The Less You Know
Outline for a story that isn’t a horror story, though it might at first resemble one: The painter paints—an abstraction, a grid, a controlled Cartesian situation. At close of working day, he flips off the studio lights, goes home. The painting, after dark, creaks and stirs: under silvery moonlight, the lattice detaches from the canvas, shimmies, strikes angles, overlaps and doubles itself. Soon there are two grids, differentiated. They converse and, in the conversation, recursive thinking transpires. As night hours go by, the painting gets smarter, its parts conspiring, mind developing and bending idiosyncratically. Morning. Studio lights flash on, the painter steps in. The painting, startled, freezes…