Monday arrived like a punishment,
The sky over Artemis Art Gallery was the color of wet concrete, and the building seemed to lean into it -- tall, sleek, and disapproving, glass panels reflecting a city that looked just as tired as Galathea Brooks felt. She didn't get much rest over the weekend.
She shook her head as the memories of the first hours of Saturday flashed back in her head. 'I swear, no more off-the-clock work, from now on.'
Galathea won't deny how hot their CEO was. His looks and his voice could be lethal to any girl that he ensnares. He was eleven years older but it didn't show in his face; it just make him more appealing.
'But I cannot... will not... should NOT entertain this thoughts. Nothing good will come from this.' She shut her eyes tightly to force the thoughts away. Right up until that night, she didn't really respond to Cael's teases and advances. She knew it was just some play thing, like a bet between her and the CEO for whom she used to intern.
She absent-mindedly took a step as she stood in the employee queue to get into the building. She had coffee in one hand and her ID badge in the other, already exhausted by the idea of eight more hours inside curated silence.
Still wide-eyed and absent-mindedly staring, she watched a car stop by the drop off. The driver rushed to open the door to assist his boss. Galathea didn't realize she was staring blankly until she noticed that the tall man who draped his blazer over his shoulder, turned to face towards her direction after alighting his car.
It was some three seconds before it registered that she was looking at Cael Alexander dead in the eye. She turned abruptly and pretended to look for something in her bag.
He scoffed, amused at Galathea's reaction. 'Hmm... finally, some reaction from you.' Cael thought as he turned and entered the building through the revolving doors.
The que moved forward and Galathea moved with it, still pretending to peek into her shoulder bag. She strained her eyes to peek if their CEO is still there and straightened up when she saw he wasn't.
The scanner beeped as she tapped her ID card. Green light lined the turn style. 'Permission Granted,' the led screen indicated.
"To exist? Thrilling." Galathea muttered, stepping inside.
Mornings at Artemis had a very specific rhythm. Shoes clicking with purpose. Voices pitched slightly higher than necessary. Everyone pretending they weren't acutely aware they worked around objects worth more than their homes, their cars, their bloodlines.
Galathea slid into her desk chair, dropped her bag, and woke her computer. The inbox populated instantly. Seventeen emails: four marked urgent. None of them, Galathea suspected, involved anything that's actually urgent.
Across the aisle, Paula Merryhill was already performing competence like it was a solo show. She stood half-turned in her chair, headset on, voice carrying just enough to be overheard.
"Yes, absolutely," Paula said brightly. "The donor preview will be transformative. We really want them to feel the emotional weight of the collection."
Galathea didn't look up. Instead, she took a sip of coffee and opened the first email.
Inventory discrepancies. Again.
Paula lowered her voice to conspiratorial murmur. "Oh, Mr. Alexander was very hands-on with this acquisition. Very discerning taste."
'Of course, he was,' Galathea scoffed in her head, diving back to her work that technically fell under "collections coordination," which meant she spent her days reconciling numbers that never added up and smoothing out problems created by people with bigger budgets than patience. She glanced, sideways.
Paula caught her eye and smiled -- thin, polished, predatory.
Galathea smiled back without showing teeth.
By midmorning, the gallery floor opened to staff walkthroughs. Galathea escaped her desk under the pretense of checking wall labels, which was code for needing air that didn't smell like ambition.
Before heading to the exhibition hall, she stopped by the front desk to check for her blazer in the lost-and-found, the one that the security staff found in the gallery past 1AM Saturday.
"Ah, yes, we have it here." The receptionist handed her the folded blazer. Galathea checked the inseam of the collar where Brooks G was embroidered. It was uniform, after all. "Thanks," she muttered.
"Wait, don't forget this." The receptionist handed her the narrow black satin tie, neatly folded. "It fell from the pocket when I was folding it this morning.
Galathea stared at the premium piece of accessory on the table. She recognized it, of course. She wondered why it fell from her blazer's pocket but she recognized it.
"I didn't notice you wore ties." The receptionist said probing. This is obviously a man's accessory. But pointing that out will just throw Galathea right on to the hot seat.
So, instead, she just answered, "Uh- yes, I sometimes do." She then took the tie and wore it round her neck. She beamed at the receptionist.
"My! You look sharp and kinda hot in that!" This receptionist is Paula's BFF. By her expression, Galathea is expecting the worst.
Galathea gave her a chuckle then waved and paced towards the exhibition hall with her lost-and-found blazer in her arm since she has her Monday blazer on.
The exhibition hall felt different during the day. Brighter, obviously -- but also flatter, stripped of the intimacy that Friday night, or the the first hours of Saturday gave her-- them. Her cheeks caught color by the thought of the confined space behind the latticed metal sculpture. She shook her head and she's back to where art was under fluorescent logic instead of shadows.
She walked slowly, clipboard under her arm, scanning plaques.
Untitled No. 7
Acrylic, mixed media.
Private collection.
Everything had a price, even when it pretended not to.
Her pace slowed without her meaning to.
The painting wasn't new. She'd passed it dozens of times -- an unsettling surrealist piece tucked between two louder works. Muted colors. A suggestion of a city dissolving into vertical smears, buildings melting into sky, perspective warped just enough to make the eye ache.
It had never demanded attention before.
Today, it felt like it was waiting.
Galathea frowned and stepped closer.
The surface looked... wrong. Not damaged. Not altered. Just subtly alive in a way paint had no business being. The brushstrokes seemed deeper, as if the canvas had absorbed more than pigment.
Her scalp prickled.
"This is ridiculous," she murmured.
The gallery was nearly dead-silent. No tourists yet. Just the low hum of climate control and the distant murmur of staff voices echoing down marble corridors.
Galathea leaned in, squinting at the lower left corner where the paint thickened unnaturaly.
For a split-second, she thought she saw movement.
Not visual -- internal. Like the sensation of pressure behind the eyes before a migraine.
She straightened sharply.
Her heart was beating too fast.
'Get more sleep,' she scolded herself. 'Stop working late. Stop romanticizing your burnout.'
She made a note on her clipboard: check lighting angle -- possible glare distortion.
As she turned away, a sound reached her.
Not loud. Not external.
A whisper brushed along the inside of her skull like breath against glass. "Do you hear me?"
Galathea froze.
Her breath caught halfway out, lungs refusing to cooperate.
The words weren't sound exactly. There was no direction, no vibration. Just meaning, suddenly present where it hadn't been before.
Her first thought was absurd.
'Am I having fire alarm hallucinations right now?'
Her second thought felt colder and heavier.
'I didn't imagine that, did I?'
Slowly, carefully, she turned back.
The painting stared back, unchanged. Silent. Deadly ordinary.
Her pulse hammered. "Nope," she whispered as she shook her head. "Absolutely not."
She took a step back, not taking her eyes off the painting.
Was it just her or did the air feel heavier near the canvas, like humidity before a storm? Her skin prickled. A deep instinct screamed that she'd crossed some invisible line just by standing there too long.
She laughed -- sharp, brittle. "You're paint," she declared under her breath, trying to convince herself. "You don't get opinions."
The laughter died quickly because the feeling of being watched didn't.
Her thoughts scattered. Childhood memories flickered uninvited -- standing too close to a cliff edge, the moment before a fall. The feeling of something vast noticing you.
Her chest tightened.
'Walk the fuck away,' she told herself. 'Right the fuck now.'
She did not wait for another whisper.
Galathea turned and walked briskly down the hall, heels clicking too fast, clipboard clutched like a shield. She didn't look back. She didn't slow down until she reached the staff corridor and shoved through the door, heat pounding hard enough to make her dizzy.
She leaned against the wall, breathing through her nose.
"Get it together," she muttered. "You are not haunted by abstract art."
The corridor smelled like cleaning solution and printer toner. Ah, the boring. The familiar. The safe.
She straightened her blazers, both the one she wore, and the one that hung from her arm.
Paula was energetically pacing from the opposite end of the hallway. "There you are-- hey, nice tie! Didn't notice that one this morning. Anyway, did you see the new donor notes? We might need to reframe the narrative for -- are you okay?"
Galathea blinked. "What?"
"You're pale." Paula was gonna touch Galathea's cheek but she was waved away.
"Fluorescent lighting." Galathea said immediately. "It's a crime."
Paula crossed her arms, hummed unconvinced , then shrugged. "Well, try not to look like you're about to faint during the walkthrough. It kills the mood."
"Duly noted," Galathea replied, already moving past her.
She got to her desk and although she was staring at her monitor, she did not see it.
She absent-mindedly unbuttoned her blazer, loosened the tie around her neck, making it drape from her shoulders. Her fingers trembled slightly as she curled them into fists under her desk.
'Stress,' she insisted in her mind. 'Overtime. Lack of sleep. That's all!'
Across the gallery floor, unseen by her, the surrealist painting shuddered almost imperceptibly.
A line shifted. A smear deepened. A window where there hadn't been one before opened onto nothing at all.
The city inside the canvas rearranged itself -- quietly, patiently -- as if responding to the attention it finally received.
Galathea rubbed her temples and exhaled.
"It said something. No, how could it say something?" she was having a one-woman debate against herself. "Of course not, because paint doesn't talk."