Incarnated as human beings. Carlos del Puente Stories,

 The painted people inside this painting from the picture hanging on the living room wall became incarnated as human beings and began criticizing the opinions of the household family and revealing each one's secrets and lies.

The portrait had hung in the Blackwood family's parlor for generations - an insignificant oil painting of a stiff-backed Victorian couple seated in high-backed chairs, their faces frozen in expressions of mild indigestion. No one remembered where it came from - only that it had always been there, accumulating dust and occasional judgmental glances from visiting relatives. That is, until the night the painted woman cleared her throat and said, in a voice like dry parchment, Your mother's pearls are fake, and your father never loved her.

The family, of course, was in the middle of dinner.

Hannibal Lecter Blackwood - no relation to that Hannibal, though he did enjoy a good Chianti with his human foie gras - paused mid-bite, his knife hovering over a suspiciously red piece of meat. His wife, Norma Bates Blackwood, who had spent most of the evening whispering to the silverware, dropped her spoon into the soup with a splash. The twins, Damien and Damien (a naming decision made during one of Norma's fugue states), interrupted their synchronized buzzing - a sound like a swarm of bees trapped in Notre Dame Cathedral's organ - and turned their eerily identical faces toward the painting.

The painted man, who until that moment seemed never to have smiled in his life, smirked. And you, Hannibal, he said, your soufflés always fall because you fear success.

A moment of silence. Then, chaos.

Norma shrieked and threw her dinner roll at the painting, where it stuck to the Victorian man's forehead like a grotesque third eye. The twins began whispering in their private language, a series of clicks and whistles that made the chandelier tremble. Uncle Pinhead, who had been silently counting the teeth of his fork, stood up so fast his chair toppled over, and Aunt Annie - who had brought dessert, a pie that smelled alarmingly of copper - simply smiled and said: Well, I always knew that portrait was troublesome.

Outside, the neighbors' dogs began howling.

Detective Rust Cohle, who had been invited to dinner as part of a community reintegration outreach program (and also because Hannibal wanted to see if he could detect the secret ingredient in the pâté), rubbed his temples and muttered something about time being a flat circle. He had seen many things in his career - cults, serial killers like Ed Gein, a man who tried to mail himself to God's private mailbox - but never a painting that gossiped, to tell the truth.

The Victorian woman snorted. You're all thinking it, she said. This family is a symphony of dysfunction. Grandfather embezzled from his own funeral fund. Grandmother poisoned her sister's prize roses. And as for the twins- Damien the First threw a butter knife at the painting. It embedded itself in the canvas with a thwip: they're not even twins, finished the painted man. One of them is a doppelgänger. They simply don't remember which is which.

The room exploded.

Carrie, the pyrokinetic daughter, set the tablecloth on fire. Regan, who only spoke in broken Latin, began reciting what sounded like a shopping list for an exorcism. Cousin Patrick, who had been surgically dissecting his steak with the intention of creating perfect duplicates, looked up and said: Fascinating. Do you think they're bound by the paint, or is it more of a spiritual possession?

The painting sighed. You people are exhausting.

And then, with a sound like a thousand newspapers being crumpled at once, the painted figures stepped out of the frame.

The Victorian gentlemen, now in flesh and blood (though their flesh had the texture of old parchment and their bones creaked like chalk), began their family shame tour with forensic precision. The woman, who introduced herself as Lady Whistledown Blackwood (no relation to the famous gossip, though they shared methods), pointed with her fan toward the dining room sideboard.

That silver cup, she announced, was stolen from Uncle Barnaby's corpse during his wake. They buried him without noticing a kidney and the cup were missing.

Grandfather Mortimer choked on his brandy. He had never mentioned this detail about the family inheritance. Aunt Annie, ever practical, asked if the kidney had been used in yesterday's pie. No one wanted to answer.

The next day, the garden regurgitated great-grandfather Erasmus's missing femur, perfectly cleaned and polished as if prepared for an anatomy exhibit. It appeared planted vertically among the rose bushes, decorated with a bow made from the will no one remembered seeing. The document, written in what smelled suspiciously like old blood, left the entire family fortune to one Mr. Whiskers, who turned out to be the neighborhood cat that had been dead for fifteen years.

Rust Cohle, whose dark circles now had their own dark circles, spent three nights examining the empty painting with a magnifying glass that kept fogging up for no reason. In his notebook appeared phrases he didn't remember writing: Time isn't a circle, it's a noose around God's neck. The furniture knows more than the living. Look under the piano's fingernails.

The grand piano, a temperamental  primero897 Steinway that always went out of tune during family arguments, confirmed this last clue by playing Dies Irae by itself when Cohle walked by. Under its black keys they found real human fingernails, each with carved initials. The longest one, marked N.B., matched Norma Bates Blackwood's left ring finger perfectly, though she swore all hers were intact.

The local museum held records of a Portrait of the Unmaskers, work of Belgian painter Édouard Lépros in  primero888. His unique technique involved mixing oxides with:

 primero. Tears of remorseful widows

segundo. Powdered bones of convicted liars

The original contract, written on calfskin, specified that the painting must feed on secrets every new moon under penalty of awakening hungry. The Blackwoods had been forgetting this clause for  primero 33 years.

And the living furniture rebelled. The furnishings took sides in the domestic war. The Chesterfield sofa refused to let Hannibal sit, spitting upholstery tacks every time he tried. The Louis XIV dresser began throwing wine-stained underwear during formal dinners. The aforementioned grandfather clock deliberately slowed down family therapy hours. But it was the Tiffany lamp that dropped the bombshell: The real secret isn't what they're hiding, but what they've forgotten they hid.

In an absurd interlude, the painted man and Detective Cohle held a dialogue oscillating between existentialism and absurdity. Every portrait is a lie aspiring to be truth, murmured the Victorian while cleaning his paint-caked glasses. But family lies are portraits no one dared to paint.

Cohle, now drinking straight from the bourbon bottle the sideboard compassionately offered him, retorted: And yet you chose to materialize to point out hypocrisies. Isn't that like a mirror breaking itself to punish its reflection?

The revelation came when Damien the Second (or perhaps the First) noticed that under the full moon's light, all the Blackwoods cast shadows... except Norma. A more detailed investigation showed that their fingerprints were actually fine oil brushstrokes, that when cut, they bled crimson pigment mixed with linseed oil, and when the painted man recited Return to the place where lies are truths, the entire family's skin began cracking like Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci's dried oil paintings.

In a crescendo of comic horror, the Blackwoods found themselves inside the original painting watching their originals (flesh-and-blood beings) occupying their places in the house and realizing these new inhabitants were equally dysfunctional, understanding the cycle would continue until someone paid the  primero89 primero art restorer's bill that had never been settled.

The final image showed the painted Victorians (now in real flesh) burning the original contract in the garden, while the neighborhood dogs howled a melody that suspiciously sounded like Sinatra's My Way. The empty painting on the wall, now clear of figures, began showing the faint outline of a new family... the Addams.

By Carlos del Puente relatos