The Starless Sea

It feels like it’s looking at me, in that old-building creepy way. That space that’s had so many people in it but now there’s no one so it feels extra empty.

* * *

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I’m inside now and it was definitely a library once upon a time. There are empty shelves and card catalogues. No books, just random invoices and packing slips and a few stray cards, the old-school kind you had to write your name on.

And everywhere, everywhere there are these paintings.

Like graffiti and Renaissance oil painting had mural babies. All abstract and fuzzy here and there and then hyperrealistic other places.

There are bees swarming down staircases and a cherry-blossom snowstorm and the ceilings are painted to look like night sky, covered in stars with the moon moving across it from phase to phase.

There are murals that look like a city and others that look like a library within the library and one room has a castle and there are people. Life-size portraits that are so realistic at first I thought there were actual people in here and I nearly said hello.

One of them is Z and anothe

r is that guy from the bar (I knew that guy was important I knew it).

* * *

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And one of them is me.

I’m on the goddamned wall.

I’m on the wall in the orange coat that I am currently wearing with this notebook in my hand.

What the hell is going on here?

* * *

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On this big wall there’s a huge owl. Not a barn owl, a barred owl maybe? I don’t know my owls. It’s gigantic and takes up most of the wall with its wings spread and there are all these keys in its talons hanging from ribbons and it has a crown above its head.

Under the owl there’s a door.

It has a crown and a heart and a feather on it, in a line down the center.

The door isn’t part of the painting.

It’s an actual door.

It’s in the middle of a wall but there’s no door on the other side, I checked. It’s solid wall on that side.

* * *

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The door is locked but it has a keyhole and hey, I have a key.

Maybe the Time has come.

* * *

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