Life Like

Reaching her gnarled hand toward me, my mother said in a gasping voice that there was something she had to tell me before she died.

“Child, I don’t want to tell you this but I have no choice because it will greatly affect you when I am no longer living.”

“Mom, be at peace, I don’t need to know anything if it hurts you so much,” I answered.

Her frail voice quaking, my mother insisted that she must tell her story.

’I was a young woman in my twenties who was unable to have children of her own. This caused me tremendous grief every day. I decided to go to the art museum so I would get my mind off my problems. There I saw the most beautiful painting of a young child with flowing golden hair sitting in a chair looking straight at me with her lovely green eyes. She was so real with such longing on her face that I reached my hands out to her and pulled her out of the artwork and took her home with me. The little angel was you, my love. I knew there would be questions about your sudden appearance so I packed up and moved to another city where I wouldn’t be known. Eventually, I found a wonderful man and we raised you as our own. The man you thought was your father never learned of my duplicity and went to his grave loving us both.”

I was horrified at what I was hearing and thought maybe my mother was delusional. “No matter what, Mom, I love you,” I assured her.

Just then, I heard a knock at the door. “Answer it, my child,” my mother requested.

Standing at the door were two official looking people. “We’re here to take you back to the museum,” they informed me. “We found out what your mother had done a long time ago but you were just on loan until she passed. Now we must return you to the museum.”

There are bright lights where I am but I am trapped in my canvas. People stop to stare at me, saying they have never seen such a life-like painting.

“I’m alive, let me out!” I beg. But no one hears me.