Hand Me Down Death

The picture had been missing for years. The pieces were collected in a decorative Tiffany-style box. She wasn’t really sure how many pieces there were supposed to be, if any were missing, or what it was supposed to look like when she got done, but she didn’t have anything better to do so she scattered the curvy pressed wood puzzle pieces on the dark, heavy wood of the dining table. It was an old puzzle, 1950’s era, not like the cardboard ones she was used to assembling.

She tied her red hair back away from her face and went to work, separating the edge pieces from the rest and turning them all face up. Finding pieces with corresponding edges and matching parts of the picture, she assembled the outer edge of the puzzle in only a few minutes. Across the bottom of the scene a table, made of, she assumed, mahogany, was beginning to develop. It looked similar to the one she was working on. She tried to imagine what the rest of the picture would look like as she sifted through the center pieces looking for red wood grain.

As the picture developed, it became a reproduction of an oil painting. The more of the picture that developed, the more it looked like the room she was sitting in. The red wood table, the china displayed on the wall behind her, it was all emerging before her eyes.

It was, she thought, as if the puzzle itself was telling her which pieces to choose. Even with 500 pieces (she had taken a guess after pouring them onto the table) and no guide picture, she was sailing through, working in an almost perfect circle around the interior, from the edges in toward the middle. Soon all that was missing was ten pieces out of the middle, the heart of the painting. There was no doubt, now. The room in the picture was the room she was in. There were even stray puzzle pieces scattered on the table. A small, illogical part of her expected to see herself seated in the center of the puzzle.

The next piece she added to the puzzle revealed what she was terrified to think was the end of a red ponytail splayed out on the table. She added another and another and a deep red pool, nearly black against the dark wood of the table began to appear. Another piece and another and soon what may have been a ponytail earlier was now undoubtedly a ponytail and it was undoubtedly her own, as was the pool which she now could identify as being blood. With a trembling hand, she placed the final piece into its place in the table.

The last thing she heard as the puzzle piece touched the table was a sickening crack. As her head fell hard onto the table and inky black blood drained from the wound at the base of her skull, the picture on the puzzle faded until nothing was left but a sheet of white.