Nightmare Fuel, Day the Twenty-Ninth - In the Gallery

I'm calling this one 29 after a diversion yesterday to use a photo taken by my lovely bride Dr Karine Suskin. IT's interesting that even when we see the same things, her pictures show that she seems them a bit differently than I do. There's probably a metaphor there.


The image came late, so the only other response we get today is from the stalwart Samantha Dunaway Bryant who has, to this point, written a response to each and every one of these.

In the Gallery

The changeling's human parents took her to a museum.

Oh, they didn't know that she was a changeling. That would have been common sense a century ago, but we don't live a century ago, now do we? We live today, in a world where everything is neatly boxed and measured, where the gap in a hedgerow leads to the other side of the hedgerow, where inside a wardrobe is naught but clothes. Where a child who suddenly becomes a bit wild is "precocious" or, perhaps diagnosed as something or other. That's the world in which we live.

These are good parents of the modern world, parents who'd tame their wild child and bring her to museums, to concerts, to whatever hidden delights they could find. In days of old a changeling would be beaten with sticks or burned with fire, perhaps it's better to tame them with money and culture.

This changeling - this Child - was a wild thing. She never could explain how the well-manicured lawns made her itch, how seeing the neatly shaped bushes made her feel constrained, as if bound in irons. So moments of despondent silence would punctuate wild running and dancing barefoot through the lawn, ruining the bottom of her skirts with mud grass stains.

THe museum was different.

Quiet, dark rooms seemed, to the child, alive with energy. Awake. If the lawn cried out because it longed to grow ragged, this was a place that was what it meant to be. She felt at peace here, so ran wild, ahead of the parents. Rapid footfalls on marble floors, echoing over the hushed voices of the other grownups.

The parents let her run ahead. They knew that it was best for children to run wild a bit, even if they didn't know what wildness lived within their tiny girl's heart. They also knew that this gallery was a dead-end, that they'd soon corner their little moppet and laugh and buy her an icecream.

She came to a painting of a wild scene, with a stern and giant creature. It saw her through the painting, she saw it.

On the other side of the painting, wildness. Perhaps the hunt someday. Flowers that grew where they will, not where they were forced to. On this side, her parents who always listened and brought her to these places so that she might run wild. The wild creature reached out, through the painting and offered to her a flower, a single glittering yellow thing. It shone bright in the dim exhibit hall, its deep yellow petals haloed in a bright glow as they flaked off into the air.

Scarlet Table, by vv nan
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/9aEnW

The parents rounded the bend, past that creepy tentacled sculpture. The one that didn't fit any known period ant that the museum was SO wrong for keeping. The next gallery was the deadend, where they'd find their daughter.

They turned the corner.

Did they see their changeling daughter, her eyes upturned as she gazed on a scene of wonder? Or did they find themselves alone, barely noticing the few spilled petals the only sign that anyone was ever here?