When I tried to win him back, I was swallowed by a black hole. He had moved out of our apartment three weeks before and took all his things, his easel and paintbrushes and beloved collection of shark teeth. The first week he was gone I was fire, a writhing mass of flames sticking white-hot pins into the naked memory of his body. A week later, his silence whittled me down to ice, so I melted, flowed like water along the sidewalks where we had kissed. The third week, I tore into his studio and found him standing there, bare-chested and painting a picture of a woman I didn’t recognize.
I crumpled to the floor and began pleading for his return. As he opened his mouth, it peeled back like a banana to reveal the black hole. It widened and enveloped his head, mushroomed across the walls, unfurled all the way down to the floor. Soon, the ground beneath me disappeared, and I laughed as my body plummeted like an anvil in a Looney Tunes cartoon.
Inside the void, I saw countless oil paintings stacked like oversized dominoes and shark teeth the size of hubcaps hanging in the blackness. I got up from where I had landed and rummaged through a pile of paintings as if it was his old laundry, tossing dirty pictures this way or that.
Eventually I found a portrait of me, which I propped on a nearby easel. As soon as the dim light from above settled on the canvas, the painting began to change. My long painted curls withdrew like tentacles and disappeared inside a tightly cropped hairstyle. Clear blue drained from my painted eyes and was replaced with muddy chestnut. My portrait’s nose narrowed, lips tightened, neck elongated, and I convulsed at the sight of the new woman smiling at me.
I seized the necessary art supplies and squeezed an assortment of colors onto a wooden palette. I painted over the eyes, the mouth, the hair, struggling to make the portrait look like me again. It was no use; my artistic skills hadn’t really developed past the third grade. The face had now become a disfigured mess, as if some hideous monster lurking within the abyss had vomited paint all over the canvas.
Realizing the botched facial transplant was beyond fixing, I spotted one of the giant shark teeth hanging in the air, ripped it out of place, and hurled it at the canvas. It landed right above the red explosion meant to be my mouth and stuck there. I grabbed another tooth and jabbed it in the whirlpool that was supposed to be my left eye. I continued doing this until the painting looked like a colossal shark had bitten into it, but swam away toothless.
Suddenly, I sensed him approaching. I curled up and disguised myself as a roll of canvas. He walked to the painting I just massacred and removed each and every tooth, then picked it up and held it close to his chest. The paint was still wet and smeared all over his skin. After a while, he set it on the easel again and vanished into the void.
I stretched myself back into shape and examined the portrait. The face of the woman I didn’t recognize was there again. All the damage I caused had been reversed. All the paint I applied had stuck to his embrace. I felt hollow, like one of his empty tubes of paint, and imagined myself back in the studio with him, my body finally calm and free but the portrait forever between us.