The Shape

Photo by Jan Kahánek on Unsplash

The first person to draw the shape was a girl called Yuna, aged seven, in a primary school in Swindon.

Her teacher, Ms Cavill, kept the drawing because it was unusual. It was the confidence of the lines that stood out, rather than its content.

Yuna had used a black felt-tip and drawn the shape in a single unbroken stroke, without hesitation or overlap.

Children draw strange things all the time, but this one… this one was remarkable. The shape itself was hard to describe. It was angular but not a polygon. It had eleven sides, none of them parallel, and something about the interior angles was aberrant. The geometry was technically sound, and yet the eye kept trying to find a centre that wasn’t there.

Ms Cavill pinned it to the wall. Three days later she took it down because two other children in the class had drawn the same shape. Same number of sides and proportions; completely identical.

She asked them why they’d copied the drawing on the wall and they both said they hadn’t copied it. They said they’d just known how to draw it. One of them, a boy called Oscar, had drawn it with his eyes closed.

Yuna’s mother, intrigued by the complexity of the figure, posted a photograph of the original drawing to a parenting forum, asking if anyone recognised the shape. Eleven people replied saying they recognised it but couldn’t say from where. Three of them said their children had drawn it in the past two weeks and uploaded photographs. All three drawings were identical.

Within a week the shape was on Reddit, in a niche subreddit for pattern recognition. Someone ran it through image-matching software. No results. Someone asked a professor of geometry at UCL to comment. The professor said the shape was “mathematically unremarkable” but declined to be named and asked for the email thread to be deleted. When pressed, he said he didn’t want to look at it any more.

By November the shape had appeared in fourteen schools across five counties. Always drawn by children under ten. Always in a single stroke.

A researcher at the University of Bristol collected forty-two examples and published a short paper noting the consistency. The proportions varied by less than three per cent across all samples. She called it the Yuna Figure and the name stuck.

After two months, adults began drawing it too. Never deliberately.

A man in Leeds reported finding it in the margin of his meeting notes. A paramedic in Glasgow drew it on a napkin and couldn’t explain why, and then stopped sleeping, and then was fine again after a week.

The shape was not a memetic hazard in any clinical sense. No one who drew it reported lasting harm. But the psychologist attached to the Bristol study observed that people who had drawn the shape once tended to draw it again. And again. The compulsion was mild but undeniable. Like a tune lodged in the skull.

In January a retired draughtsman in Shrewsbury built a three-dimensional version of the shape from balsa wood, extending its eleven sides into the third dimension using what he called “the obvious extrapolation.” The object sat on his workbench. His wife asked him to move it. She said it made her feel watched. He moved it to the garage. A neighbour’s cat sat outside the garage door for four days and would not move.

No photographs of the three-dimensional version exist. The draughtsman burned it on the second of February. He said he did not want it in his house any more.

Yuna, when interviewed by the Bristol team, said she had seen the shape in a dream. In the dream she was standing in a field and the sky was the colour of the end of the world and the shape was pressed into the earth like a footprint. She said it was very large. She said she didn’t want to talk about it.

By March, people who had never seen the shape were drawing it. The Bristol team confirmed this through a controlled study. Test subjects were isolated from all media for seventy-two hours. On the third day, four of the twenty participants drew the shape on the provided paper, unprompted. None could explain why. One of them, a retired nurse, wept whilst drawing it. She said it felt like remembering something heartbreaking.

The shape is not on this page. You would know if it were. You would feel the itch in your hand, the pull towards a pen.

The Yuna Figure has not appeared in any peer-reviewed journal since the Bristol paper was retracted in April. Ms Cavill left teaching. The subreddit was banned. The UCL professor emigrated to New Zealand and does not answer emails.

But if you have read this far, you may, in the next few days, find yourself drawing something. It will be angular. It will have eleven sides. You will draw it in a single stroke and it will feel correct.

Do not look at what you have drawn.

Just in case.

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