Elinora Alarie believed in the art of crying. As a child, she sat in front of the mirror and admired the tears slithering down her fresh young cheeks, sometimes in straight lines, sometimes in lackadaisical waves, but with a mission nonetheless: to fall. She was full of emotions, hard and soft, but when they packaged up into wet planets that launched into the galaxy of space outside her body, she only felt the purified tingle of relief; what a beautiful gift.

Elinora poured emotion into her portraiture. The paintings’ subjects portrayed the spectrum of human feeling through tearful scenes: a young boy laughing so hard he cries, a grieving man covering his face with damp hands, a woman screaming through tears of rage, a teary-eyed girl anxiously biting her fingernails, and so on. Her subjects were so realistic and intensely emotional they appeared alive, as if the viewer were watching through a window. Elinora believed she’d created a new kind of magic, one that hooked her audience and swiftly built her notoriety, and it was all thanks to her teardrops.

Teardrops are a complex concoction of water, mucus, and oil that release stress hormones. When your emotions reach maximum pressure inside your body, they burst out through tears and restore equilibrium. Tears, with their oil base, could mix with her oil paints, so how perfect, she thought, to swirl real emotion into her art to emit its intended aura.  

Elinora always believed she would travel through a bright light when she died, but she instead teleported into the body of a tired mother cooking dinner with one hand and balancing a newborn baby in the other while her young son impatiently tugged at her pant leg and his smiling older brother ran through the kitchen with a toy airplane in hand. 

“Boys, please go in the other room until dinner is finished,” Elinora told them.

“When will the food be ready, Mommy?” the younger boy asked.

“I want to play in here!” the other boy giggled.

Elinora looked down at the baby, who was sucking her fist. Oh no, she’s hungry too, Elinora sighed. Her heart sank, and tears of overwhelm swallowed her eyes. “I said to get out of the kitchen. Now!” She tried to stifle her yell, but she couldn’t take the tugging or the laughing or the sucking any longer. The lights became too bright, the sounds became too loud, the room felt too hot, and all she could think about was escaping into sleep and never waking up.

“Mom, the food is burning,” the older boy said glibly as he made another lap through the kitchen.

“What?” she snapped. She looked down through the teary blur at her stirring hand and noticed the ground beef was sticking to the bottom of the skillet, sending smoke signals into the air. She quickly moved the skillet to an inactive burner on the stove, slammed down the spatula, and slid down the cabinet to the linoleum floor, burying her face in her baby’s muslin blanket to cry. 

“Are you crying?” a voice asked. She looked up, and the paint on the kitchen wall in front of her had faded into a vignette; through the transparency stood her sister—not the tired mother’s sister but Elinora’s sister, Louise. She appeared a giant before her, as if Elinora had shrunken into a child looking at its elder. 

“Louise?” Elinora asked with disbelief. Her tears stopped in their tracks, still warm buttons on her face. She looked from Louise to the boys, who were frozen in the corner of the kitchen as if time had stopped, and then back to her sister. 

Louise’s amber eyes widened. “How …?” 

Elinora looked down at the baby in her arms and noticed she was frozen too, her face soft and angelic like a porcelain doll.

Louise continued to stare dumbfoundedly at the talking woman in the portrait, and then she reached out and gently slid her hand across the paint. To Elinora, it looked as if she were wiping her hand across glass in front of her; she felt nothing.

“It’s me, Lou. Please, say something. I’m scared,” Elinora begged. “I don’t know what’s happening to me. I was on my way to the gallery, and then I was here, and now I’m this woman, and it makes no sense.” Elinora’s heart pounded as panic darted through her new body.

“This is one of your paintings,” Louise whispered. “I can’t believe it. How is this possible?” She touched the paint again. “I came here to find you. You didn’t show up for dinner, and it’s not like you to bail. I tried to call, but you didn’t answer.” Louise seemed for a moment as if she were frozen too, shock paralyzing her from the impossible. Suddenly, her trance was shaken by her ringing cell phone.

“Hello?” Louise answered. She listened quietly for a long moment until her breath caught in her throat and tears pooled in her eyes before splashing down her face. She looked up at Elinora incredulously. She said nothing back to whomever was on the phone and hung up.

“You’re dead,” she choked through her tears. “Car … crash …. No, no, no, no, no ….” Her tears rushed out with the jerking waves of grief in her chest.

Elinora remembered the bright light she saw before she became the tired mother. Her fear melted into confused acceptance. She reached out to console her sister, and this time, she felt her flushed skin. “The tears …” Elinora whispered.

Louise laid her hand over Elinora’s and gripped tightly. “I don’t understand,” Louise sobbed. “How are you dead but also here and also nowhere at all?”

“I’d ask God for you, but I don’t think I’ve ever painted him.” Elinora gave a slight smile. “I don’t understand it either. This is absolutely nuts, but I’d rather be stuck here with you than floating around the cosmos in some ball of energy, or worse—nonexistent.”

“Me too.” Louise took a deep breath and glanced around the gallery at the many portraits hung about the room. “I’ll come see you every day. I’ll take care of your gallery and turn it into a memorial for you. I won’t let all your hard work go to waste.”

“Thanks, Lou. I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, if I’ll be gone or not, but I’ll wait for you as long as I’m here. And after that—if there is an after—just know that I love you, okay? And please, start writing again. Let me be your muse if you ever struggle to paint with your words.” 

Louise nodded but didn’t reply. Elinora admired the final single globe of sadness traversing the terrain of Louise’s face and wished overwhelmingly that she could paint this scene; it captured grief, relief, hope, and defeat all at once—she’d never seen anything so tragically yet so artfully gorgeous.

They simply stared at each other in both awe and disbelief for several long moments. Their minds were flooded with both everything and nothing. Neither knew what to say. There were no sensical words for this puzzling loss. Finally, Louise whispered, “I love you,” and reached around Elinora for a hug, but her arms passed through her like a hologram. Her eyes bulged, and panic crept into them.

“You stopped crying,” Elinora acknowledged. She’d felt a wave of electricity vibrate through her body as Louise swept through her. “It’s the tears. They are the bond.” Slowly, she felt herself being sucked back into her picture frame like traveling through a vacuum.

Louise gasped. “You painted with tears. So you’re like, quantum entangled with them, huh? Your soul is still alive, just different.”

“I have no idea,” Elinora admitted. “Whatever it is, it’s a magic I won’t complain about if it makes my work more powerful and keeps you connected to me.”

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” Louise said, checking the time on her cell phone. “I need to check on Mom and Dad. Should I tell them what’s happened to you?”

“That’s your call,” Elinora shrugged. “I’ll be here either way.”

Elinora reached out to her sister, but her palm once again met the invisible barrier between them. She blew a kiss instead, and as Louise exited the gallery, the frozen children around her thawed, and Elinora became their mother once again, one spirit split in two, as if no time had passed at all. 

The next morning, Elinora awoke as a soldier cradling his gunshot-riddled friend in his arms. It was only when Louise returned that Elinora was relieved of her anguish and remembered who she was and what had transpired the day before. Then, with every sunrise, Elinora found herself a new character in a different portrait, but this wasn’t so bad, she thought; she would always have the power to feel. She was her God, the illustrator of her own eternity, the lifeblood of her artistic legacy.

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