Adam Fieled (Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA): "The Color of Flame"

Ripping into the innards of the beast who was
our scourge, it stands to reason I should iterate
why I was not in line to save Abby. The tangle
has points of complexity, points of simplicity, too.
Abby’s girls were her family. In Abby’s mind, the fact
that we’d had a physical affair, which led to other
things, earned the sternest disapproval from her
girl-tribe imaginable. Yet Abby’s imagination was
paranoid, and it seems unlikely now they regarded
me as that much of a bete noir for them over anyone
else. The towering rage inside her— that her family
were gone, her paintings unsuccessful, her entire
life reduced to almost-complete material impoverishment—
instinctively lashed out at anything which threatened

her connection to the family left to her. That anything
was me. The truth buzzes around these constituent
elements uncomfortably, itself lashing out at the idea
that any of us Aughts crew knew anything about
anything— yes, I could’ve saved her. If she could
have been led to trust me again, rather than regard
me as a pest seducer, the work could’ve been done.
Of course, it was not. I can horde all the fool’s gold
I want, nothing can be done now. The beast who was
our scourge, as I see it, fed on artists’ bodies & souls,
who had been given too much too fast. We had no
time, in those days, to make sense of anything. We were
who we were, did what we did. We wanted our lives
the color of flame— a color, painters know, which cuts both ways.

© Adam Fieled 2026