There was a painting on a wall of the museum and people came from miles and miles to see it. It was worth millions; lasers protected it from harm, students sketched its beauty all day on the lone bench always inhabited by somebody else. It had lots of a colors and loads of black, it had figures and stars and the sun and kids and old people and a story and confusion and room for thought. People did think about it too. One day a young girl wandered to its corner without knowing anything about the infamous piece and lost her breath. She stood there for a good hour and ended the last minute with tears. Her heart had just been broken the day before; her boyfriend had lied to her and ran off. She had been calling him all day and worrying about him all night and now she looked into a mirror of shining oils. There was a girl pleading and alone and wandering the world and stumbling into rain and feeling sick behind the frame, there was sense to it, there were people staring at it and loving it. She stood there for another hour and left when the couple beside her hugged each other and cackled towards the same point she had rested her comfort on. The couple loved getting drunk and stumbling into the museum for a date just so they could ride the trip of the prints swirling and jumping out at them. A figure in the painting had big boobs; the boyfriend shouted that his girl had better ones. A student sitting on the bench behind them peered up from her sketch book groaning. The two idiots were blocking the portrait of the young Virgin Mary and without that view she couldn’t compare the shadowing between it and the famous painting being spit at by the fools. The old man sitting beside her did nothing about the noise; he just stared at its beauty and waited for the onlookers to move on, which is what they always did eventually. When they were escorted out by a security guard who never was too careful with the parameter of the painting the old man’s wife came back from getting a closer look. They held hands and giggled, whispering about their favorite parts and remembering how good the stories of the strokes made them feel. A single fellow walked up to it, looked, and was scared away to the next corner. A group of tourists shuffled up to its wall and snuck pictures, drooling over the legend and overwhelming the room with sounds of awe and admiration. They quickly moved forward to the next masterpiece, three of them staying behind to stare for a little longer. One of them was from Japan, another from San Francisco the third from Kansas. The old man finally leaving with his wife said something in French to the Japanese man and they both knew what it meant, they both smiled. The museum had to be closed early that day because a woman killed herself in front of it at four-o-clock. She took a knife to her body and was done with herself before the man beside her enjoying himself could notice. Everyone had to leave so the painting was alone; it hung with the lasers and the security guards and the cameras all night long and everyone else in the world waited for the blood to be cleaned up.