Quick question: What's the creepiest ice cream parlour you've ever been to?
Some of you might be giving the obvious answers - Slavering Dave's FroYo and Sexual Harassment, or maybe the local branch of Unlabelled Meatsicles, but I think I may have won the title a couple of weeks ago in California with Leatherby's.
Now, don't get me wrong. Leatherby's is a perfectly good restaurant that makes its own ice cream. Our Uber driver told us about it one day while we were on our honeymoon (thank you) and when we arrived to meet my family for dinner, it turns out they were already planning on taking us to Leatherby's. Which is a perfectly nice American nostalgia place with, it's true, intimidatingly huge portions of ice cream.
But they also have a painting.
It was sheer random chance that I happened to be sitting facing a mural that took up an entire wall, but the more I looked down-table at the rest of my family, the more I ended up looking at the painting and the more I realised it was... wrong. In more and more ways.
The world is filled with the work of inept artists who don't understand perspective, as is the case with many of the background details, but this isn't just the work of an artist who doesn't understand angles. This is an unintentional masterpiece of the uncanny. I took the best pictures I could without bothering other patrons or calling down the wrath of some eldritch deity, so here’s the whole thing:
The focus of the painting, at least if you're sat down, is a little girl with an ice cream. Which makes sense. What doesn't make sense is that the little girl is somehow seven years old and also forty. Challenge the greatest artists in the world to paint a picture of someone who is two completely different ages at the same time, and I don't think they could beat this.
Not content with being multiple ages, she's also multiple sizes. She's a normal sized little girl of forty-three, and also bigger than the wheels of the cart next to her. And somehow as tall as the horse, which manages to be behind her despite logically being right next to her or even a little ahead, from our perspective.
The couple in the cart are staring at the viewer with a fixed, mindless grin that conveys madness, but then you'd probably go crazy too if both your arms were prosthetic and you were trapped with your impossibly tiny legs and your staring, legless wife inside a horse and buggy.
The only other horse in the picture is next to a cowboy in the background who is also staring at us. He's lit from an impossible source, as is everything else. The little middle-aged girl in the foreground clearly has the sun on one side of her face, but the rest of the picture - the staring cowboy in particular - is lit from another angle. His horse somehow remains shrouded in darkness despite being the one stood in the street.
All of which would be weird enough if the smiling cowboy weren't also stood next to a portal that doesn't appear to be part of the wall, or the door, or reality in general.
The cowboy would be taller than his horse if they were stood on the same level, and this particular wrong-sized horse seems to have legs that are simultaneously in front of and below the cross-piece of the harness.
Horses being the constantly the wrong size would be enough to freak anyone out, so they are perhaps the reason that the old child's dog looks like it's speaking to someone off-panel in the voice of a man. He seems to be concerned and asking a bystander if they're seeing all of this shit. Or maybe he's just asking if anyone can tell how many legs he has, or is meant to have.
The little girl's ice cream seems to be bleeding, which is terrifying but still the best-case scenario to explain the pools of what looks like old blood all over the street.
The telephone poles don't connect to anything.
Arguably the strangest choice, however, is that the artist left a lot of empty space in the top right of the picture. Enough empty space that it draws the eye.
There, in the distance, a dark figure is approaching. It's very similar to the opening shot of the movie "High Plains Drifter," in which Clint Eastwood plays an angry spirit that appears out of the desert to exact a terrible revenge on a border town. Spoilers for a movie that came out fifty years ago, by the way.
It's not quite Eastwood, though. This figure seems to be pulling a wagon. Somehow, without being able to articulate why, we know that something terrible is coming.
I emailed the branch of Leatherby's (Elk Grove, if you're ever in the area) to ask if there were any full-size photographs of the mural, or if I could maybe buy it as a print or a t-shirt, but they never got back to me. Probably they don't like to discuss it. Maybe anyone who has stared this long at the mural tends to email them in a dead language that drives scholars to madness. Either way, they do make good ice cream, if you're looking for one.
But if you're looking for a restaurant with a bizarre mural, then I DEFINITELY have a recommendation.