“You must make your paintings come alive!” my teacher said as she shook her paintbrush at my canvas. “What’s this? This is not alive. Feel your painting!”

I stifled what I wanted to say by biting the inside of my cheek. The last thing I wanted was for my painting to come alive. I looked over at my teacher staring at me, along with the twenty other sets of eyes in my two o’clock intermediate oil painting class, as if waiting for me to speak and felt my cheeks get hot no doubt as red as the chest of the bird I was beginning to feather into being.

“I don’t think paintings come to life is such a good thing,” I mumbled.

“Not a good thing?” My teacher snorted as if my words were somehow offensive smelling. “To paint is to be alive. To not show movement, the feeling, the essence of life, what is it worth then?” She threw up her hands and turned her attention to the student next to me.

My shoulders sank with relief and I went back to carefully daubing crimson onto my canvas, assiduously ignoring those who still stared at me. My teacher and I were not talking about the same thing. I knew this, but hoped she never would.

At the end of the hour, everyone packed up their oils and moved their easels to the perimeter of the room to dry. I was the last one in the room even though I didn’t want to be, but my painting was beginning to worry me. If I just stayed away for a few days, everything would be fine.

“You know,” my teacher called over her shoulder as she opened the door to leave. “If you don’t start showing life in your paintings, you won’t do well in the class. I know you can.”

I looked back at my canvas, half-covered in paint and felt the pull I always did. I should never have taken out my brushes, should never have come back, but I didn’t know anything else. All I’d ever wanted was to paint.

The sun was on the other side of the building when the screams woke me the next morning, my paintbrush clutched in my hand. I watched the coffee spread across the floor, my teacher heedless of it staining the hem of her skirt as her eyes flitted about almost as fast as the birds that had torn ragged holes in my canvas.

I smiled, half with wonder and half with worry at the birds whose feathers rained fine droplets of paint whenever they flew. At least this time I’d known to paint something small.

“A flock of buntings is called a mural, you know,” I said and my teacher’s still-shocked gaze came to rest on me. “How’s that for alive?”