The Van Gogh Prophecy

CHAPTER 1: SUNFLOWERS

Between the National Gallery’s stone columns, the queue curved obediently around her. Nearly six feet tall, curly blond hair spilling beneath a yellow sunhat. Her lemon sundress seemed its own source of light. She was less a tourist than a magazine cover sprung to life.

An older couple followed behind. His jacket too warm for June. Pearls cinched at her throat. People used to walking past rope lines. Security brightened when they saw the blond woman.

The sunhat turned, framing her like a halo. “Sorry to skip the queue, everyone.” She looked at me for a moment too long, like she knew me, and disappeared inside.

Moments later, a guard glanced in the satchel at my hip and waved me through.

I straightened as I entered. High ceilings did it every time, a reflex of my former vocation. The entrance hall swelled with noise: footsteps multiplied; radios crackled; children laughed, their voices colliding and rising into the imperious dome.

I didn’t linger—up the staircase to the right, into Room 45. Zhi would have stopped at every painting, each one its own universe. We had a game: one painting per room, chosen for the other. You stood before it until you could say one true thing the picture kept to itself.

One round ended at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in front of Georgia O’Keeffe’s A Sunflower from Maggie when I said, “This, of course, is from her red period.”

Zhi laughed so hard the woman beside her shushed us, until she laughed too.

Past Matisse and Rousseau, I was committed elsewhere. The colors grew louder. The floor listed. My pulse skipped ahead into Room 43.

Sunflowers, flanked by Two Crabs and Van Gogh’s Chair. Tourists slipped away; minutes followed, until I stood alone before a joy that had learned to endure.

Eventually, I turned. Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières claimed the opposite wall. Vast, meticulous, remote. Nameless boys frozen along a riverbank in a summer they didn’t know could be taken. The boy in the red cap stood in the shallows, hands cupped to his mouth, calling across the water. My breath waited with him. No sound came.

Someone has a great fire in his soul and nobody ever comes to warm themselves at it, and passers-by see nothing but a little smoke at the top of the chimney and then go on their way.

Nine years with Vincent’s letters locked safely in a box had kept the walls in my head standing; six months back with him, and I half expected the gallery to melt around me.

Like an actor claiming the stage, the woman from Vogue breezed into the room. Yellow hat, sundress radiant, the older couple a step behind. Mid-sentence, her hand traced the arc of van Gogh’s Sunflowers, as if the paint were still wet.

She smiled at me, paused, and stepped aside. “What do you think?”

I didn’t think she was talking to me. I looked at the flowers hoping they might speak.

Patient as a mother waiting out a lie, she stared at me. My thumb found the place where the strap met my satchel. Refusing to look her way, I said, “Only what I hear.”

If you have ears to hear.

My face felt oddly conspicuous, as though I’d forgotten I was wearing one. I looked at her and said, “They’re severed, but still yearn as though called by the sun. Or God, if you will. It’s—devotion, interrupted.”

Up close, her eyes were the same sustaining green as a sunflower’s center.

“‘Devotion interrupted.’ I read that recently in an essay online.” She looked from the painting, directly at me. “You wouldn’t happen to be its author, would you?”

Heat flushed my collar. How could she know that?

Her smile flickered, quick and satisfied. She extended her hand. “Raquel.” With a small turn of her wrist, she indicated the pair beside her. “This couple you probably already know.”

Up close, I recognized him. A former U.S. congressman. Heavy jowls. The smug calculation of a politician who never stopped campaigning. The woman at his side, wife number three, tapped at her phone.

“Sorry,” I said. “I spend all my time in libraries.”

Before she could introduce them, someone shoved past us, knocking me to my knees. My leather journal tore loose from my satchel, pages flaring open as it skidded across the floor.

Above me, two hooded figures rushed toward the painting, backpacks swinging, urgency outpacing sense. One splashed red paint on Sunflowers. The other, black.

“Don’t believe the lies!” they shouted. “Tear down the Advocacy!”

The room inhaled as one. Alarms stuttered awake. A guard lunged too late.

As I got to my feet, a square-shouldered man guided the congressman and his wife toward the exit, steering them with one hand while the other opened a path. When his sleeve rode up, I glimpsed a tattoo on his wrist—what looked like a pair of tweezers: two narrow legs hinged at the top. The image stayed an instant and vanished into bodies and alarms.

Tourists pressed for the exits, some filming, one covering her child’s eyes. In moments, guards pinned the culprits facedown, wrists zip-tied, paint pooling on the hardwood floor.

I crouched beside the nearest boy; a guard’s knee pressed into his back. The guard’s hand ground the boy’s cheek into the wet paint. I gripped my fingers around the guard’s wrist and lifted it. The guard pressed all his weight, but his hand hovered two inches above the boy’s head.

“You’ve got him,” I said. “He’s not going anywhere.”

He released his hand, but his knee stayed where it was. That was his job.

“Can you breathe?” I asked the young man.

He turned his head. A black earring the size of a quarter stretched one lobe. Nineteen, maybe, his jaw set.

“Say it out loud.”

“Yeah,” he said, paint bubbling at his lips.

“Keep your chin off the floor.”

A hand closed over my shoulder. I let it pull me away.

Across the room, Raquel knelt, one hand steadying her hat, and scooped up my journal. Walking back to me, she slipped in wet paint, grabbing my forearm to catch herself.

She glanced after her absent couple and back at the vandalized wall, letting out a dry chuckle. “And that concludes our tour.”

Sunflowers bled in crimson and black.

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