Sarah said it was all pastels. Shapes and colors. Nothing supernatural or mystic. Nothing inscrutable or ambiguous. It was what it was.

She told her closest friends it was just a painting, nothing more.

A painting on a canvas of green algae-ridden waters meeting blue clear-shiny waters. A confluence.

No sun or trees or animals.

Just waters.

But, the critics saw something different. The waters, they said, symbolized feelings. Feelings meeting, joining. Juxtaposed. A happy-meets-sad-kind-of-thing.

She would shrug, squint, looking into the painting, trying to ascertain the meaning. The big why. She didn't have any answers. None. It was just done from the subconscious. Something natural. Something that easily emitted.

"It's like heaven and hell converging. The currents of the green waters seem to symbolize sins. Our sins," one art critic wrote in the New York Post.

That art critic, some Guy DeVanco, wore a goatee though, and she, Sarah, had learned many years ago to not trust men who wore goatees. Frank, her ex-boyfriend, had had a goatee, and he had shot himself, two years ago, in the subway the day before their third-anniversary. She learned later, from the coroner, maybe the mortician—she didn't remember—that Frank had had a wedding ring in his pocket.

Conclusion: Fuck Frank.

Inference: Fuck Guy DeVanco.

The painting was titled Chance. The MET in New York had bought it for sixty-thousand-dollars. More money then Sarah had ever had. More money than her mommy and daddy had ever had. And their mommy and daddy. And so on.

"What does it mean? Seriously. Tell me."

She was on the phone with a staff writer from some weekly artsy/entertainment newspaper from Pennsylvania. He was prodding for answers, digging, boring.

"Well," Sarah lied, "I was drunk off Merlot when I painted it. In a dark room lighted by candles. It sounds cliché, and it was. I was nude and feeling lonely and sad. In my mind, I imagined waters. Different waters. A unity of sorts. A unity of spirits, of souls."

The staff writer thanked her, and contentedly hung up the phone.

A celebrity now. People knew her. She wasn't just some art school dropout. She was Sarah Burdons, a painter. A semi-lucrative painter.

But, truth is: She had no clue what the painting meant. It didn't mean anything, she assumed. To her, it wasn't even her best work. Not even close to her opus.

Her best friend, Kim, insisted, however, that Sarah bring the inane painting to an art dealer. He was wowed and offered her money and then the MET offered him money and that was that.

Conclusion: Luck.

Inference: Luck.

She now had to do lectures at art schools and in art classes. Seminars and workshops. She was big-time. An art school celebrity.

Every young artist wanted to emulate her immolation. They wanted her desire. Her heart. Her inspiration.

It all made Sarah depressed and weary. Too much. It was just fucking water. There was no goddamn symbolism. No reason to make exegeses on a stupid painting.

But whatever.

Seriously, whatever.

Whatever they wanted. She'd let the masses eat her soul. It didn't matter—not with Frank dead and buried.

Kim said that Sarah should move to Chicago, start an art retreat. She said she should get out of New York. Start anew.

Sarah didn't know. She had no answers. All she knew was she wasn't happy and all the minor—sometimes major—acclaim was whittling her down.

Her doctor gave her a prescription for Xanax. He told her to just "chill" and enjoy. He told her to relax and revel in the attention.

'Fifteen minutes would have been nice," Sarah avowed. "Fifteen-fucking minutes of fame, not this. I don't want this."

The doctor laughed. He handed her the prescription, his name scrawled on the bottom, and Sarah walked out of his office with tears in her eyes.

Conclusion: Sarah, it's over.

Inference: Sarah, you're going to kill yourself, you big fucking baby.

She stopped at a liquor store and bought a bottle of vodka, the prescription folded in the back pocket of her jeans. She'd go to the pharmacist tomorrow.

She looked at the bottles on the shelf: Grey Goose, Stolichnaya, Effen, Level.

They all worked the same. She grabbed the bottle of Level.

She took nips out of it on the way home, in her car, raising the paper bag to her lips.

She lit a cigarette.

What a typical artist, she thought. A little bit of fame and here I am drinking a bottle of vodka out of a paper bag and driving down the freeway.

When she got home she crawled under the covers on her bed.

She drank half the bottle, taking straight sips. After a while, the vodka tasted like water to her. It tasted like hope and renewal. Things, for that moment, felt fine.

Tomorrow, she knew, would be different. Tomorrow would bloom with reality, fraught with choices and decisions. More depression.

But that was tomorrow.

And it seemed so far away.

Conclusion: For now things are okay.

Inference: Tomorrow will kill you.

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