Neil Gaiman says short stories are “tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and other dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner”. My final selection for this anthology is an unexpected one. It is not a short story but, in fact, a triptych: a series of three paintings which tell a story, one which allows us to, briefly, enter another world, another mind, another dream. Remedios Varo was a Spanish surrealist painter concerned, like others in this anthology, in using her art “as a way of communicating the incommunicable”. Her work is otherworldly and concerned with liberating the self from the confines, like Machado, of “our known world”.

In the first panel, ‘Towards the Tower (Hacia La Torre)’, we see a group of uniformed young women led away from a bee-hive-like structure by Mother Superior. The women pedal in time, gazing ahead in their trance-like states. However, one of them is still awake. She dares to look outward. A sparkle in her eye. In the second panel, ‘Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle (Bordando El Manto Terrestre)’, the women sit in a high tower directed by the Great Master to work – weaving the fabric of reality. The tapestry of the earth threads from their hands and out of a small gap in the wall, creating a world they are integral to but cannot participate within. Looking closely, we see the woman who is awake stitching a small detail, unseen by the others. She creates a boat, a lover, a new reality for herself beyond the confines of these walls. In the final panel, ‘The Escape (La Huida)’, the heroine is steering her boat away from the tower, her lover by her side, a dark cave symbolising her new world ahead. It is important to note the lover has not saved her, but she has fabricated her liberation alone.

Will she make it? What will this new passage entail? Comparable to the short story, the ends in Varo’s sequence are not perfectly tied up. We are left with questions, wordless interpretations, and I believe a message on the potentiality of women’s creative expression. The heroine can use the tools that once enslaved her to articulate (and thus live) her newfound freedom.

Varo’s work is included in IMAGINE! 100 Years of International Surrealism (2024-2026). Beginning at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, the show travels to Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, the Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia