IT WASN’T WHAT people thought.

The oil painting was done solely in shades of white and hung at the far end of the gallery.

The plaque on the wall beneath it read “Maria.” No artist was given credit.

“Why do they call it ‘Maria’?” asked a narrow-faced woman whose art aficionado husband had dragged her to the gallery against her better preferences that afternoon. “There’s no one in it.”

Her husband, who had dressed for the outing in a normal-looking gray business suit and a not-so-normal-looking necktie consisting of a red and green houndstooth pattern, clasped his hands behind his back and leaned closer to the painting so he might examine it better. “Well,” he said at length, “I’d say the guy painted it for his lady friend.”

The woman pursed her lips. “Who says the painter is a he?”

A shrug. “Maybe Maria is the painter, then.”

“Like someone’s going to name a painting after herself.”

Husband and wife continued to stare at the painting in silence while the other visitors to the gallery babbled on obliviously behind them. It was sort of a pretty painting, the woman supposed. The artist—whoever he or she was—had captured in oils a scene that at first glance appeared to portray a raging blizzard but could have just been random swirls of white, for all she knew. Amorphous shapes were visible through the snowstorm, like towers or trees or people.

“Maybe Maria is one of the people stuck in the snow,” the woman said, poking a finger at an off-white blur toward the center of the painting. “The poor girl.”

She started to step onward to the next piece of art when she realized that her husband hadn’t budged. “You coming?”

She glanced to her left and saw that a peculiar expression had written itself over her husband’s face. “What snow?”

“What?”

“You mentioned snow. What snow?”

“Don’t play the obtuse art critic with me. I was talking about the snow in the painting. What other snow is there?”

“Sally, the painting is black.”

The woman cast another glance at the immortalized snowstorm and forced a laugh. “Black. Do you need your eyes checked, or are you just trying to make me doubt my sanity?”

She grinned, but the expression quickly faltered when she realized there wasn’t even the faintest hint of humor in her husband’s eyes.

“Tell me exactly what you see,” he said, his tone cold.

So she did—snowstorm, vague figures, and all. “What do you see?” she asked.

By this time, her husband’s face had become ashen. “Like I said, it’s black. Lots of shadows, like it’s supposed to be in the back of a cave or something. There might be some kind of dark figure in the middle, but it seems different every time I look at it.” He cast her a worried glance. “I don’t see anything white at all.”

“And I don’t see anything black.”

They fell silent again. The other gallery visitors continued to ignore them, gliding from one painting to another without stopping to study the one that had so captivated the couple.

“I get it!” the woman finally said. “It’s one of those hologram things. It looks different depending on where you’re standing. Here, switch spots with me.”

They switched spots so the husband stood on the right, the wife on the left.

The painting was still white.

“It’s still black,” her husband said.

The woman ran a hand over her hair. “It must depend on how tall you are, then.” She stood on tiptoe to match her husband’s height, then crouched down low to the height of a child.

The painting was still white. “I don’t understand,” she said.

“I—I think we should just go.”

Her husband made to walk away, but she grabbed his arm. “No,” she said. “We’re going to figure this out.”

For the next ten or fifteen minutes the couple continued to examine the painting in the hope that he would see the white she saw, and she the black. Disinterested voices continued to babble on behind them until at last the woman turned and said, “I’ll ask someone else what they see.”

“But Sally, I—”

AFTER the gallery closed for the evening, Earl Cross pushed a giant broom across the floor, whistling a Coldplay tune he’d heard on the radio earlier that day.

It never failed to amaze him how much dirt people could track into a place over the span of twelve hours. He’d have to bust out the mop once he’d swept all the dirt up. He should ask for a raise one of these days. With all he did around here, he deserved it.

He made his way to the empty end of the gallery, and the tune he was whistling petered out on his lips. A hideous red and green houndstooth something lay coiled on the floor in front of the blank space where a famous Impressionist piece would be displayed when it was to be loaned out from a larger museum next month.

Earl stooped and plucked up the thing with his left thumb and forefinger.

It was a necktie.

Earl let out a chuckle and looped the tie around his neck. “Looks like you’ll be spending some time in Lost and Found, buddy, but as ugly as you are, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone lost you on purpose.”

TWO thousand miles away on a sunny beach, a local art festival was in full swing.

A teenage couple meandered through the crowd along the boardwalk hand in hand, both of them dressed in black Converse shoes and covered in facial piercings that turned the heads of many adults. A temporary wall had been set up along the length of the boardwalk, and the works of amateur artists hung on it every so many feet.

They stopped in front of a painting that had no artist credited. “Ooh, look at this one!” the girl exclaimed, tucking a strand of purple hair behind a gauged ear. “Jayden told me he was thinking about showing some of his stuff here. I’ll bet this is one of them.”

Her boyfriend wrinkled his nose. “Why would Jayden paint that?”

“Why wouldn’t he? He loves this kind of stuff.” She gazed lovingly at the depths of swirling blackness that seemed to suck her in the longer she looked at it. There might have been the vague shape of a person in the center of the painting, or it might have been an illusion. Pretty trippy. “It would be like him to paint a whole picture black.”

“What do you mean, black?”

“Um, hello? The painting is black. Like, totally black. I want to buy it.”

Her boyfriend’s eyes narrowed with confusion. “But Mindy, the painting is white…”