The People by Macy Spevacek

The People by Macy Spevacek

The streets were buzzing, and the children still rushed home from school. Everything seemed normal. If you were paying close enough attention, you could see the fine brush strokes and the little speckles of white paint. It all started with an idea, which stemmed into a multitude of other ideas. The Painter would get bored, or frustrated with her current idea, and paint something different. To her, these paintings were nothing but obscure pictures along a mural above her bed. To The People, this was their everything. Everywhere they looked, they could see it. Their galaxy was so beautiful, it looked like something out of a storybook.

The wall was blank; One day, she had run out of space on her last canvas. So, she did the rational thing, and painted on her wall. She kept painting with different shades of blues and purples, until she got a spark of inspiration, and moved to another section of the wall. This became a minor fault as The Painter had too many ideas. But what The Painter didn’t realize, was that the little blob on her wall was something much larger. As time went on, The Painter kept painting on her wall; she would wake up, dip her brush, and paint a masterpiece - no two were the same. What The Painter failed to realize was that she had created galaxies within the mural on the wall.

If you looked close enough, you could see the dots orbiting each other and the portraits distorting into what looked like mist. From The People’s perspective, this was nothing out of the ordinary. One day, they started to notice the oddities of the sky and the stars, and then the first incident happened. The Painter had returned to her original painting on the mural and dipped her brush into the yellow paint. She started to add more detail to the circles, as in little dots and extra texture. The People looked up, and suddenly the sky had vibrant colors and the stars started to glow. The People were amazed; what else was out there?

The People were overtaken with inquisitiveness; they banded together and climbed all the way to the stars. What they found wasn’t an atmosphere or an everlasting void, but rather where the paint met the wall. They were curious about the paint; what was behind it? They pulled and pulled until they finally peeled the paint back. Yet, it wasn’t the paint that shocked them, but was what was behind it. They kept tearing the paint away until they were met with an eye staring back at them.

The Painter was surprised to see her paint had been chipping away. She glanced at the wall and noticed the entire wall was covered with her doodles, colored with different blues and purples. No matter where she looked, she couldn’t find any empty space that didn’t contain her artwork. She knew it was time to restart, so she pulled out that old can of black paint and dipped her brush in.

Macy Spevacek is a first-year student from Michigan who is currently studying engineering. Spevacek has been writing stories on her own for years, her favorite genres are fantasy and fiction. Spevacek works to capture stories that she feels are worth writing down.