My career as a painter is over, and the fact I can no longer enjoy my love of art is strangling my soul with a horrific strength too terrifying and powerful to name. I don't know if I can handle it much longer, but let me explain myself.
Decades ago, when I was in first grade, I drew my first real picture: a crude crayon drawing with a pair of stick men in front of a forest background. It wasn't good, but my seven-year-old self was proud of it, deciding to show my attempted masterpiece to the teacher. I don't remember much from my early childhood, but the sight of the teacher's face contorting in confusion lurks in my memory to this day.
"What is that?" she asked, staring at the paper with her jaw open.
"It's a picture of two people at the woods," I said in a childish babble, not knowing what was wrong.
"No, what is that?" the teacher said, shoving the drawing near my face with her finger in the left-hand corner. In the corner of my picture, in gray crayon, something was perched in the tree with a smile full of fangs. It was a lanky creature, its waxy texture making its skin look rough and bumpy. But most strange of all its characteristics, it had small, tiny eyes. Smaller than the tip of an ant's leg. And with those itty-bitty eyes, it appeared to stare at the stick figures in the drawing
I was bewildered to say the least. "Disturbed" would be a better word.
"What is it?" the teacher pressed.
"I don't know. I didn't even draw that."
The teacher looked at the other students as they finished up their artworks, and she ruled the possibility somebody had been messing with my paper. "Don't lie to me. Tell me what you drew."
"I didn't draw it, I swear. I don't even have a gray crayon."
"No more lies. What is it?"
I stroked my hair and thought for an excuse, saying, "It's a . . . a . . . a-a dragon, I guess." The thing that had appeared on my drawing didn't have wings, looking nothing like a dragon, but the teacher bought it and didn't write it off as something weird. After school, I threw that first picture in the trash.
Throughout my life, I developed an immense passion for art, but that Thing showed up every single time I drew anything. I made a birthday card for my grandmother, drawing a flowery meadow. It wasn't until the next day, however, until my grandmother called, asking why I'd sent her a picture of a gray, slender beast with minuscule eyes. My elementary school art instructor thought I was obsessed with whatever I was drawing, and I had to lie about the creature being a Pokemon character. There were a million little things like that, and it became a regular part of my life—something utterly normal to me. After all, it started in first grade.
On Valentine's Day in fifth grade, I decided to sketch my crush to impress her, and I covered the entire sheet with her face to make sure the Thing wouldn't ruin the picture. If there's no background for the Thing to show up in, it will be a perfect sketch. My plan, contradicting what I had hypothesized, failed without a doubt. Instead of appearing in the background of the picture, the Thing was climbing out a bloody gash where the drawing of my crush's right cheek had been. As you can guess, I didn't show it to her and left school with a blank, numb, and unreadable expression.
And from then onward, I never failed to see the Thing in my artwork, whether it be peering through the window in a cityscape, swimming over the horizon of a seascape, or staring at me in the center of the page with its black, diminutive eyes.
When I started using watercolor and pastels more than pencils, I got more chances to see the Thing in much greater detail. It was a ghoul the color of a dark gray storm cloud, with yellowy, curly nails and a surreal chin as pointy as a knife Sometimes, after looking away from the picture for a few seconds, the Thing would change its spot, freaking me out. Has it ever done that before? I asked the first time it happened. I thought the Thing was more sinister the older I got, but it'd never done anything. Of course, I was assuming the Thing was a single entity that lived in my artwork. At least, that's what I've come to believe after all these years.
After I graduated from art school—a place where the Thing haunted the backgrounds of all my works—I opened a studio in Lower Manhattan. I whipped up some watercolors and sketches for the display, creating distant environments for the Thing to dwell without anybody noticing, and after a few weeks, there were quite a few buyers. In no time at all, I made a name for myself in the local artistic community, the creepy "easter eggs" in my drawings' scenery intriguing some of my buyers. Life was going great, and the money wasn't bad at all. Only a tiny portion of my buyers noticed how the creepy easter egg in the background scenery would move a few centimeters, and I informed them how it was an optical illusion I'd been working on perfecting my entire life.
A few weeks ago, after another successful day of business, I decided to make a clay sculpture in my spare time. I'd never done it before, so I thought it'd be interesting. I bought some clay, headed home through the New York traffic, and let my hypnotic creativity take control of my fingers. It was like drawing a picture, but the squishy clay felt better on my skin than a pencil or brush. I ended up making the head of a bird, chiseling the animal's feathery, wavy neck before adding the beak. I was impressed with myself, leaving the creation on my nightstand to dry overnight.
As I drifted to sleep, a noise found my ears, but I don't remember how to describe it. And as soon as my consciousness faded into suspension and my subconscious took control of my mind, I had a dream. I was in a desert, dust devils and tornados of dirt and sand raging in the distance, but wisping in circles around me was a billow of gray paint. I swear the black, minute eyes of the Thing contacted mine as the nightmare jolted me awake.
I woke with my body facing the nightstand, and I would have screamed if I thought my nightmare had ended. Instead of being the head of a bird, the sculpture had a triangular chin, a coat of gray paint, and two needle-sized holes as eyes. I didn't move; only the sculpture did. It smiled at me and bounded off the nightstand without breaking, clinking out of my bedroom. That adrenaline rush was the most I'd ever gotten. I had so much energy, but was frozen still, thinking my heart would burst with enormous, horrible pressure. What the hell had happened? I spasmed as a downstairs window shattered, not daring to think. I stayed up all night under my blankets, me spending hours upon hours of my eyes stuck open. Torture, I thought. I'm torturing myself. But I wouldn't fall asleep while that Thing was still out there. I couldn't fall asleep while it was roaming about.
In the morning, when I came to my senses, I clambered downstairs to find the window scattered across the sidewalk. What the hell did I do? I went outside, looked around the street for a minute, and cleaned up the glass until the newspaper boy arrived, asking about my window.
"Oh, eh, it's, uh, just nothing."
"Oh, well, accidents happen. Anyway, did you hear what happened last night?" the boy said, flailing the newspaper in my face. "Someone broke into a 3d printer store and made a whole load of these weird statues. They're creepy—with odd chins and these eyes . . . Those eyes . . ."
I patted the newspaper boy in the back and spent the laborious task of driving to the studio in downtown. When I got there, something had broken the door open, and I saw the Thing was taking up all the space in all the paintings. And sitting on my desk was a paper note with the words thank you. After seeing that, I destroyed all the drawings in the studio and haven't dared to make one since. Some of my old buyers have gone missing, and as you can imagine, I refused to attend a party hosted by the New York Art League, which I knew possessed one of my paintings.
My career is gone, I'm broke, and I have no clue what to do. The only thing I've learned since the end of my job is to put a dresser against my bedroom door at night. The only reason I'm writing this is to see if anyone else has something lurking everywhere in an aspect of their life—a thing that feeds on your happiness and stops you from doing what you love. Because I have no idea if I can deal with this for much more time.
