Fiction Park
The clay menagerie
His eyes swept the latch on his bedroom door. It was secure. He was safe. Everything was just perfect. His menagerie would soon come to life with the fresh breath of colours that he would breathe into themHe had never cared much about the dirt underneath his nails. They had always been black and muddy. But for as long as he could remember, they had bothered his mother. A reedy woman with pursed lips, she truly believed that cleanliness was godliness. Immaculate clothes, a tight bun, and trimmed nails were her lifelong traits that had proudly survived the inevitability of aging.
Privately, he had always felt that their house was too clean for human settlement. He often derived pleasure from littering the place simply to maintain some normalcy. Although he never dared to leave the bed unmade, he tilted the pillows at odd angles. He also made sure that there was at least one lint on his crisp white shirt and took special measures to leave a stray lock of hair unattended on his right temple.
It drove his mother crazy.
But perhaps his biggest rebellion against the tyranny of cleanliness was his affinity with clay. He loved it like his blood and bones. He adored its colour and got intoxicated by its smell. His skin ached to feel its smooth, wet texture. His fingers enjoyed kneading it into a dough.
This romance had begun on a glorious winter day nineteen years ago.
His mother had been out all afternoon airing the blankets while he sat on the veranda with an old rag doll for playmate. As he was putting her to sleep, his eye caught a trail of ants. Brimming with curiosity, his eyes followed them into a huge clay vase. Inside, they were vanishing into a mass of gooey black substance. Without a moment of hesitation, he dig his chubby fingers into the mysterious material.
It was pure heaven.
He let the bliss consume him for a few seconds. He squeezed the mud in his fist and let it run through the gaps between his fingers. It was so soft, cool, welcoming…
Oh!
He felt a sharp sting on his finger. A tiny black ant was stuck to his fingertip. Instinctively, he shook his hand in a vigorous attempt to get rid of the miniscule creature clutching his cuticle for dear life. Finally, he succeeded in setting his finger free but ended up toppling the vase in the process.
CRASH!
The deafening sound seemed to freeze the ticking hands of clock into abysmal silence. His mother rushed into the veranda to find her vase in pieces and her baby playing with lumps of mud scattered all over the gleaming marble floor.
The sight made her go comatose with shock. Her lips quivered piteously but her eyes flashed with fire. She spend the rest of the day scrubbing and cleaning. Never did another clay vase make its way into the house again.
He took a deep breath as he stared at his jewel chest on the bedside table. The box contained his clay menagerie, his cherished bundle of lifetime achievements. He fished out little clay figures from inside the box and arranged them on the table. His mother would probably have a heart attack if she saw these objects on the sparkling glass surface. But he could not bring himself to care.
He had to get the job done.
There were exactly a thousand of them. The number was perfect. All those long nights in the rickety garden shed next door had paid off. He rummaged through the depths of his backpack to produce a new packet of water-colour and brushes.
The clock struck midnight. It was his twentieth birthday. It had been twenty years since his father left his mother. It had been twenty years since she developed an obsessive compulsive disorder. It had been twenty years since the great cleanliness monster gobbled them up.
He had never asked her where the money came from. But the brown envelopes on the dining table had been increasing in volume as the years passed.
The arrival of each one was always followed by a thorough cleaning of the house. He remembered that one time when two fat envelopes had arrived and his mother had made him shift the living room furniture and change the wallpapers in an attempt to redecorate the house. By the end of the day, he had been so exhausted tidying up the whole place that he had suffered a severe backache. Throughout the night, his mother had been at his bedside, applying balms and serving hot chocolate, her face a mask of emptiness.
He sighed as if to shake off the memory. His eyes swept the latch on his bedroom door. It was secure. He was safe. Everything was just perfect. His menagerie would soon come to life with the fresh breath of colours that he would breathe into them.
He chose his favourite animal—a mare. She would be white, he decided.
At that moment, the tremors began.
They were gentle at first and he thought that his head was spinning. But then the bed started rocking and the table shook. He suddenly heard his mother shriek.
“It’s an earthquake!”
And then his bookshelf fell.
It was the worst night of his life. Nobody in the neighbourhood dared to go indoors. Finally, in the morning, he mustered some courage and returned to his room. He did not really care about anything else in the house. He was worried for his childhood, his friends, his family, his menagerie, particularly his mare—its oldest member.
Unbeknownst to him, his mother slithered behind him, soft as sunlight, silent as shadow.
His breath caught in his throat the minute he entered the room.
The bedside table was shattered and so was his menagerie. Even the clock on the wall had stopped. The room was engulfed in tomb-like silence. He remained rooted to the spot.
Then for the second time in twelve hours, his mother shrieked.
She stormed past him into the room where shards of glass and clay lay scattered on the parquetted floor. Her legs gave away. She dropped downto her knees, rather unceremoniously. Slowly, she gathered the pieces and arranged them into a smallheap. A splinter of glass sliced her finger. He watched from afar as dark red droplets fell on his mare that had miraculously survived the disaster.
She picked up the lone little thing and stared at it intently for a while. And then without warning, she burst into tears. Her shoulders shook and the room echoed with the sounds of her sobs. With a final wave of her slender arm, she dismantled the neat little pile she had just created.