The paint bottle had been carefully handled, wrapped two times over in plastic, and tucked into a desk drawer. The missing lid had left the paint exposed, and despite the plastic wrap, the hue had become darker, drier. It could no longer be labelled verdant green but instead fit the earthier tones of a hardy mountain lichen.

The boy threw it away.

In the past he might have protested, saying to call him a man. That was in the spring. In these months, the November cold made him feel smaller, weaker. He did not care what people called him anymore.

The garbage can was soon going to overflow with paper and bits of plastic and paint, so he had to balance the latest bottle on the top, the peak of his delicate tower. But the last paint bottle needed to be found before he could empty the trash. He did not like going to the garbage dump.

His computer was perched on top of the desk, dark with red streaks along the edges that he had coloured himself. The corners were whittled away, a result of constant collisions with doorframes and counters, though that felt like a distant past now. The computer had not moved from its spot on the desk for a while, so much that specks of dust had settled on the screen’s top ridge, starkly visible against the black. With a dragging of his hand, the boy wiped the dust off, casting it back into the air. It would settle again soon.

The screen flickered to life before him, illuminating his face. The same video player he had used last time was on the display. He pressed play.

The camera was shaky, handheld and moving as its carrier did. He caught glimpses of the background in brief moments of stillness, seeing floors and shelves very familiar to him. He knew that to the person recording, it was nothing more than a swinging of the arm while he walked; to a watcher, however, it might as well have been an earthquake. When the cameraman started running, the surroundings became nothing more than a blur, the occasional light like a star outside a spaceship window.

Eventually the running slowed, and the camera – or camcorder, as he knew it was – was put gently onto a table, looking over a rickety ironing board. A pair of shoes sat there, uniform in colour and size. Next to them was a box of supplies: paintbrushes, bottles, pencils.

The boy paused the video. He looked closely, trying to make out what he could from the grainy quality. His finger was brought to the screen, tapping against each paint colour as he counted them.

Lavender, taupe, olive. The writing on the bottle wasn’t visible, but he knew the colours by heart. He liked that the names were not generic. Purple was a colour, but lavender was a smell, a sight, a taste, an experience. Each bottle held a memory.

Chocolate, magnolia, verdant green. Every one of them he had found, not in the box but strewn around the house. Some of them had been placed, left with intention to be found again. Others were flung, hidden, mauled, abandoned.

Vermillion, cornflower, alabaster grey. Hazelwood, canary yellow, marigold, amaranth, mint.

Cadmium orange.

It stood in the very end of the box, snuggled into the corner. Cadmium colours were strong, passionate. So it was no surprise that the missing paint contrasted so harshly against the harsh grey background. He knew it was not in the garbage can.

The boy sighed, closing his screen. He would find the last bottle later. There were things, things to do.

            SLAM.

Another drawer, another box, another cabinet. Opened, searched, closed, but all empty, or at least useless to him. Every new spot he looked in was an opportunity, a gamble, but all of them had disappointed.

Cadmium orange. It should have been easy to find. It wouldn’t be able to hide away or camouflage like some of the other colours. It would shine like a beacon in the dark, a flame of a distant lighthouse. Yet he had searched the entire house three times over and still found nothing.

But he knew that to give up now would make everything else meaningless. He had searched the entire house three times over. And he would do it again.

The computer was still on the desk – he was the only one that used it anyway. He grabbed the edge of the screen and opened it, greeted by the same video, paused in the same place.

The video began moving again and someone stepped behind the ironing board holding a palette and several paper towels. The body set the supplies down, flattening them out and placing the shoes on them. Then the camera was raised, and the body’s face was shown.

The boy looked away. He did not like staring at himself.

His face was almost the same as it was when he had recorded the videos, though the one in the recording lacked the scars dancing around his left eye. He brought his hand to his eyelid, feeling the ridges and mottled lines. He remembered when they used to hurt.

In the recording, the boy began arranging the paint in his palette, mixing whites and blues together until they created the perfect shade. When he was done mixing, he put the palette down and looked at the camera, muttering something under his breath meant for nobody in particular. His voice rung out in the emptiness of the area he was filming. He had scouted it out for good acoustics.

Before the video could speak again the boy paused it. He had heard it a million times already; he was the one who had said it, after all. The rest of the dialogue played out on his lips in the silence, his memory reciting the today I’m going to be, my favourite colour is, what was that.

He skipped through the video, keeping his eye on the bright orange of the missing paint. He saw his recording in thirty second intervals, mixing, talking, drinking, painting. But the orange stayed in the same place. By the video’s end it hadn’t even left the box. Useless.

He opened another tab to see his gallery. More videos than he could count, the same face plastered over different backgrounds.  A school in its frame, hundreds of students filling a square yard. Fireworks over a city’s shadow, filling the sky with different tints. A lake reflecting the summer sun, held low over the horizon.

He spent minutes, or hours, scouring each video, reliving each day of the summer. By the time he had stopped it was dark. He did not find what he wanted.

The boy woke at night, before his alarm went off. The bouts of insomnia were becoming more severe recently. When he did sleep, it was dark and dreamless.

He pulled on a pair of sneakers and grabbed his garbage bag, heavy and colourful. The paint bottles shifted as the bag was hauled over his shoulder – he could feel their edges, the points of the tubes digging into his clavicle. He carried most of the weight on his back.

His journey was short and cold. The moon sat clear in the sky, a glowing crescent in the mist’s clearing that illuminated the ground below. The city at night was quiet, the sound of each footstep radiating out and into the surrounding air. Maybe he was just getting tired, but the bag became heavier as he neared his destination. The paint bottles were shifting, screaming, begging to be let out. But the boy would not let them go. Not now.

He had walked this path many times; he could’ve made the journey blind and wouldn’t have lost time. His feet is instinctively made the turns, weaving through the streets. He wasn’t sure where his head was, his thoughts detached, flying.

When he arrived at the garbage dump, he let the garbage bag down, releasing the weight from his back and allowing the lumps of bottles to tumble to the ground. The actual landfill was a ways off. What lay before him was a series of warehouses dotted with trucks and piles of garbage bags.

The boy walked past each warehouse, grey boxes with plastic roofs, taking note of each thing that had changed since he was last here. A now-unlocked door, graffiti on a wall, a missing sign. He walked, bag dragging along beside him, until he found himself at a dark green door, the entrance to a larger structure.

This building was different from the others. It had bowels, stretches of hallways filling empty space, branching doors into rooms into open closets. He put his hands on one of the double doors. It swung open, the hollow plastic just barely skidding against the gravel below. Inside was a familiar background, four grey walls. He could run his fingers along each, knowing the path of each crack, the location of every half-peeled sticker, some of which he had put on himself. The light switch was fixed to the wall on the other side of the room, under which was a mass, covered in blankets. Looking at it like this, it could’ve been anything.

The boy strode over and flung the cloth off, revealing an ironing board adorned with hastily stitched-on flowers. The metal legs were rickety, but they stood as the boy lifted the board up. He placed the paints onto the board, returning them to where they stood when he had filmed. He briefly considered taking them out of the bag and arranging them in order. He flicked the switch and the lights turned on to showcase the centrepiece of the room, an incinerator constructed of metal, black and warped. He had never used it, but often wanted to. There was an instruction book he read, though it wasn’t here now. He didn’t remember much of it, but he was sure he could figure out how to operate the machine– how hard could it be to burn things?

A small piece of shiny metal glinted in the new light. It was his camcorder; the same one he had used to record himself. The screen was cracked, muddling the already small viewer. All along it were scrambled dots, imprints of painted fingers that once held it, now coloured a fiery gold.

The boy grabbed it, closing the screen. When he returned to the ironing board he grabbed his garbage bag, opening it and allowing the bottles to spill out. Each bottle was individually picked up and thrown into the incinerator’s mouth.

Lavender, taupe, olive. Chocolate, magnolia, verdant green. Each colour, a needle that he relished throwing out.

Vermillion, cornflower, alabaster grey. Hazelwood, canary yellow, marigold, amaranth, mint. This was moving on – the clang of plastic against metal was a weight off his back, a time off his mind.

The boy picked up the camcorder and the screen swung open. He rotated it in his hands, reliving the touch of each button. When he pressed the power, a soft whirring surprised him. He looked at the screen and realized the screen was on, the battery still alive.

What does it matter, he closed the screen. He knew what was on it anyway. He approached the incinerator, readying himself to toss the device in. He drew his hand back and flicked his wrist.

But he knew what was on it.

His arm hesitated at the last moment, the fingers clutching to the camcorder strap. He re-opened the screen and hurriedly turned it on, knowing he likely had little battery left. This was another gallery, digital frames encasing snapshots of memories.

When the boy was less boy and more baby he had been told about monsters – ghosts that haunted their old lives, boogeymen that took sleeping children. He had asked if he would turn into a ghost when he died. In response there was a chuckle and a mutter of that’s a long way from now, and a mention that ghosts usually had unfinished business with their time alive. But then he was told that sometimes ghosts had a more mundane reason to be, in whichever world a ghost would be mundane. That sometimes a ghost was a ghost because they died, never leaving a reason why. That a ghost was unexplainable. He looked at the camcorder screen, the flickering light illuminating the ridges of his face.

That couldn’t be right, of course. There was something he didn’t see, something in a frame he missed. He knew it. The boy started the recording and began to watch again. This time, it would make sense.

The first video. It was bright, sunlight reflecting off the white canvas. He painted a field of flowers, mumbling vague commentary as he worked. This was one of his earliest. He didn’t know how to talk to the camera yet.

Another. A bird was taking form on his canvas. This time he spoke brightly, direct and confident. It was a diary for him, more or less.

A third. He used small brushes, meticulously adding details to a clay sculpture of a face. This was when he experimented off the canvas.

The video after had a thumbnail of black with a rectangle of light in the middle. The boy opened it, ready to scan. A pair of shoes, half-painted, were on the ironing board. The paint bottles were lined up in their box, the order he had counted them in on his computer. In the background were other paintings that he had done. This room was his studio, a place he found his solace in isolation.

The video was filmed at night, so the room was lit only by the decaying yellow of the incinerator room light. It was the same light that hung above him now. He had come at night because he had no other time that day, and painting the shoes seemed so important to him then. The video ended abruptly when the camera fell of the ironing board.

The next recording began with the readjusting of the camcorder. The room light wasn’t on – it had died, he remembered – so instead the boy used a flashlight. The bright white dug into the shadows of the room, draining the colour of the video. The shoes were only given a little more paint before a bang ran through the video sound. The boy in the recording flicked his head, putting down his paintbrushes. He grabbed the camcorder and the flashlight, pointing both towards the door on the incinerator’s left.

The boy glared intensely at the knob. He wanted to yell at the recording to leave, but he knew it would be no use. If he wanted to find his answer, he couldn’t afford to be emotional. Not now.

The recording approached the knob and swung the door open, unafraid, unknowing. The dim bulb of his flashlight swept the halls, barely reaching past a few metres. The boy watching looked at the video’s darkness, imagining he might find something reflecting back in the light. He continued to watch as the camera moved out of the room and into the darkness of the rest of the building.

Doors upon doors upon doors that all looked the same until one. It was closed, unlike the others. The recording stopped moving and the boy held his breath, counting the seconds in his head as the camera approached it. The boy flung the door open, its metal knob harshly colliding with the wall. The boy watching flinched at the sound – it was familiar, too familiar. There was nothing on the other side except the darkness of another room, but both people, recorder and watcher, examined the void.

After a moment, the boy in the recording moved away. He stood at the hallway junction, considering returning to his art.

BANG.

The sound emanated from the hallway he had entered through. The camera pirouetted, trying to identify the source of the noise. In the distance, a blob of light floated in the surrounding shadow. It was the door he had come through, the metal knob against the wall. It was a draft, just a draft. He looked back towards the rest of the building one last time before approaching the open door. His paintings were in there, after all. The shoes he hadn’t finished colouring were sat on the ironing board, waiting to be completed.

A single shadow emerged from the darkness and moved across the square of light.

There was something, something.

Why had he come here now? Was it really so important to paint those shoes? The boy started backwards before breaking into a run. Behind him came more sounds, stomps and guttural noises that barely sounded like a human could make them. The camera swooped up and down in tandem with the boy’s swinging arms. Each footstep radiated out into the silence. One pair was swift and desperate, the other unyielding, inevitable.

Suddenly, the video became significantly more stable – he was holding the camcorder in place – before cutting to black. The boy watching stared at the black screen for a while, listening to his breathing and hearing nothing else. It comforted him to make sure he was alone.

The final video was short, barely over a minute. The boy opened it to see the base of a desk. It was barely visible; an unknowing viewer would fail to deduce what it was, much less that the video was being filmed underneath it. The desk legs were connected to each other, forming a box in which there was only one open side.

The camcorder stopped moving and was placed on the ground. Adjacent to it, the boy in the recording hid himself behind a broken pallet, trying to contain his frenzied state. Tears welled in his eyes as he heard the sounds of footsteps starting to near him. He thought for a moment that his foot might be peeking out, but he didn’t dare move.

Two feet appeared on the screen, though it was impossible to make out any detail through the darkness. The sharp edge of a broken sneaker was the furling of an overgrown toenail was the claw of some creature not of this world. They were heavy and moved sluggishly, one step sinking into the next. Each was accompanied by a light thud, but the far louder sound was the breathing, if one could call it that. The air heaved in and out through a windpipe that was a broken, archaic flute, every breath out a two-toned growl.

Blood seeped into the boy’s left eye from the lacerations surrounding it. He wanted to rub it away, but instead allowed the blood to ooze off of his eyelid and onto his hand, the inflamed cuts burning. A single droplet fell loose from his skin and dripped onto the floor. The feet paused.

The boy moved his hands and head toward the ground, desperate to stop the dripping. Both boy and figure stopped breathing. If true silence was possible to achieve, it was now.

The two stayed there for exactly seventeen-and-a-half seconds, according to the camcorder’s time. But when the figure began to walk away, the boy did not move. He laid on the ground and stared into the darkness until he was sure the footsteps were gone.

The boy watching paused the video. No, not just darkness. Across the hallway and next to a garbage can, a glimmer of white. Light refracting off of a lid. The plastic lid of a paint bottle. He looked at it until the video ended, still in the same spot.

The boy closed the camcorder and looked up. He slapped a large button on the incinerator’s side – a power button. It needed to warm up before it started burning. Then he exited through the door to the left.

His walk was cold and dark. At one point he came to a crossroads where his feet no longer guided him. For once, he didn’t quite remember which path to take. He closed his eyes and thought about that day, with the sprinting, sobbing. Suddenly the way was clear.

As he got closer, bits of the trail began to show themselves, shining in the moonlight – a shard of plastic, dislodged gravel. He followed the path until he found a pallet, now destroyed. Bits of his dried blood stained the top.

Up ahead was his treasure, sitting next to the garbage. An open lid and splotched paint told of the bottle’s death, thrown against the wall and stepped on. Yet there it was.

Cadmium orange. The boy picked it up, feeling the crinkles in the hard plastic. In his hands, the bottle was pitiful, broken and drained of its colour. It seemed silly now to imagine how much he had thought about it while it sat adjacent to a trash can, leaking onto the floor.

CLANG.

The boy’s blood ran cold.

It came from behind him, the sound. He looked at himself, the paint, the pallet, and realized how familiar this all was. No, no, no, no. This couldn’t be happening.

From the hallway came crackling, millions of nails tapping against an iron floor. The boy backed away, hitting the table he had hid himself under. Sweat began to bead on his forehead.

He had closed the door, so no light was visible. Instead, the hallway developed into pure black, a dimension made of nothingness. Yet something was there. Something was there to make the sound, metal on metal.

The boy looked at the table and considered hiding himself underneath. The sound was getting louder, crackles and heaves like broken ventilators. It was hard to see, tears that he hadn’t even realized were forming streaming from his eyes, down his face and onto the floor. Each drip was louder to him than anything. He smudged the tears away with his wrist and felt the scars around his eye, horrible lines like parasitic worms writhing under his skin. They stung now, more than ever.

He was halfway under the table but stopped. He did not want more scars. Everything seemed familiar, but now he could change it.

Tears were wiped away and his eyes scanned the area, settling on the metal-tipped edge of the table leg. The boy wound his leg back before kicking at the table with all his might, all his anger. The table broke easily, splinters arching up his leg. He flinched, but took the table leg from the floor, brandishing the broken end towards the door. The paint was shoved in his back pocket.

He moved down the hallway, turning on the camcorder and using the screen for whatever meagre light he could get from it. He listened for the two-toned breaths that he knew well; he had heard them in his sleep ever since then. Every step forward was another round of darting eyes, a hand tightly clutched around the base of the table leg.

By the time he had approached the door, he had found nothing, but the sounds were loud. Behind the door was the snapping of bones, the growls of a beast. His scars burned more intensely than ever and he ran towards the door, slamming it open and charging into the room with his weapon at the ready.

Immediately, he was blown backwards by the wall of heat. He covered his eyes, the lashes almost singed. Inside was a raging beast of a different kind, the flames enveloping the room. He staggered to his feet and tossed his table leg away, the edge beginning to burn. Centimetres away from where he was standing, a chunk of a burning ceiling beam fell to the ground in front of the door he had come through.

The incinerator. He looked to the centre of the room and the incinerator had unleashed its jaw, the protective piece of metal crumpled onto the ground. The flames burned brilliant red and yellow but also blue, silver. The paint bottles, the cadmium, the cobalt. A fume flew into his mouth and he coughed it out. There were no doubt toxic chemicals in the gases.

The light had broken; the boy searched desperately for a way out in the multicoloured illuminations of the fire. The incinerator’s rage spilled from its mouth to the other side of the room, cutting it in half while a chunk of an air vent fell, making the heaving he heard before. He looked to the door he had come through, but the fire had spread up the wood.

Tears again formed, both from fear and the smoke. His eyes refracted orange from the fire, scanning the room as it continued to grow. He looked up and saw another flash of orange, a reflection of the fire. A window. He ran to it, reaching up but failing to touch it.

Above the incinerator, the air vent continued to crumble, leaning down piece by piece. The parts just above the fire glowed red, the blood of the building. The boy ran over and extended his arms over the fire, grasping at air towards the closest chunk of the vent that wasn’t hot enough to melt his fingers. When he got ahold of it, a blue flame danced under his wrists. He pulled back with all of his weight and the vent ripped off. He tumbled to the ground along with the metal; the sound the vent made when it hit the ground was the noise that had scared him so.

The boy got to his feet, coughing and hacking. He dragged the vent over to the window and stood atop it, his hands just reaching the glass. He couldn’t see but felt around the window’s edges for a lever of some kind, some way to open it. There was none.

The boy shut his eyes, unable to stand the stinging of the smoke. He banged his hand against the window one, two, three, four times but achieved nothing other than a dull pain in the palm. He stepped off the vent, opening his eyes. The fire lit his face, painting the ridges blue, red, silver. The room was dark but illuminated wildly by the colours, a witch’s dance at midnight. On the other side of the room, the ironing board burned, the stitched flowers being slowly reduced to ash.

In the flames, he saw his weapon. The table leg was burning, but the metal persisted in the embers. The boy approached it, the green-toned fire warding him off. He bit his lip and stuck his hand in, grabbing the wood. The flame burned his palm and the boy screamed as he held the leg, hot metal and wood smouldering on his skin. He tossed the leg onto the floor and stamped on it until the fire went out.

The boy pulled himself onto the vent and grasped the metal end of the table leg. He slammed it into the window and heard the crack. Then, he pulled back his arm and did it again; this time, his hand burst through, small shards of glass falling to the ground below him.

He abandoned the table leg and pulled himself up with one hand. He held the camcorder with the other. Glass dug into his fingers, cutting the edges. When he raised himself enough to get his head through, he stuck his face out and opened his eyes, gasping for fresh air. His legs were flailing around, now using his chin as leverage to find his feet somewhere to grab on to. He slunk his other arm through the window, dropping the camcorder onto a pile of trash bags below. With both arms, the boy pushed himself through the window. He let out cries of pain as chips of glass left long, thin cuts across his arms, his waist, his knee. Finally, one shoe made it to the other side of the window. He set it against the wall and propelled himself off the building, tumbling to the garbage bags below.

The boy laid there for a while, looking up at the night sky and taking in breaths. The camcorder sat on the ground next to him, finally free from the prison that was the boy’s former studio. Eventually, the boy sat up, feeling something in his back pocket. He reached behind to touch the mottled edges of a plastic lid.

Cadmium orange.

He had forgotten about it in his escape. Here it was, at his mercy in his hands. The bottle was crinkled, the label so faded it was unreadable. Dried paint was splattered around the edges.

The boy looked at the open window. The fire still cracked inside. He grasped the paint bottle and thought about throwing it back in. In the reflection of the plastic, he thought he could see a pair of feet, moving sluggishly across a dark hallway.

He shoved the paint and camcorder into his pocket and made the journey home. When he finally returned, he placed the paint on his desk and began charging the camcorder. He called the fire department and told them of the garbage dump. Afterwards, he went to the bathroom and bandaged his cuts, running his burn marks under cold water.

By the end of a few weeks the talk about the fire had died down. Nobody cared much for why it happened – the building was abandoned and the fire was dealt with before it could spread. When people asked the boy about the burn marks on his palm, he said there was an accident with an oven.

He had brought a good lunch today, leftovers from yesterday’s dinner. The cafeteria was loud, so he had to shout just for other people to hear him.

The guy from chess club came over and offered him a chocolate coin. In exchange, the boy grabbed his juice box and swapped it. The chess guy saw it was peach and smiled before leaving.

As the boy ate, a drop of red fell from his lip and onto his food. A nosebleed. He left the table and went to the bathroom.

He stood in front of the mirror, a tissue to his nostril. There was nobody else in here. The room was silent,  the only noise the boy’s own breathing. He didn’t know how long he held the tissue to his nose, but it felt like too long. How much blood could be in there? He waited, listening to the silence. He tried to dispel the thought that he would hear breaths that were not his own, heaves of a rotting throat.

Blood dripped into his mouth and he drew his hand back, not realizing how much red had spilled. Some of it covered his index finger. He looked at himself in the mirror and suddenly no, it was not just a finger, but an artist’s tool. The mirror was a canvas that he brought his brush against, making three blazing strokes of crimson. The outline of a bird, or a fish, or maybe a boat from another perspective. The blood slowly began to trickle down the glass. The silence was deafening. He did not want to look anywhere else in the mirror, for fear he would see a pair of gnarled feet somewhere behind him.

The boy locked himself in a stall. He covered his mouth with his hand, trying to contain his tears.