As the inflatable girls walked along the boardwalk, they noticed a caricature artist that had set up shop off to the side. A completely normal sight in any touristy area - but this one was a little different. For one thing, the examples of his work that were posted all around his booth seemed to be moving somehow. It was subtle, but out of the corner of your eye, each cartoonish figure seemed to occasionally twitch or adjust its position - and when you looked back, they were standing still again.
The man running the booth seemed to be holding a bundle of art supplies in his hands - pens, paintbrushes, colored pencils. But on a closer inspection, he wasn’t just carrying these implements. They were part of his hands, each one taking the place of one of his fingers. His palms looked like palettes, covered in different shades of paint that he would dip his fingers into.
It didn’t take long before the man noticed the group of girls watching him. “Hi there! You want me to draw any of you girls?”
Without really knowing why, Maddie stepped forward. She was curious. “Uh, how does this work?”
“Oh, it’s easy,” the man replied smoothly. “You know, I never had an ounce of talent before I found that Lilith Fruit. And then I suddenly turned into an artistic genius!” He pulled out a large, blank sheet of paper from behind his booth. “When you’ve got a gift like this, you’ve just got to share it with people. Here, let me show you...” The man reached around Maddie’s head and pressed the sheet of paper against the back of her neck.
“What are you doing?” Maddie asked.
“Well, to start off, I just need to trace the outline of you,” the man replied. With a brush-finger, he carefully rubbed against her vinyl skin and painted a thick black line that ran all the way around her head, from one shoulder to the other.
When that was done, he started to press further inward onto Maddie’s blonde hair. Before long, he was running the bristles of his fingertips straight across the girl’s forehead. But rather than covering her face in a splattering of watercolor paint, each soft movement of the brush seemed to push her back forcefully against the paper.
As the man worked his way down Maddie’s features, she tried to look down towards her feet, but found that she couldn’t - all her downcast eyes could see was the man’s legs, not her own. It slowly dawned on her that she couldn’t feel them either - she no longer existed at all below the shoulders! What was left of her felt flattened, a familiar sensation to Maddie by now but one that was very different this time.
By the time Maddie even thought about resisting against what this guy was doing to her, his work was already finished. With one final flourish, he pressed Maddie’s neck firmly into the paper. She was now simply a two-dimensional image.
Maddie couldn’t feel her lower body at all, because it was out of frame and so it no longer existed. However, it didn’t take much effort to raise her hand up to her face. She just thought about moving it upward and, boom, suddenly it existed again.
Trying to look at her own hand, though, was an entirely different issue. She couldn’t see it when it was right next to her head, because it was stuck on the same flat plane that her eyes were. After some fumbling around, she tried putting her hand directly in front of her face, but that was no good either. As soon as her face was behind something, she no longer had a face at all. There was no “in front of” or “behind” in this cramped little 2D world, or “just out of frame” - either something was visible to the viewer or it just wasn’t there at all.
The man smiled as he watched Maddie explore herself. After a moment, he turned the paper around to show her to her friends. They all looked shocked. “Maddie?”, Isabella asked right away. “Are you in there?”
Maddie was struck by a sense of unease. She knew that she could still move, but to do it when so many people were watching her seemed wrong somehow - totally, viscerally wrong. Shameful, even. She had to push right past that feeling in order to respond. “Yeah, it’s me,” Maddie said back, accompanied by a sheepish little wave where she tried to move her hand as little as possible.
“How do you feel?”, Amber asked, taking the sheet of paper Maddie was on from the man. Maddie could see that she was being moved, but she couldn’t feel the motion at all. Her whole world was the interior of the paper now, it seemed, and what was outside of it looked just as much like a flat image as she looked to them.
“Well,” Maddie replied, “I guess I always wanted to be admired...”