The Creative Lives of the Lichtensteins
Welcome to the Substack Zone
This story is part of a collaborative project in honor of the 66th anniversary of The Twilight Zone. Organized by and , the Substack Zone invited Substack’s best horror and speculative writers, artists, musicians and creative geniuses to contribute new original works in homage to the famous show. If you’re into eerie-maxing, here are links to every single piece (seriously, these are some of my favorite writers on the platform):
Liz Zimmers | Edith Bow | Sean Archer | Bryan Pirolli | Andy Futuro | CB Mason | John Ward | NJ | Hanna Delaney | William Pauley III | Jason Thompson | Nolan Green | Shaina Read | J. Curtis | Honeygloom | Stephen Duffy | K.C. Knouse | Michele Bardsley | Bob Graham | Annie Hendrix | Clancy Steadwell | Jon T | Sean Thomas McDonnell | Miguel S. | A.P Murphy | Lisa Kuznak | Bridget Riley | Shane Bzdok | Adam Rockwell | Will Boucher
Now, on with the show.
Dr. Lichtenstein comes home one day from the laboratory with tears in his eyes. His white coat is rumpled and stained. In the back seat, boxes of test tubes and beakers rattle. None of this has ever happened before.
Mrs. Lichtenstein has a martini for him as always, stirred up just as his car was rounding the cul-de-sac. She takes it to him in the foyer as she always does, though tonight is not the same.
Her husband looks shell-shocked, Mrs. Lichtenstein thinks— at once anxious and a million miles away.
“Is everything alright, darling?” She asks, picking at a cuticle almost as red as her husband’s eyelids.
“No,” he pauses for a long time. “I’m sorry to say it isn’t, darling.” Dr. Lichtenstein puts his hand at the small of her back and steers her into the kitchen. At the kitchen’s swinging saloon doors, he leaves her, turning right into the dining room.
Mrs. Lichtenstein won’t ask for details. She knows he would tell her if he wanted to. To be honest, she hates when he tells long stories anyway.
“Is there anything I can do?” She asks, carrying the roast to the table, hoping beyond hope that the answer will be ‘no.’
Dr. Lichtenstein looks at her face for a long time. His mud-colored eyes are puffy and his cheeks blotched. Above his lip, his wife notices a patch of whiskers he missed that morning. The rest of his hair is wiry and starting to go a little more salt than pepper. Mrs. Lichtenstein thinks he looks quite horrible, more like a failed mad scientist than a materials engineer.
She looks down at her plate, busies her self wiping a spot off her fork.
Carving knife in hand, he leans into his pretty wife, pressing his nose to the top of her head, and mumbles what’s for dinner into her tight French twist.
The roast is right in front of you, she thinks, and she doesn’t answer him because what would she say?
The Doctor has lost his job, she understands. And men, well, they’re terrible at losing.
Doctor and Mrs. Lichtenstein: a peaceful couple at home in their peaceful life. From the outside, they look just like anyone else.
But when Dr. Lichtenstein loses his job, something new comes into their home, something wild. Like many people do when at a loss, he turns to creative outlets seeking to uncover new passions and give meaning to his life.
If Mrs. Lichtenstein goes down in the basement, she may find a fresh appreciation for her husband—a man, it turns out, of many talents and imaginings. Or she may find more than she bargained for.
Sometimes curiosity rewards the cat, sometimes it kills her.
At least it does… in the Substack Zone.
“Why don’t you try something creative, darling?”
Mrs. Lichtenstein sets a plate of bacon in front of her husband, who stares absently out the kitchen window from new dark shadows around his eyes. The bacon is underdone, and sits in a splash of yellow grease. Mrs. Lichtenstein is sick of cooking bacon.
“Darling?” She asks.
“Hmm?” He brings his eyes to hers, looking slightly lost.
“Darling you’ve been— home— for two weeks. I think you ought to find something to keep yourself…busy. A project. You already have all your equipment from the lab downstairs. How about something creative?”
Mrs. Lichtenstein wants her husband out of the way. She misses her afternoon cocktail with Ms. Hudson, catching up over brandies at the kitchen table.
Mrs. Lichtenstein sets down the coffee pot harder than she meant to, rattling the breakfast dishes.
She misses Ms. Hudson’s laugh, her red lips, her vanilla scent. The way they sometimes brush fingertips under the dish towel. Having her husband around has pressed a dent into her lovely world, and she’s nearly at the point of kicking it back into shape.
“Creative, huh?” He smiles at her but it is a cracked smile, like his face has been cast in plaster. She wipes a drip of coffee and looks away.
“Sure. Why, I sometimes dabble in watercolors when I have a few moments to myself,” she says. “I’ll show you one.” She hurries out of the room to retrieve her canvas, a painting of daisies propped on a small easel in the sun room. She’s embarrassed to be proud of the painting— she’s not much of an artist after all, only a housewife— but she loves these daisies she’s made.
“Creative,” the Doctor says to himself, not looking at the painting. He bites his lip. He is miles away. He picks up the plate of bacon, kisses his wife on the top of her head and rushes down the basement steps.
Mrs. Lichtenstein stands in her empty kitchen, bacon grease splattered on the countertop, holding her amateur watercolor when she should be cleaning up.
At least the Doctor is out of her way. She dials Ms. Hudson’s number, invites her over for tea.
Weeks later, Mrs. Lichtenstein lies awake in bed, listening to her husband breathe. When his breaths become ragged, she slips one leg and then the other out from under the quilt.
When his breaths turn into buzzing snores she sits up on the edge of the bed and counts. Thirty snores. She stands and puts on her robe, shuffling out of the bedroom and down the hall in the dark. Having vacuumed this hallway once a week for fifteen years, she knows to step over the seam where the floor-boards creak, even though it is hidden under the rug. The Doctor steps on it every night.
He’s been coming up to bed in the wee hours, smelling of chemicals and something else. Once, when Mrs. Lichtenstein was a child named Emily, an opossum crawled into the attic of her parents’ lake house and died. Her husband’s smell reminds her of that memory somehow, though she tells herself it must be the smell of cedar.
Now she creeps down the basement stairs. The stairwell is pitch black, and she is not sure-footed here, as she never goes into the basement, and especially not since the Doctor lost his job. She listens though, as he drags heavy things down here and they bump on the steps.
It terrifies her but she has to know what’s changed. The Doctor is fascinating to her in a way he hasn’t been for years. When he comes up the stairs for dinner in the evenings, he’s lithe, his eyes burning, the corners of his mouth hinting at something devious, and she can’t look away. Were his eyes always flecked with green? She’s truly not sure.
At dinner he laughs a new laugh, deep and throaty, and she feels it in her stomach. Then he kisses her on the mouth, that smell making her wince and making her want more, and he heads back downstairs. She hears grunting and breathing, she hears thumps and gurgles and any manner of sounds she can’t explain.
Whatever is in the basement, it’s turned her husband into a new man.
At the bottom of the stairs she waves a hand over her head, searching for the string that will turn on the basement’s single bare bulb.
Then, she hears Mr. Lichtenstein’s heavy step on the stairs behind her. Before she can move, a battalion of fluorescent light tubes blinks on, flooding the basement with a light she has never seen. It’s brighter than midday sun, with none of the warmth.
Mrs. Lichtenstein gasps, turning around to face her husband at the top of the stairs, where he has evidently installed a new light switch.
“Oh!” She cries out, her hand flying to her heart. “Oh, darling, I didn’t mean to wake you,” she says more calmly, searching for an explanation for her behavior.
“Nonsense, darling. You should have woken me. It’s past time for you to see my creative project.” He laughs that gravely new laugh. She wants to run to him; she wants to run away from him. Something about the way he says “project” makes her legs feel like Jello. She knows in her gut— has known all along— that he isn’t painting watercolors.
She looks at his face in the fluorescent glare, searching for a sign that everything is fine and normal. Her husband, the unemployed scientist. Her husband, the mystery. Her husband, the terrifying artist.
“After you, Mrs. Lichtenstein,” he says, sweeping his arm in a gesture like a tour guide.
Mrs. Lichtenstein turns slowly, recognizing this instant as the one where her old reality ends and a new one begins. She knows without knowing that she can never go back.
“Honestly! I don’t know a thing!” Mrs. Lichtenstein looks at Ms. Hudson across the kitchen table and shakes her head. Ms. Hudson laughs, her black eyes wide and rich.
Mrs. Lichtenstein hopes her face doesn’t reveal the truth. She holds her cheeks rigid and keeps her red lips closed over her teeth.
“He spends all day in the basement? Every day? And you don’t mind?”
“Every day.” She looks at her friend across the table, the bald curiosity painted on her face. “At least he doesn’t bother me.” She wonders what face Ms. Hudson would make if she knew what Mrs. Lichtenstein knows.
“And he never talks about his special project?”
“It’s something creative,” Mrs. Lichtenstein shrugs. “Maybe he’s a little embarrassed by it. You remember how it was when we first started doing the watercolors.”
“So embarrassing.”
“Exactly.”
She pictures her husband’s face when he showed her his work. There was color in his cheeks she hadn’t seen since he was a much younger man. She could tell he was nervous, but the nerves were unnecessary humility. Her husband was brilliant.
Mrs. Lichtenstein shifts in her seat, flushed at the memory of her husband in mad scientist mode.
“He doesn’t go to work at all?”
“Not at all.”
“Well where does your money come from?”
“Miss Hudson!” Mrs. Lichtenstein jokingly scolds her friend. “One doesn’t just ask about money.”
Ms. Hudson rolls her eyes.
“Truly, I do not know,” Mrs. Lichtenstein whispers, leaning in close like a girl at a slumber party. “I guess it’s in the bank. He doesn’t seem to be worried—maybe we’re rich!”
“Oh! Maybe you are!”
There is a stretch of silence as both women contemplate the questions raised by this mystery. Mrs. Lichtenstein does know. Someone is buying her husband’s art, a patron she has never seen. And as he perfects the work, the price keeps rising.
She looks back at Ms. Hudson, who has drained her tiny cordial glass, her sharpened nails the color of cherries.
“Well, shall we go down and sneak a peek?” Ms. Hudson asks, licking her lips.
“What? You must be— no, I couldn’t.” Mrs. Lichtenstein no longer has to act. Her fear is real.
“The Doctor is out, right?”
“Well, he may—“
“Aren’t you curious?”
“It’s not my business.”
“Nothing is women’s business, Mrs. Lichtenstein,” Ms. Hudson lets the tips of her smooth brown fingers rest on the back of her friend’s hand. “So that means everything is.”
For a second, Mrs. Lichtenstein wonders what Ms. Hudson would look like if Dr. Lichtenstein got her in his lab. If he could preserve her lovely brown skin, her flashing black eyes. They could keep Ms. Hudson, so that Mrs. Lichtenstein would never have to be alone again. Something inside her flutters at the thought.
The doorbell rings and both the misses jump. The woman of the house goes to the door.
“Delivery for Dr. Frankenstein,” the courier says, holding out a clipboard. He unloads several boxes from a wheeled dolly.
“Lichtenstein,” Mrs. Lichtenstein corrects.
Ms. Hudson eyes the boxes.
“Art supplies?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
Taxidermy supplies, Mrs. Lichtenstein assumes. Plastic resin and embalming fluid. Maybe some bleach.
As the courier leaves, Ms. Hudson looks at her watch.
“We have time. We have to go down there.”
She will see everything, and then— well, then we can’t let her leave, Mrs. Lichtenstein thinks. She smiles brightly.
“Curiosity killed the cat, my love,” she says, licking her teeth.
Ms. Hudson laughs, but she is already two steps into the basement.
Mrs. Lichtenstein brings the martini to Dr. Lichtenstein, instead of waiting for him to come upstairs. Her hair floats down around her shoulders in loose waves. She no longer favors the French twist. Her fingers are stained with paint now, instead of nail polish.
The basement is pristine, as always, disinfected and shining, a monument to her husband’s brilliant, crystalline mind and their stunning new creative lives.
“Who are you working on, darling?” She asks.
“Hmm?” The Doctor doesn’t look up from his work. He’s perched on a ladder over a massive silver vat, wearing black rubber gloves to the elbow. His hair, almost entirely silver these days, is standing straight up. She finds it rather alluring.
“Can you take a break to have your drink? Supper will be ready in half an hour.”
Dr. Lichtenstein looks up.
“Oh, just cleaning up. Nearly finished.”
Mrs. Lichtenstein crosses the bright room, which doubles as a gallery for her husband’s art. We can’t exactly display them upstairs, she thinks and suppresses a giggle.
She’s amazed how good he’s getting. She walks down a frozen receiving line, examining the mistakes, admiring the improvements.
“The first few don’t look so good anymore, right? I mean, compared to the rest,” he asks her.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she says, not wanting to hurt his feelings. His beginner projects were dogs and cats, one bright red cardinal. But there are air bubbles here and there, as he worked out his technique.
Even his first few people look sloppy to her now. The expression on The Vagrant is dull and unflattering, though she admires his very interesting lined face. Cloudy resin mars the surface of The Mailman, where a gauzy strip of skin has floated off the subject and lodged in the resin. And the eyes of Mrs. Samuelson are pointing the wrong way. She was quite old, but her eyes never looked like that.
These early attempts look more like mosquitos trapped in amber by happenstance than the artwork of a great man. Of course, all the good ones are long gone, hauled away in secret by their mysterious benefactor.
She comes to the end of the line and stops. Stunningly perfect, the lovely Ms. Hudson stares back at her, radiant in her clear resinous tomb. A triumph of technique.
Mrs. Lichtenstein is so glad he got it right. The resin is clear and flawless, her makeup perfectly preserved, her hair somehow captured in motion, like she could shake her head at any moment. And her eyes— Mrs. Lichtenstein touches her fingertips to Ms. Hudson’s cheek— the eyes are perfectly dreamy, just as they were in life.
She would prefer her friend to sit next to her at the kitchen table, of course, but once Ms. Hudson saw what she saw, the Lichtensteins had no choice. Then again, Mrs. Lichtenstein might have tried harder to keep her out of the basement.
“How did you do it?”
“Figured out how to keep them alive for a while. Enjoy it now, I’m not sure how long that particular vibrancy will last once she goes.”
“She’s —?”
“A little. We’ll see how she holds up. It’s something new I’m trying.”
Mrs. Lichtenstein lays her cheek against her friend, perfectly preserved in a hard polymer iceberg. The Doctor has explained his methods to her, the science of the materials, the chemistry of it all, but it is the art that makes him a genius. The posing, the shaping, his clear admiration for the human form. But for the tiny air hole required, this one is a masterpiece.
Dr. Lichtenstein sips his martini.
“Glad you like it, darling. It goes well with yours,” he says.
Next to Ms. Hudson, on a tiny wooden easel, Mrs. Lichtenstein’s painting of daisies is on display.
At a personal and professional crossroads, the Lichtensteins turned to creative outlets, making meaning in their lives by making art.
Today, their peaceful street is even more peaceful than usual, bereft as it is of cats, dogs, a mailman, and a few neighbors.
Dr. and Mrs. Lichtenstein gave themselves over to their creative impulses, finding a new lease on life and new spice in their marriage. They stepped out of the confines of the average suburban life, and into the mad world of the artist.
Of course, the muse is unpredictable, and in this case, the creative vein was a bloody one. That’s how it often goes, when you’re in the Substack Zone.
Okay... I want to know who the buyer is! Well crafted tale. The prose felt vintage, like it belongs in the era of the original TZ. Well done!
The subtleties here were lovely. The scene jumps were very cinematic and effective. Excellent story!!! It was truly a pleasure to read. Made me think of the "écorchés" in France's Fragonard Museum. Something to add to your itinerary if you're in Paris :)