the brush, were her tools now. She clawed at the canvas, her fingers digging into the thick, wet paint, ripping through the linen. The wailing in her head became a shriek. She tore at the bloody fetus, shredding it, pulling handfuls of gory paint and fabric away. Then, she threw the ruined mass to the floor and stomped on it, again and again, her bare feet slipping in the mess.
Red. There was red everywhere. On her hands, her arms, spattered across her face and clothes. It was just paint, she knew it was just paint, but it looked like a slaughter. The metallic scent of the pigments filled the air, thick and coppery—like blood.
She stood there, panting, staring at the destroyed canvas on the floor, at the red smeared across the worn floorboards. She looked at her own red hands.
A convulsion seized her. The disgust rose from her gut, unstoppable. She stumbled to the kitchen sink and vomited, acidic coffee and today's lunch burning her throat. The room spun. The red on her hands swam in her vision. She was delirious, panicking, her heart hammering a frantic, faltering rhythm against her ribs.
The last thing she saw was the grotesque, paint-smeared wreckage on her floor. The cold against her cheek came as her legs gave way and the world, at last, went black.
.
.
.
She woke up on the floor, alarm reverberating across the apartment.
The first breath was a gasp, dragging in the stale, metallic air. Her body was a catalogue of new pains: a deep ache in her shoulders, the cold stiffness in her limbs, and a constellation of irritated red scratches across her arms and chest—as if she'd slept on a briar patch in the night. She didn't remember getting them.
Her eyes focused on the wreckage. The shredded canvas lay where she'd stomped it, a scab-like mess of dried paint and torn linen. Red smears decorated the floorboards leading to the kitchen, where a puddle of vomit had congealed by the sink. Her body had dried paint all over.
She looked at it all with a hollowed-out neutrality—she hadn't conducted any rituals. There was no horror. No rage.
She stood, her joints protesting, and stepped over the ruins. She showered, the water stinging the fresh scratches. She dressed in another long-sleeved uniform, the fabric whispering against her wounds. She made coffee. She did not look at the easel again.
It was just another morning.
On the bus, she was a camera with a smeared lens. The city passed by in a blur of gray and beige, a watercolour painting left in the rain. A child cried. A couple argued. The world was painfully, aggressively indifferent. The protest, the fetus, the destruction—none of it had left a mark on her. The universe had not blinked. The bus rattled on.
At the museum, she was a ghost in the machine. Her body performed the tasks: responding to emails, aligning placards, running files, greeting clients. Her hands moved, her legs walked, but Serena was somewhere else—floating in the static behind her own eyes.
A group of men, different from the day before, but cut from the same cloth, loitered near the Egyptian sarcophagi.
"Check out the quiet one," one muttered, just loud enough for her to hear. "Ice queen. Bet she's a freak though."
There was a faint, distant splash—a flare of disgust, a flicker of anger—and then nothing. The feeling was swallowed inside her. Her pace faltered for a single step, then corrected itself. She continued her patrol, the humiliation just a fly in the air.
The bus ride home was a study in collective exhaustion. Faces were slack, eyes glued to phones or closed against the dying light. No one spoke. There was no energy for it. Serena watched them and saw her own reflection in the dark window. She was tired. For years now. It wasn't been the kind of tired that sleep could fix. A tectonic fatigue. The weariness of a planet that had been spinning for too long.
She thought of the paints, the clean canvas she could stretch. The impulse was gone. The vibrant forest was a bloody corpse on her floor. The urge to create, to escape, had curdled into something else—something she had vomited up and then stepped over. She was done.
"… No more painting."
Back in the apartment, she ignored the wreckage. She went straight to her phone, scrolled through her contacts, and pressed call.
"Dr. Evaniski's office," a cheerful voice answered.
"Yes," Serena said, her own voice flat, a recording. "This is Serena King. I need to restart my prescription. The Sertraline. And a refill on the Trazodone." It was a necessary adjustment, adding more oil to a failing engine.
This was the cycle. It had been the cycle since her teen years, when the world revealed itself to be a writhing predator. She would cope by leaving her body, by dissociating through weeks, months, of mundane torment. She would become a vessel for routine, feeling nothing, until the pressure would build and build in the silent, hollowed-out space, and she would blow. A scream in a bathroom. A ripped canvas. A broken plate. The meds would be increased, the restraints tightened, and the dissociation would return—thicker, more permanent, until the next inevitable rupture. It was a war of attrition with herself, and she was losing ground by the millimeter, year after year.