The Painting's Window Shows Tonight's Weather

The painting came from a great-aunt's estate, unsigned, unremarkable — a modest oil landscape of a country road leading to a house under a wide sky, the kind of competent Victorian amateur work that fills junk shops. I hung it in my study because it fit a gap and I felt a vague duty to the great-aunt.

I noticed the sky first, and I noticed it the way you notice something for weeks before you consciously admit it: the painted sky matched the real sky. On grey days the oil clouds were leaden; on clear evenings the painted sky held a clear painted dusk; the morning of a real thunderstorm I looked up from my desk and the painting was black with painted storm, a fury of dark oil where the day before there'd been calm. I told myself I was projecting the mood of the weather onto a static image. So I did the obvious test: I photographed the painting daily, timestamped, in flat consistent lamplight, controlling for the real light.

The photographs do not lie the way I'd hoped. The sky in the painting changes, day to day, and it changes to MATCH — clear for clear, grey for grey, and on storm days a churning dark that is simply not the same arrangement of paint as the calm-day photo, the clouds in different places, the light through them altered. A painting whose weather tracks the weather outside the window it hangs near, confirmed across months of timestamped images. I have shown these to two people. Both went quiet.

I could almost live with a barometer painting. It was the figure that emptied my stomach. On the road in the painting — the road that leads to the painted house — there had never been anyone. Empty road, always. Then, on the evening of a day I'd rather not discuss, a hard day, the day I learned some bad news about my health, I looked up and there was a figure on the painted road. Small, dark, distant, at the far end where the road meets the horizon. Walking, its posture unmistakably that of someone walking TOWARD the house. It has appeared three more times since, each time on a bad day, and each time — I have the photographs, I check them obsessively — it is CLOSER. Further along the road. Nearer the house.

I don't know what happens when the figure reaches the house. I don't know if the house in the painting is a house, or is me, or is something I don't want named. My health is a question mark the doctors are still resolving. The figure is presently about halfway down the road.

I've taken the painting down. It's wrapped, faced to the wall, in the loft. I know this changes nothing — the figure was never really on a canvas; the canvas was just where I could see it walking. But I couldn't keep watching it come, day by day, closer down a road toward a house I'm afraid is mine. Some barometers you don't want to read.