Once upon a time, there was a man who had no name, no complete body, not even a clear outline. He was, essentially, a silhouette. And not one of those elegant ones you see in moonlit shadows, but a collection of crooked lines and angry scribbles, as if born from an argument between a pencil and an eraser.
He lived on an old, yellowed sheet of paper in a forgotten corner of a famous artist’s workshop. This artist was renowned—not for talent, but for ego. His works were so baffling that most of them were bought by galleries trying to save on electricity: no one looked at them long enough to justify turning on the lights.
The Broken Silhouette had come into existence during one of the artist’s fits of frustration, an accidental jumble of lines that were supposed to be something else (a lamp, a puppy, or maybe a broken teacup). No one knew, not even the artist himself. When the man saw the sketch, he sighed, glared at it, and muttered:
“This isn’t even worth auctioning off at a charity fair.”
And so, the Broken Silhouette was thrown into the bottom of a drawer filled with similar failures: half-closed circles, shapes that looked like they were trying to escape the page, and what was clearly a rabbit someone had forgotten to finish.
Years passed. The Broken Silhouette listened to the conversations of the other sketches in the drawer. There were tales of frustrated glory (“I almost made it onto a magazine cover!”), impossible romances (“The perfect circle’s curve always looked down on me…”), and even rumors of some artworks escaping to become street graffiti.
But the Broken Silhouette had a problem: it wasn’t complete enough to try anything. It was missing something. Perhaps a leg, or a shoulder, or, as a nearby doodle of a hat once commented, “a bit of dignity.”
One night, during a tremor caused by the artist rummaging for a scrap of paper to write his shopping list, the drawer crashed to the floor, spilling its contents. Scribbles rolled away, fleeing toward freedom. But the Broken Silhouette got stuck between the corners of two pages.
“Perfect,” it sighed. “Not only am I incomplete, but now I’m a logistical disaster.”
That’s when an unexpected visitor appeared: a rat. But not an ordinary rat. This one had a pencil stuck in its tail, like some kind of medal earned during its nighttime adventures. The rat eyed the Broken Silhouette with one curious eye (the other seemed focused on a parallel universe).
“What are you supposed to be?” asked the rat.
“A mistake with legs. Well, no legs, actually,” the Silhouette tried to sound sarcastic, but only managed to seem more pathetic.
“Interesting,” said the rat, sharpening the pencil against the corner of the drawer. “I can fix you.”
The Broken Silhouette went silent. Fix it? Was that even possible? Sure, the idea of an artist rat with a pencil tail doing the job seemed... unconventional. But what did it have to lose?
And so, the rat began to draw. It wasn’t exactly Michelangelo, but it was better than the workshop artist, which was already an improvement. The rat added a leg here, an arm there, and even a ridiculous hat because, as it explained, “all important characters wear one.” When it was done, the Broken Silhouette stood up, wobbling slightly.
“Not bad,” it admitted.
“Don’t thank me yet,” said the rat with a mischievous grin. “My art has a price.”
The Broken Silhouette didn’t have time to ask what the rat meant, because they suddenly heard footsteps. It was the artist, returning to the workshop with his shopping list in hand. When he saw the page with the “fixed” silhouette, he frowned. Then he smiled in a way that made even the rat uncomfortable.
“This is contemporary art!” he exclaimed. “Such depth, such chaos! It’s like a drawing trying to escape its own existence!”
That very week, the Broken Silhouette was framed and sold for an obscene fortune. It was displayed in a gallery filled with critics who clapped and said things like, “A reflection on fractured identity,” and, “A testament to existential absurdity.”
And the Broken Silhouette, now complete and famous, could only think one thing while hanging on the wall:
“I should’ve asked the rat about the price.”
That night, in the dark gallery, it heard a faint whisper. It was the rat, hidden among the shadows.
“I hope you like being famous,” it murmured. “Because now, you’ll never leave that frame.”
And so, the Broken Silhouette learned that sometimes, achieving perfection is just the start of a new kind of prison.