When Melanie was at the peak of her blues, as her mother called them, she let her hang a framed print beside her bed.

She closed her eyes while her mother tapped a picture hook with a hammer a thousand times and then spent an age straightening the print.

‘You can look at it all day,’ her mother said. ‘No one could be miserable with the Impressionists.’

Melanie opened her eyes. The print was a painting by Pissarro. It seemed to have a greenish hue, but perhaps that was just the lighting in her bedroom. Her vision was blurry — a side effect of the antidepressants and nothing to worry about, her doctor had said. She squinted a little and could make out a garden in the foreground of the painting, a wooden fence in the middle distance and the tall trees of a wood beyond it.

‘Thanks Mum, it’s great,’ she said.

‘It’s Eragny in Paris,’ said her mother. ‘I looked it up. It’s a suburb now, but in the 1890s it was still a village.’

Paris. Maybe she’d feel better if she were on the other side of the world in Paris. Maybe she’d feel better if she were in a village that would become Paris, far away from the present. But wars would soon be arriving in that rural scene. Melanie closed her eyes and listened to the sound of her mother clanging about in the kitchen. At least her housework was getting done while she was just lying in bed. She should be more grateful.

When Melanie next opened her eyes, her house was quiet. Her head felt foggy. She looked up and saw a woman in the painting. She hadn’t been there before.

‘Is that me?’

She propped herself on one elbow and squinted at the print. There was definitely a woman by the wooden fence. She didn’t seem to be doing anything, just standing midway between the poplars and the garden. She was dressed in a long blue skirt and a mustard-coloured shirt. It looked just like the outfit Melanie had taken off earlier and slung over the back of the chair in her bedroom.

With a jolt, she recognised herself.

What had happened to her? She was so confused. Had she faded out of life and woken up in a painting, locked into a mixture of pigments and binders, rendered in two dimensions? She looked down at her hands. She could make out their shape but no details, as though the artist had not bothered to give her more than the suggestion of hands.

She searched her mind for an explanation and found it long ago in her childhood. She remembered reading somewhere about a young girl who had vanished. Erica, that was her name. Erica had disappeared and then showed up six weeks later in a painting on a wall in her parents’ house. She moved around in the painting over the months and years as she grew older, until one day she disappeared completely.

Was she like Erica, lost in a painting? Was this her place now, a simple land where visible brushstrokes played in a delicate light? For a moment she let herself enjoy the warm sun of the French summer and the preindustrial silence of the soft breeze. It was peaceful there. She inhaled deeply and the smell of oil paint suddenly overwhelmed her. She felt a rising panic, the same panic Erica must have felt looking out at her family, unable to join them.

Through her confusion she heard a voice in her mind, the rational Melanie, the Melanie who coached her through life.

‘That’s a subplot from The Witches by Roald Dahl.’

Melanie sat upright, suddenly snapped out of the fog. She wasn’t in a painting, how ridiculous. She was in her bedroom and Erica was a character in a storybook.

She looked at the clock. It was 5.30 pm. Her mother must have left hours ago. She had only minutes, perhaps seconds, before her husband and their little boys would arrive home, before the wonder and chaos of their family evening would begin.

About this story

‘Poplars, Eragny’ is a view of the artist’s own garden, painted by Camille Pissarro in 1895. Pissarro was an Impressionist who mainly painted landscapes, but you can also find portraits and people engaged in everyday activities among his works.

I write flash fiction stories that play with the idea that experiences of the paranormal are a psychological interpretation of normal events. Roald Dahl’s story of Erica in The Witches has stayed with me since childhood. For this ekphrastic piece of creative writing, I decided to play with this story, giving my character Melanie — who appears in all my flash fiction stories here on Medium — the experience of awakening in a painting.

Is there a woman in Pissarro’s painting? I can see one, but only an impression.

The Woman in the Poplars was originally published in ArtMusing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.