"mix," he instructed.
I looked at the lump. I looked at him. at the lump. at him.
"I beg your pardon?"
sighing deeply and with a slight roll of those vivid eyes, he sat down and pulled me into his lap with him. his arms reached around to rip a small piece off the mass, and he worked it between his fingers, all the while staring pointedly at me.
it was stubborn at first, staunchly maintaining its rigidity, but his hands were relentless. I watched his knuckles turn white with effort, his veins slithered smoothly across trained muscles, and sure enough, the clay began to give. the heat from his skin took the chill off the topmost layer and those determined fingers pushed it further in with steady, measured kneading. before long, the piece had been heated through and ended its struggle. he persisted. not satisfied with just having warmed it, he continued until gave in to him completely, the toughness of the raw material reduced to... well, putty. it flowed silkenly under his touch, welcoming him so blatantly I could see the lines of his fingerprints embossed on the surface.
I don't often feel kinship with inanimate objects, but somehow I'm sure I knew exactly what that clay was going through.
...all the way up to when he gave it to me and wrapped my hands around it by covering them with his. now the damn clay was on its own, because I hadn't the slightest.
"mix," he said again.
under the penetrating eye of the art nazi, I timidly tried to recreate his movements, glancing up at him occasionally to verify that I wasn't making some drastic blunder that would cause the fabric of time to unravel and the world as we know it to cease existing.
I looked at the clay. I looked at him. I looked at my hands, my shoes, my insecurity, I looked up and away.
he never took his eyes off me.
I had likened him to the calm before a storm in the beginning. now the comparison suspended itself thickly in the air around us, saturated it like the humidity before Florida rain. his eyes today were crystal clear, the waves shushed and stilled, their constant bombarding on my skin replaced by the weight of his intent.
I'd spent much of my life greedily keeping myself from other people, and when I met her, Imogene, Imogene, my beginning, my end, I all but threw the gates open, practically kicked the fuckers down, and let the parts of me that had been carefully saved and preserved flood her. it swept her away. a twinge of guilt licked at my insides, maybe she drowned in it. well she was gone now and it was gone now, the reserves emptied, and I was exhausted from expelling all that energy on such a tiny little thing. she was little, too. frail might not be the word I'm looking for but it's the word I'm going to use. sitting in his lap at that exact moment, the lump of clay cooling in my immobile, incompetent hands, something akin to all the secrets I'd been keeping snaked out towards him. it creeped past the gates that once held it as they drooped lamely from broken hinges. right before it reached his sternum, he abruptly stood, and I went flying with all the grace of a politician's smear campaign.
but once I steadied myself, I mustered the courage to look
back into that uncharacteristically calm ocean, and my secrets, at his level, stared him down too.
he never took his eyes off me.
they say you can feel a good strong storm brewing in your bones, but my bones felt like mush. instead the empty rooms of my recovering heart, where Imogene used to hide, echoed with electricity that rumbled in clouds I couldn't see. the walls shook, reminding me needlessly that, pending background check and security deposit, we were open for another tenant. it had taken awhile, the last one had left the place in shambles, but it cleaned up real nice.
the storm was coming. I could almost smell it.
a few blocks away, some two stories and six feet below us, a cheap pine box lay buried, stamped with numbers I couldn't recall.
