Crashed

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If I’d liked expressionism, I might have been okay.

But the expressionists don’t do anything for me, don’t even make my palms itch. And Klee especially doesn’t do anything for me. My education, spotty as it was, pretty much set my Art Clock to the fifteenth century in the Low Countries. If it had been Memling or Van der Weyden, one of the mystical Flemish masters shedding God’s Dutch light on some lily-filled annunciation, I would have been looking at the picture when I took it off the wall. As it was, I was looking at the wall.

So I saw it, something I hadn’t been told would be there.

Just a hairline crack in the drywall, perfectly circular, maybe the size of a dinner plate. Seen from the side, by someone peeking behind the painting without moving it, which is what most thieves would do in this sadly mistrustful age of art alarms, it would have been invisible. But I’d taken the picture down, and there it was.

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