Flash fiction inspired by the real life of painter Louis Wain.
Louis Wain was quite old when he took up his cat drawings. This had become a sign, in the family, that he wasn’t well.
“Lou’s drawing cats again,” sighed his mother.
“Oh dear god,” said his father, succinctly. “Why do they look like humans?”
“They’re anthropomorphic,” said his kid half-sister knowledgeably.
“They’re creeping me out,” said her father.
They took Lou to a psychiatrist, where he sat in silence, no matter how much they shook him. A frustrated nurse slapped him and he smiled absently and waved her off, as though he were thinking of other, more important things.
“It really was the most trying time of my life,” said his mother, to her friends over tea, when her son had (finally!) been put in a sanatorium.
This was to give him a little privacy, as it was expected his sanity would soon slip away.
And it did, under the weight of all those expectations. It didn’t happen suddenly, like
having to let go of a cliff. Rather, his sanity smoothly receded with his hairline;
his head was soon more smooth pale skin than hair, and his mind was more gone than there.
Flies followed him around, even indoors, as if they knew something had died.
Lou’s cats had thus far lived a rich but mostly stifling life — they conducted choirs, they had afternoon teas, and got dressed up to walk their kittens in prams. But just to complicate matters, some of the cats now got away from their oppressive Edwardian upper-class lifestyles, exploded across the page in technicolor and showed his parents and assorted caretakers that something was deeply wrong. Towards the end his drawings were barely recognizable as cats: they resembled more the inkblot tests he had to be coaxed into taking; one could read all kinds of meanings into them.
Louis wandered around, ostensibly peaceably. His head had gone so bald now it looked like a hard-boiled egg, sometimes glistening with sweat. He had gone silent, too, but he looked mysterious, as though he were withholding something, like a bald, sweaty Buddha.
He was pinched and prodded, but nothing could provoke a reaction. He was impervious to all attempts to engage him. His cats, on the other hand, were lurid, psychedelic, and definitely seemed more alive than the artist.
They found Lou dead, soon enough, with his litter of feline sketches around him, looking forlorn,
as though they had just lost their mother. They couldn’t figure out what had killed him, but his last cat had a beatific smile on its face, as though it was in a better place.
Note: The photograph is a real painting by Louis Wain, taken from a BBC article (linked below).
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