from "Adam or the proper picture"

by Axel Thormählen

Not many people have had Adam as their art teacher. I was one of those who had that pleasure, but unfortunately he didn’t like me. My face, he announced in front of the entire class, didn’t fit into any aesthetic context. I must have seemed so ugly to him that he avoided looking at me even in passing. In fact, he didn’t look at any of us for longer than absolutely necessary. We were, so he told us at the beginning of every art class, a superfluous, vulgar breed, and teaching us art was a waste of time. Twelve-year-old pupils, we thought of art—if we thought of it at all—as a random thing, rather than as a school subject. The main thing was for Adam to approve what we painted, then we’d get a good grade and that was art. I got one poor grade after another because Adam kept telling me to paint an apple; but I couldn’t do apples, or faces either. The soft cheeks and the shadows were beyond me. Art teacher Adam was a good-looking young man whom the biology mistress was running after, as the whole school knew. He, however, yearned for the perfect apple.

[continues in TrenchArt: Parapet]

Axel Thormählen’s A Happy Man and Other Stories is available from Les Figues Press.