No matter how many people I met here, none of them had faces. Probably I should have listened to my mom, who always told me to draw them. I never did. She said, “Jimmy, if you don’t draw their faces, they will choose their own.” They didn’t do it either.
The good thing about me being a prisoner in my own pictures is that I always drew better than everybody else. It could look much worse if I was one of those who place the triangular sun in the upper right corner or draw a person as a combination of sticks.
I can’t leave this place, no matter which road I take. The town of my own looks almost real. I live in a simple country house with a disabled dog, surrounded by many trees. It was one of my latest pictures. The town center is pretty dull. I made it back at school, before I started my BA. Being short on budget back then, I only used charcoal and cheap sets of pencils, the number of colors in which never exceeded sixteen. That’s not the best place to be in, so I rarely go there.
Far beyond the river there are fields with tulips and acid-green meadows that are a home of geometric animals with disproportionate body parts and bushes of unusual size. These are my childhood drawings. I was surprised when I saw them here, as I had already forgotten about their existence.
It’s not so bad in here as you can imagine. The town has a museum, a zoo and a circus. There is even a Noah’s Ark, which our elementary school teacher once assigned us to draw as homework. On weekends, I go to an ice cream shop. This is the brightest place here, drawn with crayons.
It’s quite calm down here and it never rains. Crime level equals zero. Everything is almost the way I wanted it to be, besides the fact that I have no one to talk to. I’m used to the fact that the residents are faceless. They communicate with each other in their own peculiar way, without words. It was strange at first, but I just accepted it as a fact.
Sometimes it’s even good they are faceless. The day I got here, which was the day I died, I appeared here naked. That’s probably because I died naked. I drowned swimming in the lake after my leg cramped. From this perspective, I am even lucky they don’t have eyes. Otherwise, I would feel uncomfortable. None of them but my dog. But that’s fine. She knows me better than anyone.
I do not know how long I have been here for and for how long I will stay, but if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that you have to try really hard at everything you do, because your purgatory could look like anything you create. And if you don’t think so, then you are just as crazy as I once was.
Yuliia Vereta (she/her) is a Polish writer of Ukrainian origin who is now living her third life in Katowice, where she works as a translator. She is a poet on a good day and a disaster-maker on a bad one. Her speculative works have been published in print and online, among others in Star*Line, Dreams and Nightmares, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Utopia Science Fiction, Penumbric, Kaleidotrope, and ParSec. She is a 2022 Best of the Net Nominee. When she isn’t working, writing or cooking, she tries to remake her stationary time machine into a smaller portable model, since the one she currently owns does not fit into the elevator and constantly becomes the source of strange questions at airport customs.
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