This one doesn't try to "tell a story", at least, I don't think so, but the story behind it is that I was bopping around some random links and ran across a picture of a nude woman swimming underwater taken from below. It occurred to me that there are some positions or postures a model just cannot manage easily unless in freefall or in water, so I did some more bopping around specifically looking for pictures of nude women swimming underwater for the purpose of playing with them with the image manipulation program. They had to be nude because I'm not up for trying to remove clothing digitally - the nature of raster images (as opposed to vector) is such that it's usually far easier to add stuff than to take it away, and it can be very hard to find appropriately "clothed" models when you're thinking about making lizard-like demons out of them. Most of these women could serve as models for flying angels or demons.
All the women in this picture are in fact fully grown women, but they've undergone some "cosmetic surgery" while being plopped into this image. They're shaped like women in overall (they have wider hips and their hip joints are further apart than they would be for men, slenderer arms, shorter stature, etc, etc), but they're a lot less buoyant than they had been, and now they're exactly like Eli except that they don't have scars.
I wasn't thinking about what I was doing while I was doing it, this is just how it turned out when I ran out of things to shovel randomly into it, so let a description of the image suggest what might have been rattling around in the basement of my alleged mind:
Oskar, the hand keeping his head underwater and the pool itself are all from a screenshot, and apart from removing a bubble or two from in front of Oskar's head and chucking in a couple gallons of paint, it's unaltered. The extreme left and right sides of the pool are a lot darker. People are coming from or out of the sides of the pool, and they look like they ought to be women, but they don't have parts, they're partially transparent and coloured in disconcerting ways, and they have glowing eyes. As his lights start to go dim, face starting to turn purple, he has an image of Eli where his heart should be.
Oh, and the water has a light reddish fog to it.
One tongue-in-cheek "interpretation" is that he's dying, and knows it. These disturbing human-shaped entities floating into the periphery of his dimming vision could be here to escort him to whatever or wherever might be Beyond, and there doesn't seem to be much promise it'll be pleasant. What he's taking with him is the one thing he treasures the most: the memory of Eli at her most pleasant, all cleaned up, nicely dressed, and politely asking to come in and just hang out. He knows full well what she is, but this is how he remembers her.
