Neighbours have always found Auntie Lara to be a tad...well, odd. Some people claim it is her eccentric personality, and others say it’s more those ridiculous hats she always wears. Auntie Lara jokes around about it a lot, saying that she got lost in a garden maze once when she was little and have never been the same since. I didn’t really get it.
The day I came to visit, she was dressed in a lime-green sweater and an ivory-coloured gypsy skirt sewn with silver beads and miniature mirrors, which made it clank and jangle merrily every time she moved. As usual, there was a stuffed dove, bright orange this time, perched on top of her straw bonnet.
“Kat, darling, it’s so good to see you!” Auntie Lara gushed, enveloping me in her soft, thick arms. I stammered out a passable reply and she herded me into her house, chattering animatedly all the while. Everything went in one ear and out the other though, because her house was like an art museum: Every single whitewashed wall was crammed with newspaper clippings, photocopied images from books, and random complicated-looking doodles scribbled on torn-out pieces of scrap paper. Each picture glued, tacked and taped to the walls seemed to be all somehow alike in their peculiarity. Staring closely at the picture closest to where I was standing, I noticed some very strange and quite impossible details. Labelled Relativity, there were 16 faceless figures, all upright, left-leaning, or right-leaning. It was as if three kinds of gravity existed at the same time, and the little figures lived in their own world, oblivious to the sideways and upside-down people around them. There were also three gardens and five stairs that were even odder than the people: They were, like the people, tilted, but a few of them also had stairs on their undersides as well! One staircase had an upright person climbing it on one side, yet a left-leaning person was descending on the other side at the same time.
“Ah, I see you enjoy Escher’s art too!” Auntie Lara said happily, pricking my balloon of thought.
“Er...who?” I asked.
“M.C. Escher, darling. He was a most intriguing Dutch artist who liked to bend the rules of art to create impossible things,” she offered enthusiastically, eyes sparkling. “I find his works quite fascinating, as you can see.” Laughing, Auntie Lara gestured to the art-laden kitchen walls around us.
“Now, would you like to see your room?”
---
The wallpaper in my room was, of course, unusual. Snow-white birds entangled in curling shoots of ivy twined loosely with large bunches of leaves that somehow managed to look like miniature bird wings. No part of the picture was exactly alike, and it was easy to get lost among the swirling haze of white and green.
There was something missing on the wall that faced the bed. I couldn’t figure it out at first, but then it hit me like that time in Phys Ed. when someone smacked my forehead with a dodgeball: There was just another tangle of greenery where another bird should have been. When I pointed this out to Auntie Lara, she simply shrugged and raised an eyebrow.
That night as I lay asleep, I dreamt of Escher’s birds on my wallpaper. Cooing softly (they were apparently doves), they led me away with a soft rustle of their feathers. We were drifting over an impossible world, Escher’s world, where double-sided staircases and multiple gravities were the norm. As we flew over the strange scenes below us, the bizarre became even more bizarre. Bird people, insect curl-ups with a dozen pairs of feet, contrasting viewpoints from a dangerously tall building, hundreds of wild tessellations, reptiles coming to life from paper, drawn hands drawing themselves, fish in fish scales, magic mirrors, reflective spheres, neverending stairs, impossible architecture, and tribars, and running dwarves, and falling water going the wrong way...
Images spun around my mind like a carousel going a hundred miles an hour, and were whipped away, only to be replaced by another one in an eternal dance of the kind of reality so rare and deadly that you can afford to live it only in your dreams.
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With a start, I woke up in a cold sweat panting in my now-twisted covers. Sitting up, I noticed that my hands were ice-cold, as if a freezing wind had struck at it for the entire night.
Glancing around the simple room filled with sunshine streaming in through the window, my eyes fell upon the part of the wallpaper with a missing bird. I nearly choked on my morning spit.
Another one of Escher’s birds was missing.
Leaping out of bed, mind whirling with impossible possibilities, I stumbled across room and stared at the two empty spaces. Resting my elbows on the smooth wooden top of the dresser in front of the doves, I felt my bare skin brush against something soft and delicate.
A single snow-white feather.
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Image #1 - inspired by an illustration from The Mysteries of Harris Burdick
Image #2 - Relativity by M.C. Escher
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