Blood and death reared their ugly heads in his art

Steam curled upwards from a chipped coffee mug, settling cloud-like against the cracked ceiling. Blessed warmth chased the tension from paint-spattered hands while hooded eyes stared, unseeing.

It was only when the mock sky above rained flakes of plaster that the young man tore his gaze away. Grumbling, he set the mug down, raised his head and sighed, his eyes as blank as the canvas that stared back. He blinked irritably and turned his head like an owl, gunshots cracking across his spine.

Tanned fingers tugged absent-mindedly at a feathery tuft of hair peeking out from under a badly knitted beanie, darker and dirtier than the yellow ochre on his palette. The other claw selected a ragged paintbrush, lonely without pigment.

Though his fingers moved like glaciers in the cold, the dusty radiator coaxed the chill from his bones and, dabbing at his palette, he began to paint.

Alex had only been painting seriously for a few months. He used to be a sculptor, as haughty as they come.

They had sold quite well, his sculptures, but now all that was left were half-finished blocks of marble and clay littering the studio.

A few lay crumbling on the floor amid dusty footprints, victims of carelessness or the occasional breakdown.

They were becoming less common now, but that terrible summer's night had been burned into his memory, kicking down the door and inviting all his nightmares to a drunk party inside his head.

Painting had been his only way of staying sane. Isolating himself, his brush moved day and night, kept alive by his obsession and grief.

Now, winter suffocated the morning sun and the clouds outside dyed the cerulean sky a steely grey, but the telephone cord still lay unplugged, and the stack of unopened letters grew.

However, his daily schedule had not changed. Every day he downed coffee until his eyelids became baggy and lifeless, but still he kept painting, kept running. Alex was afraid to sleep. Anxiety and paranoia had confined him to the studio, chained him to his easel and murdered his restful nights.

In the weeks after the crash, distorted remnants of blood and death reared their ugly heads in his art; startling red stains fading to flaky brown, mud from a nearby ditch tangling limp curls, all bathed in the horror-movie lights of the ambulance.

Alex's haunted subconscious was playing that scene on a loop behind his eyelids; he dreaded the faux sleep that brought nothing but nightmares. He couldn't paint over them like a stray spot of paint; every time he tried, the nightmare would shake its demonic mane and snort in derision, drenching Alex not in his paints, but in bright crimson blood.

Anna's blood. He had to keep going. He didn't know whether he was running to or from, but it didn't matter. Alex hated this emptiness that pressed down on him, hated the headaches and heartaches, hated everything his life had turned into without her.

Observing his brush with the glazed eyes of a faraway spectator was no longer enough. Alex sought a final escape from guilt, from sorrow, and from his worst enemy: himself.

Rosalie Liu, Year 12, St Kentigern College