The Portrait of Almost Enough
Krishna Prasad
What if your greatest enemy was your own reflection?
Elias's job is to create perfect faces for a corrupt Ministry, but their own is deemed too flawed to exist. Trapped by self-hatred, Elias's internal critic literally claws its way out of a sketchbook ; A sentient, perfect mask that wants to erase them for good.
To defeat it, Elias must join a underground rebellion of artists who sculpt with forbidden, living clay. A dystopian tale for fans of The Giver and The Starless Sea, about the radical act of embracing who you truly are.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the city of Narcissus, beauty was not inherited; it was purchased.
Mirrors were outlawed, and citizens relied on artists like Elias to sculpt their reflections. The Ministry of Aesthetics dictated every contour, every hue, every lie. Elias's studio, tucked between a butcher shop and a pawnbroker, reeked of turpentine and desperation. Their hands were stained the color of almost enough, a shade the Ministry deemed acceptable.
Tonight's client was a widow. Her husband had died six months prior, but her grief lingered in the creases around her eyes. "Make me forget him," she whispered, her fingers clawing at her cheeks. "Erase every line he loved."
Elias dipped their brush into a jar of liquid moonlight, the pigment glowing faintly as they painted over her crow's feet. The widow's face softened, her skin tightening into the placid sheen of a porcelain doll. She paid Elias in gold coins stamped with the Ministry's insignia, a single, unblinking eye.
"It will fade in a month," Elias warned.
The widow nodded, her new face already cracking at the temples.
When she left, Elias locked the door and pulled a cracked mirror from beneath a burlap sack. Their reflection stared back, skin the color of storm clouds, a nose broad and unapologetic, lips too full for the Ministry's taste.
"Who are you?" Elias whispered.
The charcoal trembled in their hand.
---
The first stroke was a lie.
Elias's charcoal sketched a face too fair, too sharp, a caricature of the Ministry's ideals. High cheekbones like knife edges, eyes blue as frostbite, skin luminous and poreless.
The drawing twitched.
"Softer," hissed a voice from the walls. "Brighter. Less clay."
Elias recoiled. The voice was theirs, aged seven, when their mother first pressed fairness cream into their palms.
"Darkness is a debt, child," she had said, scrubbing their face raw. "Pay it, or no one will love you."
The portrait peeled from the paper, hardening into a mask of fired purple clay, smooth and flawless.
Its eyes, too blue and too cold, locked onto Elias.
"You think this is you?" it sneered. "You are a forger. A thief. A lump of wet earth."
Elias lunged to shatter it, but the mask splintered into shards that cut their palms. Blood dripped onto the studio floor, staining the woodgrain like ink.
"Finish me," the mask demanded, "or I will finish you."
---
The ghost arrived at dawn.
Elias woke to the sound of scratching.
A spectral boy knelt by the window, his ashen fingers carving symbols into the floorboards. His skin glowed faintly violet, and his eyes were hollow voids.
"Who are you?" Elias demanded.
The boy pressed a shard of fired clay into their hand.
Etched into its surface was a word in a dead language: Enough.
"She is waiting," the boy whispered, and vanished into the alley's shadows.
Elias followed him to a sunken grove where the earth bled violet.
There, among the roots and dying lanterns, was Zara, a woman with wild curls and hands caked in clay. She knelt beside a pit of purple mud, sculpting a tiny face that mirrored Elias's own.
"They are time travelers," Zara said, nodding at the clay figures hardening in the sun. "Each crack is a lie they refused to swallow."
---
Zara's grove was a cathedral of rebellion. The air hummed with the whispers of half formed clay faces, their features shifting like desert dunes.
"Why purple?" Elias asked, their fingers sinking into the cold, wet earth.
Zara smirked.
"The Ministry banned it centuries ago. Too unruly. Too alive."
She pressed a handful of clay into Elias's palms. It clung to their skin like a second epidermis, twisting into gauntlets of thorns that bloomed tiny violets.
"Pain is not the enemy," Zara said. "It is the clay."
Elias looked from their own stained hands to the defiant, unfinished faces around them. They understood now. They would not be finished by the mask, or the Ministry, or the ghosts of old voices. They would be the sculptor.
Taking the shard from the ghostly boy, Elias pressed it into the wet, violet earth, and began to dig. They would not search for a reflection. They would build one.
---
"We are not born with faces. We are sculpted-by hands seen and unseen, by gods and ghosts, by the lies we swallow and the truths we dig up." - From the journals of Zara al-Khalil, Rebel Artist of Narcissus