The Woman in the Pink Hoody

Longlisted (no shortlist) Reflex Fiction Flash Fiction Competition, August 2021
Longlisted Furious Fiction Australian Writers’ Centre,  March 2021

They say the gallery queue was famous for its slow shuffling, a snake of endless waiting. Street vendors sold warm chestnuts to people bored or hungry enough to buy them at hiked-up prices. Buskers strummed; fire-twirlers spun. Clowns cartwheeled and all dropped hats to rustle gold and silver.  

They say once inside the gallery’s glass panes, maps located her portrait. Only one person at a time could enter the temperature-controlled chamber and admire her painting. Even though her face was canvas, oils and pigment, she soothed fury in a storming man and melancholy in a weeping woman.

They say her bronze eyes saw other worlds. She is the painted soul of silvery moonlit rivers.

They say she’s trouble – her unclaimable beauty riled men up too much. She looked down on unpainted women and made them feel ugly, cheap and small. She’s fake. An ideal. Unreal. One man spat on her – another pulled a knife.

They say her tears bleached the precious antique paint. 

They say she had a private letterbox at the gallery. Her guard opened the mail daily; purple and red envelopes. He read her every word.

They say she replied, but that must surely be bullshit. 

They say the moon was a pewter newborn arc when she disappeared, the night shadow-dark. Nobody knows how she did it. Nobody knows how she slipped from the canvas onto bustling streets, golden gown trailing.

They say it was her guard – she begged him to cut her from the gilded frame. He’s since been arrested and charged. People still queue to see the canvas where she lived. The beautiful shape she left. Her deep lake of calm. 

They say I’m lying when I tell them she was walking barefoot, crow feathers in her hair under a hot-pink hoody, collecting raindrops in her cupped palms. She crossed the road to the park, I followed. 

They say she’s let everybody down. She’s a national treasure – our heritage. She should go back and live in her canvas. From the way she was plucking a mandolin in the bandstand, dancing and drumming with the feral mob, I don’t think she will.