The Couple in the Portrait

The paint felt sticky on Mili’s hands, bits of it drying and flaking and getting stuck to her fingernails, and other splotches of cerulean smearing between the lines of her palms.

It’s why she hated painting in the first place.

With a heavy sigh, Mili replaced her paintbrush in its wooden well; an actual, miniature well, where the ropes that might’ve held a bucket now held nearly a dozen paintbrushes aloft in the swirling mix of muddled colors below. It really was more paint than water in the well at this point.

Perhaps that’s why all the colors on the canvas in front of her looked sullied and dull.

The painting was supposed to be a gorm, a tiny, bluish creature with long spindly arms and legs, all claws and teeth and scales, but Mili’s painting certainly looked more like a fish out of water, flopped upon a rock, withering in the heat of a greenish sun.

She’d never be an Artifex, no matter how hard she tried.

With another exaggerated sigh, Mili plucked a large brush from the well and began correcting.

After all, the gorm in the cage in the corner of the room wouldn’t be so still for long.

It was easier, her father had said, to start with creatures like the gorm, ones that really couldn’t hurt you, but could certainly be a nuisance. It, even with its claws, could barely leave a scrape on human skin. Its teeth, though large, were hardly enough to bite into a soft berry.

Really, the scaley blue thing was barely as big as Mili’s hand. That’s why it sat in a bird cage that her mother had scavenged from the wooden shed in the gardens.

Still, even as the little creature stirred in its sleep, Mili shuddered, waiting for it to eventually waken and begin shrieking.

Mili pushed back a lock of her curling red hair before fixing the color of the sun. Then, the claws. Adding a bit of shadow would make them look a bit more real, she thought. Squinting, she let the brush roam against the canvas, streaking gray into long, curving claws that almost, if one blinked a few times, looked just right.

The canvas certainly thought they were close enough. With a quick glance toward the gorm, Mili smirked as she realized its claws had disappeared. No- not disappeared. They were now in the painting.

Its voice, however, was not. The tiny beast chose that moment to open its eyes, yawn a thick-toothed yawn, and assess its claws. Or, where its claws had been before it fell asleep.

And then the shrieking started.

Mili dropped her paintbrush and smacked her hands over her ears in an attempt to squelch the horrible, grating screams, cringing in her uncomfortable stool before pushing away from the drawing table, nearly falling in the process.

The only thing that kept her from tumbling to the floor completely were a pair of strong arms that wrapped around her middle.

“I thought you would be finished by now,” Torrin, Mili’s father, said from behind her, plunking her back onto her stool and salvaging the discarded paintbrush.

Torrin was a tall man, with tan skin and russet hair that Mili envied even when her own wasn’t covered in cerulean flecks of paint. He was strong, and his muscles were no doubt built from the countless creatures he had wrestled to the ground, or at least, that’s what Torrin had always told Mili. But they didn’t need to tackle unsuspecting magical creatures. They had paintbrushes for that.

“I had to start over,” Mili answered, resisting the urge to cover her ears again. The little beast was still shrieking over the loss of its claws, and the windows in the sunroom were shuddering with the noise. Vines that crawled between brick and mortar within the room trembled, as though for fear of losing their leaves.

“Come,” her father commanded, offering her a hand to step over the countless crumpled balls of decaying paper and potted plants that had long ago spilled over, never to be righted. “It’s no use trying to paint now. We’ll wait until it falls asleep again.”

Mili was all too eager to follow Torrin into the sunlit hall of her home, shutting the heavy oak door behind her with finality. Still, the cries of the gorm carried through the wood.

“It’s not hurt, is it?” she asked, casting a nervous glance back at the door before following her father down the hall, past dozens of framed paintings, past standing flowerpots, and tiny benches on either side of the hall, set to face specific paintings in case anyone wanted to come and sit amongst the creatures immortalized in paint.

Mili grimaced at the canvas boasting a tolem, a creature with a long, serpentine body covered in a smooth layer of fawn-colored fur, four legs boasting three toes each, and a beaked head with two small ear tufts. This was a creature that had its own bench for visitors to stare at it, sometimes for hours. Another painting with its own bench across from it was not on a canvas, but on a broken, splintering plank salvaged from a nearly-wrecked ship. The scuid sat proudly upon it, and visitors often marveled at it, wondering aloud what it must have been like in life, free to prowl the seas with its four tentacles and countless eyes.

“It’s not hurt. Don’t worry,” Torrin answered. “It shall regain its claws once the rest of it follows them into the painting, one you were supposed to finish two hours ago.”

Mili pulled up the sleeves of her dress, past her elbows, smearing paint all along the way. “I was finished, at least, I thought I was. But the gorm didn’t disappear. It just sat there.”

“You will learn,” her father answered cheerfully, not seeming bothered in the least that, even after twelve years surrounded by paints and creatures, she still hadn’t grasped how to become an artifex.

Flora, Mili’s mother, was waiting in the garden at the ramshackle picnic table where they ate dinner every night, surrounded by half-iced cakes and flour and rolling pins.

Flora looked up from the cupcake she was icing, her face sprinkled in, well, sprinkles. She always seemed to be a mess of some sort. If it wasn’t flour on her pale cheeks, it was paint, or soil from the gardens. Her hair, long and auburn and nearly as tangled as Mili’s, was piled atop her head in a knot that did little to contain the frizzing strands.

 “Are those cupcakes?” Mili asked eagerly, forgetting the failed painting and the sleepy gorn in the sunroom.

“Of course! You may have forgotten that it’s your twelfth birthday, but I certainly haven’t.” She dusted off her hands and pulled Mili into a hug. “It’s the perfect time to take a break from your birthday, and give you a present.”

Mili squealed with delight and held out her hand. Flora plopped something smooth and cool into her hand.

Peeking between her fingers, Mili saw that it was a small acorn-looking seed, sitting inside a glass orb.

“What is it?” she asked, tapping on the glass.

“It’s a seed from a wishing tree,” Torrin said proudly. “Took us months to track it down. If you ever need to capture a creature that you can’t quite seem to paint, all you need to do is make a wish.”

Mili glared at the tiny thing. Of course it was a gift for her job as an artifex. Mili had once asked her father where the creatures went after they were painted away, and he had simply said “between.” Between what, she didn’t know, but she often swore she saw the black eyes of one particularly angry-looking tolem, following her when she walked through the gallery.

“But I don’t want to be an Artifex. I’m not good at it.” Mili protested, and tried to shove the little bauble back into her mother’s hands. But Flora simply closed Mili’s fingers around the gift.

“It is your destiny,” she said calmly, with a small smile. “Dangerous creatures need to be painted away, and someone needs to keep the island safe. You will learn. I’m sure of it.”

Mili wiped away stinging tears that made her fingertips glisten in the starlight. With a heavy gulp of air, she tossed the bauble in the dirt, hearing the tiny crack as the orb broke. “I wish you were the only ones that were trapped in paints instead of those creatures.” She stormed off without a second glance at either of them.

The sunlight woke Mili the next morning, streaming through the gaps of the curtains that fluttered in the breeze of the open window.

Mili rolled over on her side, pressing her face into the downy softness of a sky-blue pillow. Her room smelled like spring, like pollen and dew and green things. Peeking one eye open, she peered around her room.

There was no lingering scent of buttered scones that her mother loved to bake, no overwhelming smells of the tea leaves her father favored. Yet the sun was shining.

With a grunt, Mili forced herself up, rubbing the sleep from her eyes as she peered around her room. It was still a mess. Her boots were still tucked beneath her desk between discarded, balled up parchments that had once been failed sketches. Her clothes were still on the floor from where she had tossed them last night before slipping into bed.

Mili slipped on a pair of cream-colored slippers and padded softly into the hall, where silence greeted her. Her feet danced over the wood floors, hardly making a sound, just like the rest of the house. No one made any footsteps.

Mili turned the corner into the kitchens, but only a dismal grey morning greeted her. The fire was unlit, and the coals were cold. The manor still smelled like spring, and not like breakfast.

Frowning, Mili passed through the kitchens and into the adjoining hall, the gallery of paintings. She froze. The house wasn’t the only thing that was empty. Each canvas was now white, cold, and very, very empty.

But it wasn’t possible. Mili shook her head as though she might be mistaken. How could it be that all the creatures had been freed? Where were they?

She needed to find her parents, fast. Perhaps they were still in the gardens, on their favorite bench, enjoying the sun.

Stepping outside into the sun, she was greeted by chaos.

There, on the picnic table once filled with cupcakes, was a giant slumbering creature that looked like a cat with wings, cupcake wrappers stuck to its gray fur. The griff. It had once been in a painting all its own. And there, in the sky, circled the anu, a giant bird-like creature that breathed fire. Even against the bright sky of morning, Mili could see the golden and violet feathers that decorated the anu’s large body, and hear the chattering call of its deadly song.  Behind the bench, there was a scuid, squelching its way across the grass to the little pond beyond the gardens.

Mili screamed, but all the creatures paid her no attention.

They were freed, and something told her it was all her fault. How could it be?

She tiptoed towards the bench and the scuid flopped past, ducking behind it to watch as it flopped into the pond with a great splash. No doubt it would devour every frog in sight. At least it wasn’t eating any boats.

Something caught Mili’s eye. There, on the bench, a colorful canvas. It was a painting, the last colorful canvas to be found anywhere in the manor. But this one did not show a creature.

In the painting stood her mother and father, hands clasped together as they stared back at Mili, lips slightly parted as though they were in the middle of saying something to her. But not the Mili that held them in her hands. Rather, they had been saying something to the Mili that had stormed away from them last night.

           Mili’s breaths came quick and fast as she studied the painting. So lifelike, with just a hint of the blurred edges created by brushstrokes. She ran one finger over the painting, as if she could feel her parents' warmth, the itchy fabric of their sleeves, the harsh stubble of her father’s blossoming beard.

“What do I do?” she cried, hugging the canvas close.

The scuid splashed in the pond, and the griff on the table yawned in the sun, content to ignore her.

She wiped away another tear that fell, and another, afraid they might splash onto the painting and destroy it. Mili had never damaged a painting before, and didn’t want to know what would happen if this one were to smudge beneath her carelessness.

A fireball streamed past her head, hitting the bench were the canvas had just been sitting. She screamed again, and hurried to the picnic table. Its feeble umbrella wouldn’t protect her from the anu. What if it set fire to her house? And all the paints and brushes inside? Then there would be no way to capture it.

Stealing herself, she raced inside to the sunroom, gently setting her parents’ canvas on the desk and collecting all her brushes and sack of paints, and hurried back outside. The picnic table would do just fine.

She let her pack spill over the table, tubes of paints rolling away and brushes clattering onto the wood. She had tossed in as many shades of violet and gold as she could find, and several brushes of varying size.

The painting had to be perfect. Mili ripped the cap off the tube of violet paint, and squirted it around the table.

She let her brush glide through the paint, pulling it this way and that along the smooth hickory table. She formed a small head, then lofty wings, then a roundish body that ended in a flowing tail.

Here, under the weight of the flames and the breeze of the flying anu, streams of fire streaking through the air her mind was clear and her hand obeyed.  Golden feathers danced at the tips of its wings, and smattered themselves around the round body, making the bird look almost speckled.

Mili furiously gripped her brush, blending and dotting and detailing each line of the anu’s body. Another screech broke her concentration. The anu had set a rosebush on fire, and it was gleeful as it soared.

But the anu’s feathers were disappearing one by one in a hazy mist. It resembled a living cloud, now, one with no wings, and a rapidly fading tale. Stretching its body up as tall as possible, it let out a final wail, and Mili swept her brush in a final, shading stroke.

The anu disappeared, and a purple, glistening mist clung to the air where it had been.

The griff on the table woke up, studied the painting and the splashes of paint in its fur, and promptly went back to sleep.

She sighed heavily. She had done it. She had painted away a creature. And it had only destroyed- well, looking around now, she saw that much of the garden was now charred.

The glint of the pendant, tucked between one of the few remaining blades of grass in the soft soil caught her eye. It had opened when Mili had thrown it to the ground, like a pocket emptied of its contents.

Hurriedly, she scrambled to her feet. No, it wasn’t a trick of the light, not a funny shadow or a stray weed that had snuck into the gardens.

It was the seed of the wishing tree, and it was growing. A perfectly bright green leaf unfurled from a little sprout in its shell, as though the fresh air and the warm sunlight, and maybe even a little heat from a flame, had helped it burst from its seed.

Mili raced towards it. She could fix everything!

She paused as she touched the leaf. Wishes were very specific, of course, and she would have to be careful. She thought long and hard.

“I wish-” Mili let out a long sigh. “I wish for my parents to be freed from their canvas, returned to me exactly as they had been before; happy and loving and whole, and the best parents anyone could ever ask for.”

Nothing happened for a long moment. The griff snored, an the scuid splashed.

Soft voices floated from the doorway of her home.  

Mili grinned, and sprinted inside. Flora and Torrin sat at the kitchen table, arm in arm, looking as though they had just sat down for tea, but were simply waiting on Mili to arrive.

“Mama? Papa?” Mili managed, her voice raw and cracking with disbelief. The wish had worked. It had actually worked.

Flora grinned, and her lips looked smudged with a peculiar, rosemary-colored paint that seemed to have washed onto her cheeks. Torrin winked at Mili, and his forehead wrinkled what seemed to be a smattering of grayish paint.

“Hello, Mili,” Flora said, holding out her arms. Mili jumped into them eagerly, the warm embrace of her mother’s hug fitting her like a sweater.

“I’m so sorry,” Mili mumbled against the dampening fabric of her mother’s shirt.

Torrin tousled her hair affectionately. “We know you are.”

“And we are sorry, too,” Flora added, pulling away and wiping the tears from Mili’s eyes.

“I accidentally let all the creatures out,” Mili admitted softly. “But I did it. I painted away the anu, all by myself.”

Mili led her parents out to the gardens, where creatures still ran amok, but a beautiful violet bird covered their little picnic table.

“Well,” Torrin said with a grin, touching the painting with pride in his eyes. “Let’s go get some canvases. We have a lot of work to do.”