Feliciano didn't always draw pretty things.

He had papers hidden in the back of his closet and under the mattress of his bed, fine ink drawings and oil paintings that he never wanted to be revealed. They were filled with things that he was never sure he should have seen, never sure he should have thought about, and the forbidden images spilled out from his fingers and onto the empty white papers of his sketchbooks.

There were the broken bodies of the battlefield, bent backwards with their faces melting into something akin to sweet hysteria, warrior's swords twisting though them like clay.

Women, men, joined together in rapture and ecstasy and drawn with charcoal black silhouettes, stark white patches of moonlight falling across hands that scrabbled for a hold on sweat-slicked skin and lips that parted to breathe and kiss and plead.

Prostitutes in watercolors with their breasts hanging out, spit and lipstick smeared across their ruined faces, and strangers that laid in the gutters with their glassy eyes open and reflecting the stars.

There were children being born and children dying all immortalized in hurried pencil sketches, hungry babies suckling on bloodied wounds from mothers with no more milk to give. Brothers and sisters clutching at cold hands with clumsy fingers. Girls with missing limbs lying abandoned in the rubble of a ruined home.

One painting was of the inside of a church, men on their knees with prayer beads pressed between their fingers; another showed a baby bird with a broken wing, frozen and forever asleep on the side of the road.

On and on and on, canvas after canvas and paper after paper filled with the pain and agony and faithlessness of a world desperately running from itself. And in those same canvases was printed evidence of every good, worthwhile thing life had ever had to offer—the evidence of everything their existence had always depended upon. God spoke with the face of every wounded soldier, angels hiding in the sunlight that cascaded over every dead woman's body.

Hatred was proof of love.

Blood was proof of life.

Sweat and tears and milk and cum were all testaments to the crude fragility of reality, and that in itself made them gorgeous.

Feliciano didn't always draw pretty things. There weren't always pretty thing for him to draw. But there is a certain, crippled beauty inherent in all the jagged edges of creation, and when he picked up his pencil that was all he could ever see.