In honor of Jason Sanford's upcoming novella, We Who Hunt Alexanders, out on July 22nd, we at Apex hosted a microfiction contest inviting you to describe your own blood-maw pocket hell. We got some amazing submissions, and after much trial and tribulation, narrowed it down to a top three. In second place was "All That I Am, A Failed Dream" by Adrian Ward. You can read the piece and learn more about Adrian below! Congratulations to Adrian!
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"All That I Am, A Failed Dream"
In the museum closet, I am again compelled to create.
Brush meets canvas, and the piece explodes from within me. Color. Emotion. All that I am becomes strokes of paint, bits of self expressed through canvas.
When I finish, the brush has cut bloody lines into my fingers. Sweat soaks my back.
The painting before me is raw and horrific and beautiful.
Outside, the remnants of geniuses hang from the walls. Courbet. Rembrandt. Van Gogh. I have long dreamed of my work hanging besides theirs, fragments of myself forever etched into the memories of all who see them.
The painting before me is worthy of a place on that wall. It is a vessel of myself, capable of fulfilling a dream.
It is a masterpiece, and it will never be seen.
My tormentor flicks a careless finger, and my painting—myself—burns.
I throw myself over it, trying to smother the flame. Pointless, I know this by now. I can succeed only in burning myself afresh. I have long become a sort of canvas, layered with various colors of scar tissue.
When my masterpiece has become nothing but ash, my tormentor bids me create another.
"Again," she says.
"No."
"Again," she says.
It will be destroyed. All that I wanted to be, all that I am. Time and time and now and forever. Thousands of paintings already, each my greatest work, my expression—perfection—of myself. Thousands more to come, made only to be destroyed without a single eye upon them, without moving a single soul.
Nothing. I am nothing. My dream, nothing.
Hell. This is hell.
But the compulsion to create forms again, and I cannot deny it.
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Adrian Ward is a college student and writer originally from North Carolina. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Apex blog and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among other venues. You can find him online at adrianwardwrites.wordpress.com.
