Inspiration struck with the setting sun, but he waited for the dark of night to steal into his workshop. It had always felt furtive, creating. Stupid to still be worrying about it, maybe, since the kids had long since moved out and the wife had gone down to meet the ferryman ten years ago. Even had there been anyone around to witness his activities, it wasn’t as though there was something wrong with it. If he found it hard to articulate why he needed to be alone and secret, he knew he needed it.
Once an early supper had been eaten and the dishes tidied away, he poured himself a tot of rum, probably more generous than it should have been. He took his drink outside, where he took a seat on the creaky old chair he kept meaning to fix. He shared a contemplative silence with the neighbor’s cat while he waited for the day to die, moving only to take a drink or raise a hand to a pedestrian passing by on the street.
The light grew mellow, the dome above deepening. There were fewer people out on the streets and lights were coming up inside. Fewer people were passing on the street, although all of them greeted him cordially. None of them lingered to chat: no one really knew him anymore. They were kind to him on principle. The smell of woodsmoke on the air intensified, overpowering the dusty dead-leaf scent of autumn and carrying with it hints of hot fat and spices.
He was too distant to make out words, but could hear conversation from all around, from people still lucky enough to have their families. There was a somber tenor to the murmured cadences. No laughter at all, and children who made a ruckus were hushed impatiently. The summer had been too dry, the harvest poor, taxes rising. If winter proved harsh, people were going to start dying.
Only when the sky was black, the stars visible without a moon to challenge them, did he rise. He was by himself by then: the cat had scented dinner in the works as well and gone to look into it. He took his empty cup back in, closing the door but not locking it. The cup, he took to the kitchen and set in the sink optimistically. Then he took it right back out and added another dram to the clay vessel. He took the bottle, too.
Thus equipped, he retired to his workshop in the rear. He plunked the bottle down on his workbench and settled on his rickety stool, each leg a slightly different length. The cup, he set in front of him like it was the medium he meant to work upon. Then he just fiddled absently with a fine brass knobs on his alembic while he tried to plot a course to his idea. Inspiration was a destination: it never came along with instructions how to get there.
Finally, he sucked in a deep breath, noting how it strained his lungs. He’d not got out today to take a walk and he’d promised himself he would. Be nice to promise himself he’d walk twice as far tomorrow, but he already knew that wasn’t happening. He’d be lucky to get to sleep before the birds were singing.
Thought of how miserably tired he was going to be sparked something contrary in him and he reached out purposefully. He’d already decided this was something he meant to do and it would take as long as it would take: no sense bellyaching. From the shelf beside his small workbench, he retrieved one heavy book, then a smaller one. The latter, he sat aside for now, shifting the cup of rum so he could place the larger one foursquare before him on the table.
He took his time paging through it, lingering on every third page while he considered the objects on offering. Each spread was a pair, on the right an image, on the left a description of its properties. Known properties, at any rate. Weren’t many things in this world were willing to be laid bare for no better cause than satisfying human curiosity. Nature liked to keep her secrets, as a rule.
He paused when he reached the image of a fern, rubbing at his chin thoughtfully. Eventually he moved on with a grunt, shaking his head. A nice notion, but this just wasn’t the season for it. Those tetchy rhizomes didn’t like the cold and there’d already been a frost. If he tried to work them anyway, they’d find a way to get back at him.
The next time he paused, it was for a picture of a humble dandelion. He stared at it for a moment, perfectly frozen, like a hunter who had scented his quarry. Then he was thrusting his stool back, in order to paw through the rows and rows of tiny drawers in the hutch above the tabletop. He pulled out handfuls of bitter leaves, impossibly green, a rose so white it glowed in the candlelight, beads of dew clinging to its petals. A lump of fragrant resin, which must be very valuable judging by how carefully he handled it.
One fist plunged into a drawer and came out clutching a rubbery strand of kelp. Its pimpled bladders glistened wetly as he dumped it carelessly on the workbench. From the next drawer, with exquisite care, he pinched between thumb and forefinger a shimmery sheath of opalescent mystery. Something that looked a bit like a dragonfly’s wing, a bit like a mica sheet, except that it wilted limply in his gentle grip in a way neither of those things would.
Items assembled, he rose from his workspace, making for the small kiln against the rear wall. He puttered about with no sense of urgency lighting several briquets that stank unromantically of coal. Once he had them arranged at the bottom of the clay oven, he returned to his stool.
He was occupied for a goodly while dissecting the flora, each in its individual way. The harsh knife-leafed greens, he shredded with his hands, tearing the leaves into bits, the bits into fractions. The rose, he plucked one petal at a time, laying the petals on the tabletop in stacks of five.
The jagged wad of resin received pride of place in the center of the mess taking shape, and he didn’t touch it again. Only brought one hand or the other close to it several times, as if to take reassurance from it or remind himself that it was there.
The kelp, he severed, so each pea-sized puffer stood independent of the next, sadly bereft, prongs of dislocated stem poking out of either hemisphere.
The iridescent lengths of silk, he cut with a knife drawn from a broad, shallow drawer beneath the workbench’s surface. Not the matte, pure black of iron or silver’s starry glisters, this: the knife was made from stone. It was dark green, slick, with the glossy sheen of lard or suet. The knife itself might have been knapped yesterday, so sharp were its cutting edges, but the sinew lashing the blade to the hilt was brown, cracked with age, tangibly ancient.
Its cuts were precise, always a trinity. Now the shimmery things were flat on the table’s wooden surface, you could see there were just two and they were round. He didn’t piece them like slices of a pie but in stripes, as if a clawed paw had slashed at them, except that his motions were painstaking. The substance would tear if he did not cut it cleanly.
He stood throughout this procedure, and only sat after his organic components had been broken down each in its own manner to his satisfaction. He sat, and sighed as he took the weight off his feet. He took an extra minute to finish the rum in his refilled cup and pour himself another dram. He took the time to drink that, too, not holding the liquor in his mouth like he was savoring it but cradling the cup pensively in his hands while he stared into the amber liquid.
After it was gone, he poured another tot, then set the cup aside decisively. Rising from the stool, he went to the wall opposite the kiln, where he took down a handful of jars. He pulled them off the shelf one at a time, handling them cautiously. Each was fragile pottery, handsomely painted, looking as if they could shatter in the grip of clumsy hands.
Each, he set down on the tabletop before retrieving the next, one, two, three. Lined up untidily well back from the edge. The smaller book, he pulled before him now, closing that stuffy tome and pushing it aside.
He returned to the stool, where he placed at center stage a large stone mortar. He began adding items one by one to its rough bowl, shredded organic ephemera first. The lump of resin, he placed within the bowl atop the rest with a degree of ceremony. Seizing up the hefty pestle, he ground once clockwise, starting at twelve. Then he set the small stone club aside.
From the first of the three pottery cannisters, he selected a measure of powder fine as ash, pure white. He added a hearty dose to the mess in the mortar, which was a moldy greenish-brown. Another clockwise stir and he restored the lid before setting it aside. He pulled a second jar toward him, and this powder was purple, brilliant and scintillating. He added two precisely-measured spoonsful to the bowl, then reached for the third without stirring.
From this jar, he retrieved a tiny quantity of pure black substance, grainy as sand.
He was frowning now, canted forward on his rocking stool, brows so deeply furrowed it looked as though he was squeezing the beads of sweat from his own face. The pestle, he struck against the inner face of the bowl before pushing down to center at three and then nine, six and then twelve. Nine and three, twelve and six, then he set the granite oblong aside again.
A sound from beyond his workshop startled him and he glanced over his shoulder automatically. A dog’s barking: nothing to be concerned about. He recognized the voice and its owner was a nervous thing, always ready to raise a fuss about nothing. He turned his eyes back to his work, shaking his head.
His wife had always been so strict about this. ‘Don’t you dare cause trouble for us with your nonsense!’ she had said. ‘Don’t upset things, you’ll bring it right back on us!’
She had been so wise. Wiser than him. He couldn’t leave well enough alone, but he knew where she was coming from. The world had been arranged in the way that it was, and it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t just, but that didn’t mean you could change the rules to suit yourself. If you tried, even if you got away with it, there would be a price eventually.
Pushing these thoughts away from him, he scraped the mortar’s contents into a dish of clay. He clapped a cap on top of it and carried it to the kiln. He scraped the coals out before inserting the pottery ball into the oven.
He sat back while he waited for the brew to cook, resting an elbow on the desk while he sipped at a new cup of rum. She had been right. She had absolutely been right, which was why he’d never once defied her wishes in all the years they were married, even when he was sorely tempted to. The house would always win, and if you seemed to be getting away with cheating the system, you were about to become the rule’s proof.
But he was old now and she was gone. Their children were grown up and barely a part of his life anymore. Their neighbors only cared about him in the most abstract sense, because he was a fellow human being and he had long been one of them. He cared about them in the same way, but unlike them, he had no one else to care about. It was enough.
He waited for the hourglass on the workbench to run out, then flipped it and let it drain again. He drank his rum and then another cup. When the last grain of sand bounced down around the bottom of the upper cone and plummeted toward the lower basin, he stood. He donned a pair of heavy leather mittens first, then went to the kiln and opened the door. He stooped and pulled the clay dish from the oven, holding it cupped on one palm while he pulled the lid off with the other.
When he looked into the basin, he nodded to himself, feeling satisfied by what he had created.
THE END
Note from the author: Back in undergrad I purchased from an art fair a pottery tile. The artist had painted a selection of vegetables arranged in such a way as to resemble a female nude lying on her side, seen from the rear. Beneath this striking image, the words: Reclining Salad. As objets d’art went, I thought that was pretty nifty, and it turned out my parents were taken with it, too.
Ever since, they’ve been bringing back tiles from their travels to add to my collection. The tiles range from abstract images to human figures, all of them necessarily small. Evocative, for such modest works of art. In this series, I’ll be writing a short story for each, my very own Pictures at an Exhibition in miniature.
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