Penny: One Long Afternoon
By atfirstdawn

*Mature content warning
*© Keira Morrison/ atfirstdawn 2013
*Dedicated to and inspired by silenceyoursword


Penny had spent the last twenty minutes on the edge of her bed harvesting every last scrap of effort within her to try and not break down into tears. Everything had suddenly become so complicated for her; Charlotte, Penny’s girlfriend, had been kidnapped and Penny had been tasked with paying the ransom. The ransom was a painting, the centrepiece of her university’s art gallery. Had Charlotte have been kidnapped and held for ransom on any other day, then acquiring the ransom, in this case the centrepiece painting, would have been the only difficult part. But on today of all days, stealing the centrepiece painting was just one of the nigh impossible tasks that Penny had found herself faced with; getting to the university should have been the easy part, but now it was going to be just as difficult as stealing the painting itself because of the ball gag which had been perpetually tied in and around her mouth and locked in place, a ball gag to which her kidnapped girlfriend Charlotte had the key for…

Penny knew that going outside with a gag in her mouth would attract attention, and while her dignity wasn’t something that she held in high regard when compared to the safety of her abducted girlfriend, any attention would be bad attention, especially in a public place like the university’s art gallery. In desperate attempts of keeping herself calm, Penny had ran every possible outcome of wearing a gag to an art gallery through her head; mostly each scenario ended with her being told to leave and or being barred from the place entirely. Other scenarios included bumping into people she knew, both friends and annoying classmates who all would make things equally more difficult… there was no real way around it; the gag wasn’t coming off until she had the key and she wouldn’t have the key until she had the painting.

The hopelessness of it all began to overpower Penny’s mind once more, and again she tried to deny its pressure. Penny needed a distraction, she needed to act, and so with a deep breath, Penny stood from the edge of the bed and leapt across the room to her wardrobe. Rummaging through her wardrobe as she pushed on the first pair of shoes she could find (a pair of black heels), Penny pulled out both a brown floor length trench coat and a long blue winter scarf. She buttoned up the trench coat and wrapped the scarf around her neck and mouth; she looked ridiculous, but it was better to be seen having bad fashion sense than being seen gagged in public. Making sure that the scarf was tight enough to stay in place; Penny left her bedroom, picked up the door keys and left her house.

For Penny, the university was a thirty-minute walk away, by bus it’d take just under ten minutes because of the motorways connecting her home to the city; getting the bus would have been something Penny would have done had it been any other day, it would have saved time and she had the money to spare, but her gag had seen to it to make fast and convenient travel impossible. Still, after ten minutes of scurrying down uneven dirt paths and through narrow back streets, the clock on Penny’s phone ensured her that she was making good time, today wouldn’t take her thirty minutes to get there, even in her heels.    

As she continued to make her way to the university, Penny caught herself wondering just what the centrepiece painting was. The gallery changed every month or so and Penny hadn’t stepped foot inside it since the beginning of the semester, the painting could be of anything, not that it mattered at all, but through a cynical strand of thought, Penny still hoped that it’d at least be worth the hassle on some level; Charlotte was all that Penny cared about but she didn’t want her kidnapping to be because something meaningless and trivial.  

A few more dirt paths and back streets later Penny saw her university. All she had to do was take the step bridge over the main road, walk on to the campus and into the art gallery. Luckily Penny had arrived at an odd time; 1:40pm, meaning that all seminars and lectures were in full swing and that Penny wouldn’t, or at least shouldn’t, have to deal with any large crowds and or faces who would recognised her. Making it over the step bridge, onto the campus and into the gallery with only a couple of odd looks from passers-by, Penny began to scale the steps of the art gallery up to the third floor where the centrepiece painting was hung. Along the way Penny noticed numerous posters detailing that the current month was in celebration of abstract art; Penny was no stranger to the abstract, it was her favourite style, though she found most of it to be hit and miss…

Pushing open the glass door to the third floor gallery, Penny stepped inside and quickly made her way to the centrepiece painting. The location of the centrepiece, unless it was a sculpture, never changed and so it only took Penny a moment or so to reach it. She found it and stood, silently catching her breath after her long hike and the three floors of stairs, and stared at the centrepiece…

It sucked; the centrepiece really, really sucked. It was a circle, a red circle on a white background and nothing more. Penny continued to stare at it, not sure how to feel about it or anything else; there was no shading present on the circle, it wasn’t a sphere or a clever trick-of-the-eye illusion, it was just a red circle, a bright red circle on a plain white background, not even its size was impressive, the canvas itself was about half the size of Penny.

Biting down on her gag, Penny began to formulate a game-plan. She wouldn’t give a damn about stealing such a waste of space art; the trick was going to be stealing it without getting caught. Now that she knew the size of the canvas itself things seemed easier, it wasn’t something huge and twice the size of her like the other paintings which were dotted around the gallery, so carrying it out of the gallery wouldn’t be very hard; she just needed to avoid the alarms and security…

“It’s perfect isn’t it?” came a whispering yet familiar gruff voice from beside Penny which made her half jump.    

Penny hadn’t realised the tall and round man that had come to stand beside her as she stared at the painting; he was twice her size in every way with a short beard and beady eyes. She had never seen the man before but she knew exactly who he was; he was the man who had kidnapped Charlotte.

All at once Penny wanted to scream, cry and hit the man with the nearest blunt object that she could find, but all she could manage to do in reality was stare up at him as he spoke.

“I need this painting; its perfection is something I cannot go without.”

His words never reached more than a whisper yet they retained dull and throaty characteristics.

“We all need perfection in our lives. I know you understand this, I know because you’re in love. I could take this painting myself but no doubt I’d be caught and fined, perhaps even jailed; but you, you will find a way because you have something perfect at risk and when perfection is at risk one can do anything.”

Penny had only half listened to him; again his voice alone had paralysed her, all she had managed to do was turn her head away from him and back to the painting of the red circle in front of her.

“This is what you need to know; I will be waiting two lanes down from this campus in a white van at 9pm tonight. Your girlfriend Charlotte will be in the back of this van, when I have this painting she will be free to go. Do you understand?”

Penny nodded, hearing the man mention Charlotte’s name had flooded her eyes with tears. Penny stood a moment longer, long enough to curse both the man and the painting before leaving the art gallery and the campus entirely…

Following a brisk, tear-filled walk, Penny ducked into an old and cluttered alleyway and crumbled to the floor between a dumpster and a pile of loose trash. Penny unwrapped her blue winter scarf from around her neck and mouth and let the tears that she had been holding back since the phone call earlier that morning fall freely and endlessly. Wiping her eyes with her scarf she continued to cry alone in the alleyway, she felt isolated, powerless, weak and hungry… eventually she checked her phone; the gallery wouldn’t close until 7pm and the current time had only just gone 2pm…

Penny wiped her eyes with her scarf once more, knowing that it was going to be one long afternoon.