A Nest of Nightmares

But she would lose this afternoon, too, if she didn’t snap out of it. Sara turned the canvas to the wall and looked around. Watercolours, perhaps. Something quick and simple, something to loosen her up. She had been too stiff, intimidated by the oils and canvas. She would have to work up to them.

‘Can we go to a movie tonight?’ Michael asked as she emerged from her room with the big, spiral-bound pad of heavy paper and her box of watercolours. He was marching a blue dinosaur across the kitchen table and through the fruit bowl.

‘We’ll see,’ Sara said absently.

‘What does that mean? Does that mean yes?’

‘It means we’ll see when the time comes.’

‘What will we see? Will we see a movie?’ He followed her outside.

‘Michael, don’t pester me.’

‘What’s that?’

There was a new tone to his voice. Sara turned to look. He was staring in the direction of the lake, astonished. ‘Is that the ghost?’

Recalling her dream, Sara felt a chill. Shading her eyes against the sun, she peered across the lake. She saw a large white animal walking on the farther shore, too oddly shaped to be a dog, too small for a cow.

‘It’s a pig,’ Sara said. She had never seen such a large, white pig before, and she wondered where it had come from. What was somebody’s prize pig doing loose?

The pig had stopped its purposeful walk and turned toward the water to face them. Now it stood still and seemed to watch them. Sara took an involuntary step backward, her arm moving down and to the side as if to shield Michael.

‘It sees us,’ he said. Sara couldn’t tell from his voice if he was frightened, pleased, or merely commenting.

‘It can’t get to us,’ Sara said. ‘There’s all that water in between.’ She spoke to comfort herself. She had never heard that pigs were dangerous, but it was a very large animal, and there was something uncanny about it, about the way it stood watching them.

Then, just as abruptly as it had come, the pig turned away from the water and began to trot away, following the shoreline until it was out of sight.

Sara was relieved to see it go.

That night, Sara painted. She got out her oils and a new canvas; she felt inspired. She was excited; she hadn’t felt like this in years. The picture had come to her, a vision she felt bound to paint. She was in no mood for sketches or exercises, or ‘loosening up’ with watercolours. This was her real work, and she needed no more training.

The main figures in the painting would be a large white pig and a shrouded human figure. Sara hoped to express some of the terror she’d felt during her nightmare, and to recapture in the painting the unease she had felt upon seeing the pig on the shore in the midday sun. She planned to keep the robed figure’s face hidden, fearful of painting something merely grotesque instead of terrifying.

She worked for hours, late into the night, until she realised that weariness was throwing off her sight and coordination. Then, pleased, exhausted, and looking forward to the next day’s work, she went to bed.

The children let her sleep no later than they ever did in the morning, but Sara didn’t mind. The hours spent painting seemed to have invigorated her, enabling her to thrive on less sleep.

When Mary Alice arrived to pick up Michael, she offered to take Melanie for the day, too, as company for her youngest. Sara gazed at her in mute gratitude, seeing her blonde, smiling friend as a beneficent goddess, the personification of good fortune. With both the children gone, she would be able to work.

‘Oh! Mary Alice, that would be wonderful! Are you sure you don’t mind having her along?’

‘What’s one more kid? Chrissie needs someone to play with. And besides,’ she patted Sara’s shoulder, ‘it will give you some time to paint. Are you working on anything right now?’

It had been Mary Alice, with her ready sympathy and praise, who had encouraged Sara to take up painting again.

Sara smiled. ‘I started something new last night. It’s different. I’ll show you what I’ve done when you get back.’

But despite her words and easy manner, Sara felt her stomach fluttering nervously when she went to bring out the uncompleted painting after the others had left. She was afraid of what she would find; afraid it would be clumsy or stiff or silly, and not at all what she remembered working on.

To her own surprise she was pleased by the sight of it. She felt a rising excitement and a deep satisfaction at the thought of having uninterrupted hours to work on it.

The pig and the shrouded woman stood on a misty shore. Nearby was a bush in which nested a large white bird.

Sara painted all day with an easy authority she had not known in years. She felt light and free and intensely alive. She didn’t have to think about what she was doing; the work had its own existence.

‘Unusual.’

Sara turned with a start to see Mary Alice. She felt as if she had been abruptly awakened. The children – her own, and Mary Alice’s three – were roaring through the house like a hurricane. She looked back at the painting and saw that it was finished.