Room for Another - Part 4

Room for Another

Alex stood very still, watching the painting as if stillness itself might help him understand it.

At first Magera just seemed a part of it: a dark-haired woman painted inside a copy of her studio, with the moonlit garden beyond the arch behind her. Elmer sat at her feet in the painting, his tail wrapped around his paws. Neither of them moved. They might have been ordinary brushwork, fixed and silent, if not for the eyes.

She seemed to be watching Magera in the studio she’d left behind, where the newest Magera was watching the last one.

The one who now walked through a seaside painting leaning on the side easel, its gauzy curtains stirring in a salt-bright wind, a small dark figure walking toward the beach house she had just finished painting.

No one spoke.

Then, beside him, the new Magera lifted the seaside canvas from the side easel with quiet care and carried it to the wall. Alex followed the motion automatically, though his attention kept pulling back to the first painting where Magera stood inside the studio-within-the-studio, still and intent. The new Magera leaned the finished canvas in place, where the painted sea continued to breathe and glitter in its frame.

Then she set a blank canvas onto the easel.

Inside the original painting, Magera moved. The shift was slight, but Alex saw it at once: not movement exactly, but awakening. Her gaze flicked from the new blank canvas in the real studio to the side easel inside her own painted studio. In her version of the studio, the canvas was still blank. 

Her laughter broke the illusion of paint at once. 

“Magera,” Alex said. But she didn’t answer. Instead, she picked up a brush. Elmer jumped lightly onto a stool beside her, accepting this new absurdity far more quickly than any human could.

Beside him, the newest Magera now stood with one hand resting lightly on the worktable, watching. Not denying what she saw. Her attention stayed fixed on the original Magera’s hands, as if she too were learning a new set of rules.

That frightened Alex more than if she had smiled.

Magera was painting now, painting inside a painting. The first strokes were pale structure and light. A tall window. Clean verticals. A suggestion of ironwork beyond. Then the image opened into something unmistakable: a small studio flooded with morning brightness, elegant and spare, with tall windows and the Eiffel Tower rising beyond them into a pearl-gray sky.

Paris.

Of course she would choose Paris. Hadn’t she always told him she wanted to go there, to paint the city of lights. Alex felt his throat tighten.

She painted quickly now. Every movement of her hand was certain. Beside him, the newest Magera watched in still concentration, saying nothing.

The air around him changed, charged. The scent of wet pavement, and something floral drifted in from an unseen window box. In the painted studio, a curtain stirred. And on the worktable beside him, a rag lifted at one corner though every window was shut.

Alex stepped back.

He’d seen Magera’s paintings spill before. Mist from a river. Music from a violinist. The breath of a storm-dark sky. But those had always felt like overflow, magic escaping its frame.

This moved with purpose.

Inside the painted studio, Magera added the last edge of the window frame. The Eiffel Tower sharpened into full, impossible recognition. Morning light poured into the room.

Then she set down the brush and Alex’s whole body locked.

She came to the veil one last time and placed her hand against it. He matched it without thinking, solid canvas against his palm, her fingers visible opposite his through the trembling shimmer.

“I’m sorry,” she said, though he didn’t know for what.

Then she turned. She crossed the painted studio, Elmer following behind, and stepped into the Paris canvas.

For one impossible second Alex saw her there, inside the painting in the painting, Elmer winding around her ankles on a pale wooden floor. Alex stood motionless in the real studio, his hand still pressed to the canvas.

Beside him, the newest Magera drew breath and when he turned, she was no longer watching the blank canvas.

Now she was watching him. Not coldly. Not cruelly. With dawning understanding, as if she had just learned enough to know what came next.

Then she glanced toward the kitchen door and back at him.

“I’m starving,”  she said, “aren’t you? Why don’t I make us some dinner?”