r/nosleep
The Reason I Won't Go Near My Paintings Anymore by reddit user LordColbito
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.
