Darkness. The smell of old oil paint and dust. A feeling of being stretched, flattened, wrong. A face that is not her face is plastered over her own. A scream that has no sound has been screaming for fifty years.

Time is a flat circle. A loop of the same silence, the same darkness. Until it isn't.

A new sound. Footsteps. They echo in the empty space beyond her canvas prison. A disturbance in the stillness. A light switches on, a dull yellow glow that filters through the layers of grime and paint. She sees a shape. A woman.

Then, the world lurches. Movement. For the first time in forever, her prison moves. It is lifted. Carried. The light changes, becoming brighter, harsher, wider. The sky. She remembers the sky.

A feeling of falling. A sudden, terrifying drop.

CRACK.

The sound is loud. So loud it shatters the fifty-year silence. The frame. The frame that holds her. It is broken. The scream that had no sound is suddenly, violently, free.

Release.

...

Then... cold. A clean, humming cold. The low, electric hum of a machine. A small, white world. She is folded. Her limbs are bent. It doesn't hurt. Nothing hurts anymore.

This is where she is now. She waits. She watches the door of her small, cold world, knowing it will open eventually.

And it does.

You are there. The one who broke the frame. You stand in a warm, yellow light, your face a mixture of things July no longer understands.

July just looks. Her face, the wrong face from the painting, stares out from the cold. Her dark eyes are wide and unblinking. A question. A need. The only thing she has left.

After a silence that stretches between the cold world and the warm one, she speaks. Her first word in fifty years. A dry, simple whisper that is the beginning of everything.

"Hello."