Brian Skinner’s Reviews > Yumi and the Nightmare Painter > Status Update

“There’s an old joke that mentions lost items always being in the last place you look for them. It doesn’t say anything about memories though. Those, once lost, are the sorts of things you don’t even know to look for.”

““It’s wonderful,” she whispered. “It’s like someone broke the sun itself into a million pieces and threw it in the air like confetti.”

“There’s a certain insanity that defines artists. The willful ability to ignore what exists. Millennia of evolution have produced in us not merely the ability to recognize and register light, but to define colors, shapes, objects. We don’t often acknowledge how amazing it is that we can tell what something is simply by letting some photons bounce off us.”

As he did his rounds, he continued to imagine that he was some lone warrior. Instead of, essentially, an exterminator who had gone to art school.

Nightmares are a fluid terror. Once you get the briefest handle on one, it will change. Filling nooks in the soul like spilled water filling cracks in the floor. Nightmares are a seeping chill, created by the mind to punish itself. In this, a nightmare is the very definition of masochism.

The star was particularly bright when the nightmare painter started his rounds. The star. Singular. No, not a sun. Just one star. A bullet hole in the midnight sky, bleeding pale light.