A story titled "The Sculptor"

Some people can't help but write, some people can't help but run, others can't stop creating beautiful music. Then there's me- I can't help but sculpt faces.

Since I was a child it was all I ever wanted to do. Before I knew how to sculpt, all I would do was draw faces; but they weren't like the other kids' drawings. From the time I was a toddler, the detail I was capable of was immense, rivaling the great portrait masters.

When I first discovered clay my results were even more dramatic- even in lifeless gray, I was able to bring soul and emotion to these faces. I started out just using my hands, but early on, around age five, one of my art teachers realized my talents and showed me tools. It takes a college student sometimes years to master the tools of sculpting and a lifetime to perfect the art itself- but for me, it took just one afternoon before I was using even the most basic schools available in a preschool to manipulate my clay in magnificent ways. My classroom teachers were dumbfounded, my peers were jealous and I simply didn't care enough to notice any of it.


Naturally, my parents thought something was wrong with me; they took me to the best shrinks and psychologists in the city thinking it might help. These accomplished doctors, with degrees from the best universities in the world adorning their walls, would stare intently at me for hours at a time while I sculpted away. By this time, I was about seven and I had taken to bringing clay and tools with me all the time in a small backpack. The shrinks tried to deduce things from who they thought I was sculpting, one of them figured I was portraying images of people who had hurt me, bullies and such. Another had suggested to my parents that perhaps I was sculpting the faces of would-be criminals, like that movie Minority Report. Thankfully my parents never took me back to that guy because I just don't think I could handle the pressures of working with Tom Cruise all the time.

In the end none of the highly paid professionals could come to any diagnosis. One my one they were dumbfounded by both my prowess at sculpting and my apparent lack of any cognitive detriments. A few of the doctors suggested various pills, antidepressants, ritalin, cocktails of the two and so on. My parents decided to give one of them a try only to discover that while on the pills I didn't just not sculpt- I didn't eat or sleep or talk to anyone. After a week of sleepless nights, memories of which are fuzzy at best, I was taken off the pills and left to my sculpting.

Now, it's not as if I didn't do anything else. I ate spoke, I at my meals and had proper manners at the table, I cleaned my dishes, I was polite (when not sculpting) and I even managed to make a few friends who were so impressed with my sculpting that they would come over for hours at a time to watch me sculpt and try to imitate me. Of course, no one could come close.

As I got older, I lost most of my friends who had moved on to other pursuits such as chasing girls, having drinks and playing video games. None of these things interested me in the slightest and high school was very difficult because of this. I had learned by this time not to sculpt in class, but I would still spend my lunch hours in a quiet corner making faces of whoever I saw passing by, or melding faces together. Their realism only increased as I grew, adding color and texture so detailed that from the right angle you could almost not tell it was a lump of molded and painted clay. And then there were my dreams.

My nights would be filled with vivid images of the faces I had created, whether they be familiar faces or faces I had invented out of the blue. This alone would not bother me, but it was the cryptic messages they would send me that did. Instructions for situations I had yet to encounter, formulas for mathematics I didn't understand and the names of people I had never met. It would not be until I entered college that I understood what the dreams were about.

TO BE CONTINUED...