Nina was being watched. She could feel the eyes following her every move no matter where in the house she was. They were always on her. Cooking, cleaning, sleeping, she did it all in another’s company. The last time she had been alone must have been when she still lived with her parents, however, those were just a different set of eyes. She had never experienced true privacy, and couldn’t foresee any future with it either.

The eyes were beady red ones, and they stared at her within the confines of a canvas. A large painting stood on her wall proudly, watching its surroundings with hunger. It consisted of streaky red and purple paint, a thin figure too tall to be human. Its head was tilted slightly to the side, just off balance, and the face it wore was consumed by a large hole reminiscent of a mouth. It stood far in the background of the painting but was tall enough to reach both ends of the canvas. Every day Nina swore that the figure moved a little bit closer.

Her friends told her that her fears were nonsensical. They loved the painting, admiring the ‘originality and modernity’ of the piece, playing dress-up as art critics whenever they came over for dinner, and delighted in the opportunity to become outspoken individuals. They flaunted their bravery like peacocks, and whenever they expounded Nina on her poor art taste, they morphed into some gross feathery flesh amalgamation, squawking incoherently. She soon stopped inviting friends over for dinner, preferring the ominous silence to the meaningless babble.

Her family was outraged whenever she would mention selling the painting. They would lecture Nina as though she were a child, telling her story after story about her grandfather, a master painter, who died and left that very painting to her. She was the only one in the family who received a piece of art in his will, she should cherish it with her very soul. To this, Nina had no real response, though she wished that her grandfather would have given her any one of his other paintings, for the rest were cheerful rather than threatening. She gazed upon those pieces with jealousy, imagining a life where a dragonfly hovered on her wall instead of a monster.

This left Nina all alone with her painting. In daylight, she would cook and clean around the illustration, making sure to watch its every move just like it was watching hers. At night, however, she lost the shred of courage residing within her, choosing to run past the canvas in fear that it would reach out with its spindly arms to grab her. It was a visible ghost, a nightmare in her waking moments.

Soon, the painting started to haunt Nina’s dreams as well. Terrors of being caught by the creature and ripped apart flooded her unconscious mind, and close-ups of the thing’s disfigured face flashed before her eyes. She couldn’t escape it, no matter where she went. More and more nights were shattered by her screams, the figure drew closer to its prey. She knew something had to be done, but the solution eluded her.

One day, Nina’s friends decided to pay a surprise visit to her house. Three of them crowded by her door, chattering about what the upcoming night would hold. It had been too long since they were invited over for dinner, and they missed the nostalgic conversations about life and art. The declarations of love for their favorite painting swelled in their chests, ready to burst. However, the house was silent, and nobody answered their knocks. The door handle, they found out, was unlocked, so, giggling impishly, the group let themselves in.

Upon entering the living area, the three were surprised to find out that the house was empty. It had seemed that Nina had never left her room those days, and when they checked her phone’s location, it was detected to be close by. Where had she gone without her phone? And why did she leave the door unlocked? The friends began to chatter with uncertainty about what to do next, when one of them spoke up, “Have I just never looked at that painting close enough, or is there a new person in it?”

The group turned to see the same painting that had always hung on Nina’s wall, except this time two figures were plastered onto the canvas instead of one. The lanky, purple and red creature was now so close to the foreground that its bony shoulder obscured the new creature beside it. Jaw open and eyes wide, a fleshy rendition of their friend stared back at them from a distance, and the group was overcome with the feeling that they were being watched with more eyes than ever before.