The Girl With the Bad Dreams

Chapter 3

Carlin is dimly aware of a distant banging. The banging grows louder; it's right above her, as if someone is pounding on her ceiling. "Can you turn that damned thing off?!" a man's voice yells. And that's when Carlin hears another sound: her alarm clock.

Carlin slams her hand down on the machine, silencing it. She doesn't open her eyes to do it – she knows exactly where it is. But now she has to open her eyes; she has to see how late she is. And when she does she realizes it's been buzzing for over ten minutes. "Sorry!" she yells up to the man in the apartment above her. Then she leaps out of bed.

Carlin lives in a basement apartment where only a head-high window looking out onto a patch of sidewalk pavement lets in a sliver of sunlight. That sliver dimly illuminates a clutter of half-finished oil paintings leaning against the brick walls. Carlin steps over and around piles of art supplies as she desperately gets ready for work. Her kitchen, bedroom and artist's studio are all a single room. She doesn't have time for a shower, but she drags a toothbrush across her teeth, ties back her hair, takes a deep breath, and heads out into the daylight.

Carlin pre-orders on her phone as she walks to Starbucks. There she balances bags and trays while signaling for an Uber. Thirty minutes later she's walking into the conference room of Model & Knight...where she interrupts a dozen executives and clients mid-sentence.

They stare at Carlin through the sudden and uncomfortable silence.

"You're late," says Hank. It's an admonishment, not a statement of fact.

"I know, I'm sorry," admits Carlin. Then she summons her best smile. "But I brought lattes!" She holds up the tray.

One of the executives, older than Hank, frowns. "We already have coffee." He eyes Hank accusingly as he gestures toward a catered spread of coffee, tea, bagels and locks already set out on silver trays.

Carlin's eye passes over the spread to the satisfied smirk of Eric sitting with a notepad at the end of the table, usurping her position of up-comer. Carlin turns and exits the room without saying a word.

No one goes after her.

As she exits Model & Knight's lobby, she dumps the Starbucks into the trash. She reaches for her phone to check her e-mail on on the way to the mail room. Nut she and gets the dreaded message she half-expected: she's been fired. She throws the phone down in frustration and immediately regrets it from fear cracking the screen. Fortunately it seems okay. She starts to call an uber, realizes she shouldn't spend the money, and begins walking El station instead.

When Carlin gets home she tries to forget the day in her art. She begins mixing a pallet for her oil colors. She props a canvas up on her paint-splotched dinner table. It's a half-finished portrait of Eric, her co-worker. He's distorted and screaming. At first his distortion appears to be stylistic, like an expressionistic depiction of his inner soul. But as Carlin begins to add paint it becomes clear that the distortion is disturbingly photo-realistic. Eric isn't misshapen as the result of some surrealistic artistic choice; he's misshapen because his skin is being stretched and torn by tiny hooks. The wires attached to those hooks disappear off the right side of the canvas...and remain invisible across two walls of Carlin's apartment...before re-appearing on a second canvas, where her boss Hank holds them sadistically like the strings of a puppet.

Carlin loses herself in the work. She surrounds Eric with ashtrays and burning cigarettes. Jeering faces are barely perceptible in the smoke climbing from the cigarettes.

Suddenly Carlin's phone rings and she's ripped from her concentration. Almost like when she wakes up from a bad dream it takes her a moment to recognize her surroundings. Then she reaches out and grabs the phone. "Hello?"