The Yukon Canvas

That canvas bitch comes at night, when I sleep. I have vowed not to stop until I create a work of beauty and yet she has consistently ruined everything I have ever done.

I was an up and coming artist; oil paint on canvas. I was getting some of the best spots at the best markets. My clients came to know me, they began to recommend me, and before long I was a featured artist at the city museum.

The mayor’s portrait that hung at the capital was done by me.

I was known for my unique, and often bizarre, landscapes. I could create vivid detail of the inhabitants and their natural lives. I brought the viewer into the image.

One day, strolling through an inner-city flea market, I came across a canvas like I had never seen.

“What’s it made of?” I asked the guy standing on the square of dirty red tartan sprawled on the hot pavement.

“I don’t know, dude, I just sell this stuff,” said the sunbaked teen.

“What can you tell me about it?”

He huffed and searched for a tag on a string.

“Yukon, Canvas. 37 by 72. $15,” said the kid with a huff.

I bought the canvas and tipped the gentleman another $5 for delivery.

The Yukon Canvas would be my masterpiece. It would be a blended triptych, seamless in transition from piece to piece, opening with the dark mysteries of an endless universe then merging by volcanic stone into a glowing metropolis of humanity from sea to city to forest one built upon the other, topped with a castle, and the canvas would then merge into… into… what.

What?

What would be the triumphal conclusion to my triad of story? To know would mean to know my future and who could know the future?

What does the future hold?

I would figure it out by the time I finished the first two sections, I was sure, but that castle was the last piece I could do. I worked for seven months to finish the first sections and here I was, artists block, to provide a future.

I agonized, night after night, for two more months. Inspiration was bound to come to me at any time; I needed to know, what would be the ultimate outcome?

That’s when she started entering my dreams. In my dreams I watched myself as I turned out the light in the shop and closed the door. I couldn’t see her at first, she would not face me, but she entered through the moonlight and shrouded the unfinished portion of my masterpiece.

She finished the portion in seclusion and then faced me with triumph, hands on hips, one eye hidden behind a peekaboo of rust red hair. Our eyes connect and I beg her to let me see what she has done to my masterpiece and as she begins to turn…

I wake up.

I dreamt this dream night after night for thirty more years. I stopped working on anything else. My clients had dwindled down to the few diehard fanatics that swore I would astound the global communities with my impending genius.

Until one night I decided not to let that teenage bitch continue to taunt me and I stayed up to watch the moon.

I have something to drink, something to smoke. I put some questionably smelling turkey slices between two slices of sourdough bread that are heavy on the mayo.

I bite into my sandwich and walk by the security camera I’ve set up in my workshop and see her. The camera blurs and she’s gone.

No, it blurs again and she’s there. She stands, hands on hips and looks into the camera and smiles. The camera blurs and she’s gone. She’s back. She’s gone.

I run to my workshop, but she’s gone.

The Yukon Canvas is defiled. Vertically from bottom to top are bright pink and brown and blue and yellow striped runes that read: ᛚᚨᛏ ᛗᛁᚲ ᚺᛃᚨᛚᛈᚨ or, roughly translated, “Let me Help.”

“Get out of my dreams!” I screamed, but realized very soon it was not a dream and I set off to clean the intruding paint and restore the canvas. I was in luck that very little of the cheap paint spread across the tryptic line of the center piece.

I felt renewed. I felt lighter. I slept like a newborn child that night and that woman was gone from my dreams.

I woke up to find it was just another dream. Yet, upon seeing my canvas, it was as if I hadn’t even made an attempt to clean it. The same cryptic graffiti was sprawled across the unfinished portion of my life’s work.

Was the whole thing a dream? If so, how did I dream of the exact defacement of my own piece of artwork?

I reviewed the camera feed to my workshop, but there was no woman. Through a glitch in the film one moment there was my piece, unfinished, and the next it was defaced.

I put to work removing the graffiti until the canvas was like new and all the blemishes of the current portion were restored. I got a better lock for my workshop and upgraded my security.

The painting was defaced for seven nights in a row with varying colors and styles of graffiti. Always the same runes. Always, “Let me Help.”

“I WOULD RATHER ROT IN HELL THAN LET YOU DESTROY MY MASTERPIECE, YOU YUKON WITCH!” I would yell as I would delicately scrub the canvas clean.

On the eight day, rather than clear the canvas clean, I began to paint. I added a draft of the insides of my own workshop. On the floor an easel where a copy of my painting was in the process of myself painting it.

I had finished it. I celebrated with expensive foods, both in cost and health, and napped like a dog on the purple shag rug until the evening sun stopped warming me.

When I woke, I found the worst offense of all. There was a redhead with a peekaboo haircut wearing a light pink jacket. She had her arm wrapped around me and we were both looking out to the viewer and smiling.

The canvas on the canvas was cleared out to show tiny cursive English I had to read with a magnifying glass in one hand: Let me Help.

“Get out of my painting,” I screamed at her.

“You will not ruin my life’s work,” I said as I began to prime the area for new work.

“I will create something so good you will not stand to ruin it,” I said as I begin the masterpiece.

I took it back to the stars. I created universes colliding and spreading, becoming new, and a civilization scattered across it.

The next day I found that infernal witch floating in a light blue spacesuit, one eye visible in her cartoonish helmet window. I couldn’t quite tell if the eye was open or closed. If I stared too long it felt like she was winking at me.

“Get out of my painting,” I bellowed.

I started again and created an epic scene of heaven and hell. Angels and demons chasing each other in an infernal and infinite battle for good and evil and everything blurred inbtween.

In the morning she was there to greet me, sitting in a brown leather sofa, wearing a pair of 3-D glasses and stuffing her face with thick buttered popcorn. On my fucking canvas.

I painted extensive mountainside cottage villages lined with vineyards and there was to perform a ridiculous dance in a bucket of grapes.

I painted something abstract with a lot of golden hoops and red balls. There she was balancing on a red ball while hula hooping with a golden hoop.

I painted a café, just to see if she would be willing to talk and the next day she came. She sat at a table I had painted just for her and she sipped at a cappuccino with one eyebrow raised from one visible eye.

“Please,” I begged to the painting.

“This is my life’s work. It’s troubled me for years and may have brought me to my ruin. If I can finish it, I can be something again. Someone. My clients will come back and it will have all meant something,” I begged.

I looked at her unmoving face and noticed that the eyebrow was not raised in question to me, but rather as a way to point. She was indicating the menu on the café wall, which had been wiped clean and read, in perfect French, “Let me Help.”

I got angry and painted an apocalypse, so that she could burn for her crimes. She brought marshmallows on sticks.

I painted conquest, war, famine, and death. I tortured her by acts of god, acts of science, acts of the dark and twisted unknown and still she battled me with peace, justice, provision, and health.

I grew tired as time passed and I painted my workshop again. I gave her a bed in the corner to sleep in.

When I woke the next day I found the bedsheets to be disheveled and a bouquet of white poppy and lavender laid gently upon the pillow.

I gazed upon the canvas and saw, as usual, a note scrawled in pink and blue paint on the canvas in the canvas that read: Let me Help.

“I don’t want to fight you and I don’t want to hurt you, I just want to finish my painting in peace,” I told the painting.

I took the day off the get some fresh air, When I got home I went directly to bed and slept like the devil.

In the morning the painting didn’t appear to have changed. It was exactly like it had been the day before. It was a beautiful likeness of the inner working of his wooden workshop. A bed had been added to the corner, it was disheveled with a bouquet of white poppies and lavender.

But the note on empty section of the canvas in the canvas had been erased. It was blank again, fresh and ready for me to start anew. It was as if the woman was telling me she was giving in, letting me finish my work in peace, and I was happy for it.

I let myself have a break, let my head clear, find new inspiration and I watched the canvas for several days.

I knew she was still there, lurking in the shadows. I saw the bouquets refresh with new flowers, the bedsheets were never rumpled in the same way, and she left finger smudges on the glass of the far wall’s window when she looked out to the moon because she couldn’t sleep.

I painted her a bathtub and sink. They too showed signs of usage by morning, but the woman never appeared herself again. She did just enough to let me know that she was there and waiting to help at the very minute I would ask for it.

I would not ask. I would not give in.

My blockage returned. I didn’t know what to finish my painting with, so I added a cozy chair and curtain to the far end of the room. The spot where the sun hits just right in the evening before the sun goes down.

The days went by and I couldn’t think of what the future would be, so I gave her a bookshelf and table.

I grew older, I attempted other pieces, but nothing worked. I gave her a fridge and a microwave. I gave her a lamp and a blanket. I made the workshop so cozy I almost wished I could live there.

“I wish you would come back,” I told the woman one day.

The next day she had not returned, but left a note written on the unfinished portion of the canvas in the canvas, “Let me Help.”

“I will never let you help me! This is my work of a lifetime,” I told her and scrubbed the canvas clean once more until a serene landscape of stark white primer greeted me.

After my death my value soared. I was listed for millions and found my way into bigger and better museums across the world.

My most well-known painting was Yukon Canvas, unfinished, the most visited museum piece in art history.

Tour guides would tell patrons that it was rumored I left the painting unfinished because the future is a wide-unknown. Some theorized that I knew the future and it was too dark and dreary to be revealed. Others theorized I had planned a perfect utopian society.

“Did anyone ever know what he was going to paint?” a child will ask the nervous tour guide during a field trip to the museums of the nation’s capitol.

“Yes, actually, the art community has found evidence that the third section was started and stopped several times, due to some light layering at the seam of the second and third portion and ultraviolet lights have revealed some stains in the canvas we’re unable to see with regular vision, but none of it is enough to consider what he may have planned for the third section,” the tour guide will reply, “any other questions?”

“Who’s the woman with the red hair?” the child will ask.