Disclaimer: all that belongs to me about this story is the concept of it – Neverland and its inhabitants are not mine.

Beta – PurpleShamrock17

THE PAINTING

I had the painting on my wall ever since I was a child and I couldn't remember a time when it was not there: between a rural idyll showing a shepherd with a lamb in his arms and a framed photo of me as a baby. The shepherd had a tanned face with two clumsily painted red spots on his cheeks, meant to be healthy blushes. The baby that I was had a serious look on his face. Gloomy, actually. I guess that even as a baby I didn't like getting my picture taken too much.

But the main character of the painting I want to talk about now, was so little that I couldn't say anything about his face with one hundred percent certainty. That is, until I used a magnifying glass which I did many years later. I didn't know the man who made this huge painting but it must have been somewhere in the 19th century – if it was the 20th one, then it was the very beginning of it. That was what it looked like, at least. I don't know how it was found in our house – it was already here when we moved in, even before my birth. I don't know why the previous owners didn't take it.

The big painting was in a carved wooden frame that I came to know so well over the years. It depicted a map of an island – an isometric island view to be more precise; one rich in many, many details. Graham Masterton wrote once a story about a hungry moon, in which a kid like one I once was, discovered a painted boy had no hand after taking a really very close look – the details of this picture were so small, even if still recognizable.

That was what it was like with the painting of Neverland: richness of very small details that I didn't pay attention too, only to discover a new one after some time. The artist who painted it, must have been a real master of his art. I only knew him by his initials, JMB. These were carved at the bottom of the frame, just below the name of the painting and that's how I knew the name of it – and the island depicted – Neverland. The heavy, wide frame was made of cherry wood and grooved with deep lines painted gold. The redness of the frame made a pleasant contrast to the rich greenery of the painting.

The frame itself was a fascinating piece of art, just as rich in details as the painting was. It was handmade and depicted faces of little boys and pirates, peeking through the wooden leaves. Each of them was given their individual features – curly hair, big noses, full lips - and I could spend whole hours – and I really did as a child – looking at the faces of children and men immortalized by the unknown artist. Some of the children – boys only but for two girls, one of whom looked Indian like – were wearing caps made of animal skins, the men looked like pirates and even if I didn't recognize them as such, there was still the painting. It showed pirates, mermaids and an Indian village. There were also mountains among the woods and children. If I could see their faces clearly, which was not possible due to the small size of the painted characters, I could check whether they were the same faces the frame carvings showed. But I think they indeed were.

The painting – map - showed not only places an ordinary map would, but also people – the inhabitants of Neverland. I gave this name to the island for what else could the name from the frame mean, than the name for it? The people were really very tiny and it took a magnifying glass to see all the details of their bodies and faces. Like that one of the mermaids splashing in the intensively blue waters of a bay was wearing gold earrings – marked as very small yellow spots beneath her ears which themselves were tiny pale spots, not bigger than the earrings. Or that behind the porthole of the pirate ship on the other side of the painting there was a barely visible face reflected. I thought it was a pirate but something that after my taking a closer look turned out to be not the frame of the porthole but strands of long dark hair, assured me it must have been a woman. Or a group of children playing under the trees; they wore outfits looking like they were made of animal skins. Some of them could be seen much more clearly, like a boy wearing a long nightgown and in a top hat – yes, I could recognize it was a boy in a nightgown and not a girl dressed in a white dress, unlike the one who was indeed a girl – wearing a long blue dress. Above their small heads there was a tiny figure of a flying boy in green clothes and a small hat which was just as green and had something that looked like a red feather on. On the boy's arm there was something that looked like a small yellow ball, within which you could see a tiny – very tiny – human figure painted with darker yellow; the small being seemed to wear a greenish dress. It was of course, what you could see only with a magnifying glass. A very magnifying one. And even then you could think that your own eyes don't show you what it really was, making a fairy-like entity out of a mere yellow ball the artist put on the arm of the boy. That your own imagination was playing tricks on you, trying to find any familiar shape in a yellow dot.

This was the place about which I dreamed my whole life. Yes, it's not a metaphor. I don't want to say by this that I had daydreams on how great it would be to become part of this amazing painting. Even my friends who visited me, started to comment on its size and unusual theme. Although it was all true, my dreams were something different entirely.

I had dreams about Neverland and its inhabitants – the pirates, mermaids with their tails sticking out of the blue water, which were in a few cases, the only part of their body I could see. And the boy in his green outfit and with a blurred tiny red rod stuck at the top of his cap, which couldn't be anything else than a feather adorning it.

I often imagined I could fly like him. I dreamed about coming to his world and finally finding out why his companions wore animal skins and if the tiny yellow glob on his arm was something more than a mere spot of yellow paint with a tiny speck of green inside. A yellow ball or… a fairy maybe? Yes, fairies certainly fit this world. If there could be pirates and flying children, then why not pixies? While the other kids played soldiers or policemen, I preferred imagining that I was together with the Neverland islanders from the painting-map hanging on the wall of my room, having adventures with them – fighting pirates and teasing the mermaids. For some reason something told me if they were living beings, they wouldn't be the owners of the nicest dispositions in the world – whether the real or the Neverland one. My daydreams followed my dreams – ones at nights where I was immersed in the world created by my imagination to do everything in it that I couldn't do for real. Sometimes those dreams were lucid and it was like it was happening in reality. All of this – those fantasies and dreams - started when I was just a small boy, maybe five years old and didn't leave me as I grew older. I was a little boy at first, later a preteen nearing my teenage years, later an actual teen and a young adult man at least. But the obsession with the mysterious painting didn't leave me. Nor did the Neverland painting leave my bedroom, in which I still slept, under the gaze of the painted characters. I was the only person looking at it now or at least paying attention to it.

To see how it changed.

No one would believe me on this but over the course of years of my studying the painted map of this mysterious green land, the characters the painter had painted on the linen somehow… grew older. I know it sounds ridiculous but I'm not crazy, just explaining what I saw. I couldn't fool myself any more. The changes were very slow but did exist – after several years I couldn't reject the idea the painted boy with a pixie on his arm looked more like an adult man, the girl wearing a blue dress was a woman now and the little boy holding some brown thing which was probably a teddy bear, became a youngster. I observed all those changes, unnoticeable by a naked eye throughout all those years, just as my own growing up was impossible to recognize in myself. But while my grandmas and aunts kept commenting on how big of a boy I was becoming, no one ever made the same comments when it came to the painting and its inhabitants. It was just me who could observe it. Even if I mentioned those changes to anyone, no one would believe me. Or worse – they would and my painting would be taken away from me. That was at least what I was afraid of – well enough, so that fear prevented me from sharing my thoughts with anyone. And over the course of time something changed in myself too. I don't mean just purely physical changes. Something about my mind changed too.

I started having dreams. Well, I had them before – dreams about the Neverlanders and the wonderful adventures I had with them, but this time it was something else. It was like I was one of them – one of the boys belonging to that world. The Lost Boys – that's how I called them. I imagined they were kids who somehow found their way to Neverland and stayed there. As a child, I sometimes imagined I went there – to the world without school, nagging parents and house chores but now, when the time of my childhood came to its end, it started to be something different. As if I'd been sucked in by this world.

I needed more and more sleep. My dreams about Neverland were different now; it was as if some power wanted me to stay in Neverland forever and forget about my old life. In those dreams I saw many boys, young and old, arriving to this land to play with the Lost Boys and their brave leader, Peter. It was his name – the boy who flew with a pixie sitting on his shoulder. In the painting he was an adult but in those dreams he didn't change. He was still the same child he had been and this time I could see his face clearly; for the first time in my life. The golden glob was a fairy indeed, one who was his dearest companion. I played with many other boys like I was still a child. I saw them arriving – so many boys from many parts of the world. Jamal, Dylan, Jacques, Andrzej, Ivan, Pablo – boys with names from all over the world, all of them meeting in this magical place.

Those dreams explained a lot to me. I knew now that the painting wasn't the only one, that there were many, many more and all of them were created by a man named James Matthew Barrie. For many years I wondered what the JMB letters on the frame meant – was J for John? For Jack? Or maybe even Jane or Joanne? Well, now at least I knew the answer. In those dreams I knew that the man who created the painting was a black magic master, a man who never fully grew up and who wanted to preserve childhood forever, if only on a painting. At first he wanted to write a children's book and cast a spell on it but finally he decided on making a painting, presenting a childhood's paradise – mermaids, pirates, kids who could spend all the time they had in the woods of an exotic island. He replicated it in many copies which in turn, were spread all over the world, where hundreds of kids became trapped by it. In their dreams they came to Neverland and stayed there together. Forever.

I forgot those dreams soon after I opened my eyes in the morning, left with just fragments of them which I had to mix with the fragments of dreams I had had before to get the clear picture of what was happening in my life. I thought these were mere dreams… but then again, why the changes of the painting? Dreams are something ordinary and everybody has them, while no one else besides myself (and the boys I saw in my dreams) had map-like paintings on the walls of their bedrooms; ones that changed. My dreams were getting longer and longer. And deeper. I couldn't wake up even when my young siblings were banging on the door of my bedroom. I didn't let them look at the painting. Luckily, they didn't seem to be that interested in it as I used to be when I was young. I slept almost half a day now and my need of sleep continued to grow.

All of my dreams now concern the Neverland island. I feel like I belong in there while my interest in my everyday life is getting smaller and smaller. Real life doesn't have any charm for me now. I wait impatiently to go to bed to have adventures, which I forget – but for small fragments of them – right after I wake up. I know it can't last much longer. My real life seems somehow blurred in comparison with the dream one – but in all honesty, it doesn't seem to worry me. All that I'm interested in now is Neverland – the dream life I lead in the world created by the black magic of a man who didn't want to grow up but who instead, wanted to create an enclave for kids. Even if they, like myself, are kids already only in their mind and heart. I know my time in my real body is almost over and soon to be replaced by the dream body I use when in Neverland. I'm afraid but on the other hand I'm glad that it is to happen soon. This life and this world got pulled up on me. I wait impatiently for the day when I won't be able to wake up after the night filled with dreams about the island any more. And who knows, maybe it's going to be this very day?

Goodnight.