Faced with a difficult decision, she locked the apartment door behind her, closed all the windows, pulled over the curtains, unplugged the phone, offed the lights--and sat in the living room, cross-legged before a dark TV, focusing on a specific point in the middle of the screen, somewhere, nowhere, all at once.

The first clear image that came to her was one of the ocean. She recalled fishing at the beach with her father, watching the smoke rise from Father's pipe, curling up and up against the dusky sky. When night came on, when all was dark, quiet except for those ocean sounds, she'd watch the tip of her fishing pole, waiting for the tug-tug-tug that signaled a fish. Sometimes she pulled in small ones, perch and sea bass; but sometimes there would be corvina, croaker, even halibut. People, when asking how a person went about fishing from the shore, couldn't understand how it's possible to catch fish in such shallow waters, where people swim. "There's fish that close in?" What they didn't realize, and what she knew, was that the ocean is full of life, and just because people are swimming in close doesn't mean that there aren't schools of fish lurking beneath them, perhaps inches from their feet. If they knew, maybe they wouldn't be so eager to go in for a dip.

Fish had much easier lives, she imagined. A fish didn't have to make difficult decisions. It saw the bait; it went for it. There might be some hesitation, some caution displayed on the part of the fish, but for the most part, it was all instinct. She wondered if she weren't better off functioning on instinct alone, like a fish.

She took her painting brush, the green one a green-eyed boyfriend had once given her, and she began to paint.

This time she had no canvas. The walls were looking a little too white, a little to bland, so she started there, splashing colors here and there--red, gold, blue, black--letting the picture take form. And eventually it did, and she was surprised at what emerged.

After the living room walls, she moved her painting materials into the bedroom; after that the kitchen; then the bathroom. The leather furniture was the last to go. Her apartment looked like a Grateful Dead concert when she was through with it.