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I turned, then dragged the piece over a stool, balancing the paper across both it and the oak windowsill so I could step back.
There. I looked at it again.
Each inhale filled my lungs with a tide of dust and art, ink and graphite, paper and wood. In my vision, the piece blurred, black grooves coming to life the longer I stared until finally, I saw it.
There was art below the blackout.
It seemed to be sideways, so I turned it, stepped back once more—and there it was.
When the light hit just right, there were details upon the paper, etches that even the noir of the charcoal couldn’t quite hide in the right light.
I backed up to the others, finding it easier to see beneath now I’d seen it once, and lined them up, one by one.
It was, I realised, a snapshot into something darker than the charcoal that covered them.
I saw the same setting, same figure, all with slightly different variations.
It took me a long time to truly understand what I was looking at, but the art, even hidden, had been made with few strokes.
The image itself was simple, and yet each choice, each heavy-handed line was deliberate, skilled, and each evoked the same thing.
Upon every canvas was a depiction of pain.
A man lay chained among trees, his form tense and taut with agony.
In a world where I struggled to connect with others, where normal reaction and empathy were eroded, I think they were the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.
But they were all the same.
The shadowed man tumbled through every depiction of tragedy. From hands and knees, body hunched, to screaming,then back to the ground, arching and agonised, or curled up and frightened.
Fear to desperation, to despair, until he was a husk.
My stomach turned, as I looked back over them again and again, as if the story might change.
There was so much pain in each, I couldfeelit in a way I never had.
But why would someone do this over and over?
If there was no end?
I chewed on my lip, looking around to find there was one last piece left on the easel beside the door.
I slid onto the seat, tilting it toward the light and trying to see past the charcoal smudges trying to obscure it.
Would this one be different?
He’d suffered enough.
The chains had to be gone.
Something got stuck in my throat as the final image took shape.
The chains were gone, but the man wasn’t free. He lay, no longer tense, or doubled over, or agonised.
He was dead.
And when he died, he was in pieces, his body glitching across the page like a bad recording of an old movie.
