The Painter of Drowned Colors

I started calling her Delia after the faded name stitched into the back of an old painter’s smock I found in the attic of the lighthouse keeper’s cottage I had rented for the summer. The cottage was a relic of a time when the sea was a living thing that demanded respect, and the lighthouse itself had been decommissioned decades ago, its great lens shattered, its light now a hollow socket staring out at the gray Atlantic. I came there to escape the noise of the city, to find some quiet for my own painting, but the quiet I found was not the kind that settles in your bones like peace. It was the kind that creeps into your lungs and waits.

She appeared first as a shimmer of salt on the air, a taste of brine that lingered long after the wind had turned. Then I began to see her in the corner of my eye, a tall figure in a rain-slicked coat, her hair like wet seaweed plastered to her skull. She never moved, just stood there, watching me mix my paints. The shadowlings came later, two small shapes that skittered along the floorboards, always just beyond my peripheral vision. I named them Flotsam and Jetsam, after the debris the sea spits back, because that’s what they felt like—fragments of something lost, bobbing in the tide of my periphery.

At first, I tried to drive them away. I burned sage I’d brought from the city, swept salt lines across every threshold, even found an old iron nail and hammered it above the doorframe. Nothing worked. The salt lines were always disturbed by morning, as if something had dragged its fingers through them. The sage smoke would curl and twist into shapes that resembled grasping hands before dissipating. Then, one night, I heard a sound from the attic—a slow, rhythmic scraping, like a brush being dragged across a dry canvas. I climbed the ladder with a flashlight, my heart a frantic bird in my chest. The attic was empty, but I found the smock, hanging from a beam as if it had been placed there. The name ‘Delia’ was embroidered in a script that had once been elegant, now faded to the color of old bone. That’s when I knew her name.

I tried to be kind to her after that. I left a small bowl of water and a shell by the window, an offering. I spoke to her as if she were a shy neighbor. I told her about my life, my failures, my dreams. The shadowlings watched from the corners, their forms trembling like heat mirages. For a while, the atmosphere seemed to soften, the oppressive weight in the air lifting. But then the painter’s smock began to move on its own. I would find it draped over my easel in the morning, the sleeves smeared with a dark pigment that dried to the color of dried blood. I washed it, but the stains would not come out. They spread, slowly, like a bloom of algae in still water, until the fabric was consumed by a pattern that looked uncannily like a face—a woman’s face, her mouth open in a silent scream.

My own paintings began to change. No matter what I painted—a seascape, a portrait, a bowl of fruit—by morning, the canvas would show the same thing: a ship sinking beneath a churning sea, its sails torn, its hull breaking apart. And in the sky, a figure like a dark angel, her arms outstretched as if she were conducting the storm. I recognized the figure as Delia. I tried to paint over it, but the image would bleed through, the colors I used becoming thicker, oilier, as if the paint itself were alive. One night, I woke to the sound of scratching from my studio. I found Delia standing over a canvas, her form more solid than ever, her eyes like black pearls. She was painting, her fingers bleeding paint that dripped to the floor and pooled. On the canvas, she was painting a portrait of me—but it was wrong. My eyes were hollow, my skin the color of wet ash, and behind me, the shadowlings danced like puppet strings. I was so terrified I fled the cottage, running down the rocky shore until my lungs burned, and I didn’t look back.

But I returned. I had to. I couldn’t leave my paints, my canvases, my life’s work. And when I came back, Delia was gone. The smock hung empty on the hook, the paint stains now dry and brittle. The shadowlings were gone too. For two weeks, there was nothing. I began to think I had imagined it all. But the paintings I had made during that time—my ‘Delia period,’ I called them—began to sell. A gallery in Boston took them. Critics praised their ‘darkly compelling’ imagery, their ‘haunting’ atmosphere. They didn’t know the truth. They didn’t see Delia’s face in every brushstroke, feel the cold salt breath on their necks when they stood before them.

Last night, I finished a new painting. It’s a portrait of a woman standing on a shore, her back to the viewer, her hair streaming in the wind. She is pointing at something in the distance—a lighthouse, its beam cutting through the fog. I painted it from memory, a scene I had never seen but had dreamed of a hundred times. When I finished, I stepped back and looked at it. The woman was Delia. And behind her, barely visible in the shadows, were two small shapes, holding hands. I realized then that I had not gotten rid of them. I had only captured them. They were in the paint now, trapped in every canvas I had made, waiting to be released. I am writing this by candlelight in the cottage, the smell of salt and turpentine thick in the air. The sea is restless tonight, and I can hear, very faintly, the sound of a woman humming a lullaby. It is coming from the attic. And I have just realized that the paint on my brush is warm, as warm as a hand that has been holding a styrofoam cup of coffee for too long. I am going to finish this letter, seal it in a bottle, and throw it into the sea. If you find it, please burn my paintings. Do not look at their faces. They are still watching.

I have just turned around. Delia is standing in my doorway, her hair dripping wet, her eyes glowing with a blue-green phosphorescence like the bioluminescent creatures of the deep. In her hand, she holds a brush made of something that looks like bone. She is smiling. The shadowlings are with her, crawling up the walls. They are speaking, their voices like the rush of waves over pebbles. They are saying, ‘We are ready to be born.’ And I understand now that my paintings were never mine. They were eggs. And they are hatching.