Goodbyes
by David O’Mahony
Fred wheeled his chair over to the painting and laced his fingers in his lap.
About six feet long and four high, the once-proud work of art was a dingy thing in a dirty, cracked black frame that made the image more ominous every time he looked. On the canvas, a procession of raucous adults in dour peasant clothing danced through a dense forest behind a red-cheeked piper in a mustard flatcap. The ninety-eight faces in the procession stared at him, so big they could almost have stepped off the canvas. Whether they were twisted in merriment or pain he could never decide, though he had counted them a thousand times, lingering always on the woman with the foxy hair.
Fred’s daughter Carla knocked on the door frame and came in without waiting. “Dad, it’s time. We need to go.”
A tear rolled down Fred’s cheek, and he wiped it away angrily. It wasn’t his house anymore. They were selling it to pay for the care home.
“I always thought if I kept the thing, your mother’d come back somehow.”
“I know, Dad.”
He shook his head. “I couldn’t do it. Nothing was good enough for him.” He threw his jaw forward to point at the piper on the canvas, his cap and cheeks the only real dash of color in the whole thing. He’d haunted Fred’s dreams for decades, like he was taunting Fred with a secret he wouldn’t tell.
“It’s a painting, Dad. You know it is.” She’d been five when her mother Sandra had disappeared. Fred knew all she remembered was her mother obsessively reciting the Pied Pier of Hamelin every bedtime and promising to “tell her how to live forever” when she got older, though she never had, and Fred didn’t know what she’d meant anyway. He’d never had time for fairy stories.
“Why can’t I take it with me?” Fred asked.
“We talked about this. Remember? We agreed it would be best for you to have a fresh start.”
“I don’t want one.”
“I know, Dad. But you were at the bottom of the stairs for two days before I found you, and God knows if you’ll ever get the feeling back in your legs. At least they have nurses and staff around if you fall again.”
Fred sighed without taking his eyes off the painting. He hadn’t fallen; he’d been running from the piper, though when he told his doctor through a haze of painkillers the man had nodded and hummed. Eventually the man had said, almost bored: “Mr Connolly, I think it’s time you found a place with round the clock care.”
“I don’t know why you didn’t chuck it,” said Carla. “You’ve been obsessed with it since Mom left.”
“You wouldn’t understand.” He had tried to get rid of the painting many times, but it always found its way back.
He’d tried to tell his daughter how her mother had painted and framed it, but Carla rolled her eyes and said he was getting confused again, that it had to be from some thrift store.
But he’d seen Sandra paint it, hadn’t he? He’d seen her smile, so proud and telling him how the magic was always when oils were still wet, before they’d set and become final? In his mind, it was the last happy day of his life. After his foxy-haired wife had disappeared, half the family had said, “What did you do, Fred, you must’ve done something, Fred”, until he began to believe he must have. Once that happened the labour of trying to remember had cracked him open and hollowed out his mind until he saw the piper in the corner of every room, taunting him as if to say that staring at the painting long enough might reveal why Sandra had gone. He envied how the faces alongside the piper would stay young forever as he began to decay.
“Dad? Are you listening?”
“Yes.” Although he wasn’t, really. He was fixating on a bubble of oil paint that seemed about to burst. How had he never seen it before?
“Christ,” said Carla, leaning over him. “A leak? Or is the paint melting? I know it’s hot, but…”
A rivulet of black had crept over the edge of the frame, and a drop of green seemed to be snaking its way alongside it. Fred gripped the arms of his chair. Hadn’t Sandra said something about the paint melting before she left?
Carla reached out to dab the image.
“No,” Fred yelled, catching her hand roughly.
Carla twisted free, taking a step back.
“Sorry, I don’t know what came over me.”
She kept moving toward the door. “This isn’t easy for me either, you know?”
“I know.”
She sighed, hanging in the doorway. “I have some water in the car,” she said, deflated. “I’ll get it, you’ll drink it, you’ll say your goodbyes, and we’ll go.”
“That… sounds like a fine idea,” Fred said quietly, head tilted as paint began to drip to the floor. His fingers hovered a hair’s breadth away from the frame. The piper’s face loomed – Fred could almost swear he heard music. Perhaps the piper hadn’t been mocking him all this time – perhaps he’d been making a promise. “A fine idea,” he repeated.
Carla screwed her eyes shut for a moment, then went for the car, heels thumping on the old wooden floor of the long hallway.
She winced at the sunlight and oppressive heat outside, then sat in the car with the AC while sipping a bottle of stale water. The radio cycled through bland pop songs until she decided her father had had enough time. The sooner he was out of the place, the better; it would clear his head, surely. Maybe she should have insisted sooner. At least then she could have taken that painting out back and burned it when he wasn’t looking, no matter how much one of the faces on the canvas looked startlingly like her mother.
“Dad?” she called from the front door. “Ready to go?”
Nothing answered apart from swirls of dust in the sunlight.
“Dad?” Had he fallen again? Or had a stroke?
“Dad?” She ran to the living room, greeted by an empty wheelchair against the wall. The paint no longer wept. “Dad? Dad?”
As she began running from room to room, ninety-nine pairs of eyes turned to follow her as they danced forever behind the piper.
David O’Mahony is a horror and dark fantasy writer from Cork, Ireland. He has had more than 45 stories published or accepted across the globe, with his work finding homes with Temple Dark Books, Graveside Press, Cloaked, Parabnormal, Dragon Soul Press, Rogue Planet Press, Dark Holme Publishing, Wicked Shadow Press, Exquisite Death, AntipodeanSF, and others. He has written non-fiction at irishexaminer.com.
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