One of my masterpieces called me a broken man just before she died.
She’d been trying to get through to me, hoped till her dying breath that I could be fixed.
I smiled as I slit her throat and told her these words as the life drained out of her.
‘Be careful trying to fix a broken person, for you may just cut yourself on their shattered pieces’.
Crafting the finest diorama is a meticulous task. One must show patience, meticulously adhering to every minute detail contained within the space.
Ensuring that the masterpiece is simply perfect.
I once created such a diorama.
It was set to be my crown jewel, a fine artwork indeed. Every inch of that little box was crafted to perfection. Glued and moulded into the exact shape that I saw in my mind, painted with pinpoint precision.
Right down to the tiniest little splatters of the crimson blood that were spilled over the floor and walls of that little cell.
The diorama was perfection, and I placed it upon my mantle.
However, with one fortuitous bump, my masterpiece fell and shattered into a thousand pieces on the ground.
The diorama was broken.
Painstakingly, piece by piece, I picked the broken pieces of the diorama up. I set to work, fixing the masterpiece, gluing it back together as best I could.
Yet try as I did, I could never get it to look exactly how I needed it to again. The paint seemed all the more dull, the figures just didn’t seem to pose themselves the same way.
No matter what I tried, I could only see my masterpiece as a broken diorama.
Such is the nature of humanity, is it not?
What is perfect, we praise and put upon the mantle. But what becomes broken, we turn our noses up at. We discard that which doesn’t meet our own personal standards.
Broken people are tossed into the trash just as quickly as broken dioramas.
You’ve experienced that as much as anybody, haven’t you Aster Gray?
Walking that fine line between life and death as a tightrope walker balances upon the wire. Determined to prove that you are the perfect example of a paradox. You painted yourself in the perfect tones of the grey shades of life.
I too used your existence to create my masterpiece.
Painstakingly, I drove that knife into your flesh. I painted the floor and the walls with your blood.
You bled red, not grey.
The perfect shade of crimson that completed my crowning glory.
A perfect diorama within that prison cell… And yet, here you are.
Neither living, nor dead.
You are that which knocks my diorama from the mantle and shatters it upon the ground. Your very existence now mocks my handiwork.
But I’m not trying to fix you, Aster.
I have no intentions of placing you back upon that mantle.
I’ll simply do what I do best.
Stab, cut and slice.
I’ll see if you still bleed red, my little broken diorama.
You’re not the only broken person down here in Deathrow.