”The Woman, the Changing Painting, and the Missing Person”
“The extreme sensitivity to initial conditions meant that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings over the Amazon could influence the weather in China.”
The painting changes each time you look at it, the local residents often said, but I had lived in the city for far too long to believe in the myth of the changing painting hanging in the bus station. I stood on the same spot every day, right across me was the mysterious painting of a woman dressed in all white, looking back at the viewer with a solemn look on her face, or turning away, no one knew, in an ominous background filled with patches of green and yellow paint unevenly laid out, which appeared to be a forest from a distance.
I would stare at this picture for long stretches of time every morning before I took the bus to my workplace, sometimes for at least ten minutes, and on some days, for an astounding thirty minutes, if the bus took longer than normal to arrive, yet nothing changed at that time. As a keen observer of many things and with no one to talk to, I spent most of my time just staring at random objects in the bus station. In my head I imagined there was a whole other world inside them, one invisible to the human eye but it is there, and in that place, everyone is quiet. Here, in my world, there are always people talking, and it irks me that most of their words hold no weight, like a packet of ketchup that comes with buying a burger at a store just casually being passed on to another person. Some days I would listen to the radio blaring inside a small store that served meals for commuters who didn’t have much time to spare to prepare their own food. The news was always about the same missing person – a man in his mid-thirties – whose identity was too vague for people to care, but I listened to the monotonous voice of the reporter anyway, simply because I had no choice.
There was something else that bothered me for months: the strange sight of a woman dressed in a black pencil skirt, brown jacket and a plain cream blouse tucked in underneath. Like me, she stood on the same spot every morning at the bus station, leaning against the wall, watching people come and go, and I had never once seen her leave that place. I doubt anyone else ever noticed her. Her hand bag sat on the floor like a child left ignored by the mother. She held a can of beer in one hand, her finger gently tapping the aluminum surface as beads of water ran across it. Head tilted to the side so she was looking at the spot where buses load and unload, there was a serene look in her eyes, as if she was waiting for something or someone, and she had grown to accept the fact that whatever or whoever that was, they will never come. I imagined she has lived in this world for a hundred years, cursed to wait for eternity. Some days the urge to walk up to her and start a conversation was too overwhelming that I'd often get dizzy. Every morning, for ten months, I would walk past her when my bus arrived. Ten inches away from each other – that was how close we had only ever been. Even as one day I found the courage to talk to her, I kept my distance.
“Do you ever go to work?” was my first question. For a moment, she was silent. It was the first time that I felt uncomfortable with silence. She threw me a sidelong glance then gazed outside once again.
“There’s no point,” she responded.
Her voice was softer than I expected. Standing next to her whilst keeping a safe distance, I calculated that I was at least two inches taller than her. She looked pale in the morning light.
“So,” she sighed, “does the painting ever change?”
Again, silence fell upon us. All I could hear was the ambient noise swirling around the station and the faint sound of the radio reporting the missing person.
“Does beer taste good this early in the morning?” I shuffled on my feet.
She laughed quietly. “It’s the only drink that I like.”
“Why don’t we grab something to eat then?” I knew that my bus was coming in five minutes, but for the first time, I didn’t mind. She nodded, the gesture was so small that it was almost unnoticeable, but my peripheral vision was sharp enough to tell.
This happened three years ago. Every day I would be late to work so I could spend time with this woman, a complete stranger. Suddenly, after a couple of breakfast dates and stories shared over a plate of pasta or grilled cheese sandwiches, she vanished into thin air.
I’m a firm believer that everything in this world is interconnected, at least in one way or another. Threads bind every living and nonliving thing, and so when one of these is cut off, everything and everyone else connected to this within a certain radius will most likely feel that something has changed. People tell me that this is how the butterfly effect works – a single flap at the right timing can trigger a chain of events to happen.
Because we were working closely with forests and the natural environment in general, this was how I trained myself to think. My team specializes in field work so every now and then we would be sent off to a certain place to observe how a local community manages a protected area for a specific purpose, which was often for ecotourism. One day we were sent to a mangrove forest to read about a community-based management project.
I was already 23 years old, living alone, and working there was the first time I had felt the butterfly effect – one that changed my life forever.
It was a fine Tuesday afternoon when we arrived at the site. The area covered for the main ecotourism activity, which was in the form of a paddleboat tour, was not exceptionally large, but it was enough to give you a good glimpse of the wonder of nature. Over the years, the government had reported an increase in the number of tourists visiting the place that had caused negative changes in the natural environment. After quickly looking around, we proceeded to the main office where the meeting was supposed to be conducted. We sat in a small compact room with a round table in the middle, papers piled up on top of it, and a team of local residents standing around dressed in a casual manner that seeing us, all clad in synthetic leather jackets, boots and expensive jeans, raised an unnecessary tension in the room. There were five of us and three local residents who appeared to be the ones managing the place. The walls were overly decorated with creative symbols and slogans that call for the preservation of nature. A cool breeze from the river blew in through the partly opened window.
I was mostly quiet during the meeting as I scanned the papers and read about the project. Our team leader was the one who spoke with the managers. As a linguistic expert, she understood them better than the rest of us did. She and I had an affair at some point when we first met, but things simply did not work out between us. She was outspoken and lively, and I was the complete opposite, but I genuinely did like her. We decided to break it off after a month of being together. Since then, an invisible wall had risen between us, and neither of us had the courage to move past it to mend our friendship. We unknowingly carried it everywhere we go like a stubborn ghost clinging to our backs.
The meeting went on for an hour or two. I had simply exhausted all my words for that day that talking to anyone after that seemed like an unbearable task.
Every Wednesday of the week we would return to the site to fetch the reports and observe the situation. One late afternoon, as I was resting on a bench overlooking the river, a group of fireflies flew around a certain spot in the forest. There were so many of them that from afar, one might mistake them for a giant floating lamp, and then it happened: for one blistering moment, they formed the unmistakable shape of a human being running in the forest. The sight was blinding. I sucked in a deep breath. The fireflies dispersed at the sound of one of my team members calling my name, but I remained frozen in place.
“Are you alright?” he asked, gently tapping my shoulder. I blinked, tearing my eyes away from the swarm of fireflies in the distance, now lesser in number. I nodded, paused for a moment to collect myself, and then went ahead to catch the ride back to the main office.
It was as if the sight was just a passing dream. It was the same day I knew something had changed, like a nail keeping me intact had been pulled out of place and only I could hear the sharp ringing sound it made as it fell to the ground.
At some point in our lives, things always had to change. In mine, I believe the butterfly finally took off at the perfect time.
The next morning, I headed straight to the bus station to tell her the story of the swarm of fireflies taking the shape of a human being, but she wasn’t there. I looked around the entire station, one store after another, and even went as far as asking the maintenance workers if they had ever seen her but received no response. It seemed like no one else ever saw her or believed that she had even existed.
For the first time, in ten months, the woman with the can of beer so early in the morning and a hand bag, dressed in a black pencil skirt, brown jacket and a plain cream top underneath, was nowhere to be found.
I already missed the first bus so I went back to the same spot where I used to stand across the large painting and leaned against the wall, catching my breath. It was eerily quiet. I noticed the radio from the small store beside me had been switched off. Everything around me turned into blocks of ice submerged underwater when I realized the painting had indeed changed. No longer was the woman looking back at the viewer but had completely turned away. Patches of bright yellow-orange paint were splattered all over her dress, like fireflies.
What a strange dream, I whispered to myself and smiled, closing my eyes.
In that dream, there was no missing person, the woman had disappeared, and the painting has changed.
I never believed in a god but if fireflies happened to exist in this world, I thought there must be one, so I found myself praying that wherever she was, she was safe, with her can of beer, and laughing in a warm pool of afternoon light, that the thing she had been waiting for all her life had finally come to meet her. — Vanessa T.
