The city had forgotten this corner. Cracked walls, graffiti drowning in smog, and silence broken only by stray footsteps and the wheeze of rusted pipes.
Somewhere in that hollow skeleton of a building, he painted. Starving, shirt half-torn, brush held in trembling fingers like it weighed a hundred pounds. The mural stretched across the wall—half angels, half beasts, eyes like burning stars and wings stitched from nightmares. No one ever stopped to look. No one cared. He painted with hunger in his veins and madness nipping at his mind, alone with his colors and the ache of never being seen.
Even his hallucinations had stopped speaking to him. That was how far gone he was.
