River of Clay

This is a bit of a failed experiment, but you know, training my creativity and all that. 

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Transcript

Today marks another non-event. I suppose I should have expected that. After all, the only excitement I can ever expect to run into is that of a crazed hermit, or, god forbid, an encounter with bandits. Of course, I can’t be so angry at myself for finding such a dull path in life; I meant well for myself by it. After my time on the front, something boring with numbers seemed like just the way to add to my bank account. It was a kindness. And yet now that I’m constantly confronted with that boredom, the reality of it, the pain of it, it all hits differently from how it did in my imagination. 

But today was almost exciting. Almost. I was assigned to this little town on the far edge. Used to go by Redbranch, on account of all the redwoods in the forest just to the east. The town was the usual, modest affair. Folks made their livings providing services to each other, farming, fishing in the river, and doing a bit of woodworking and bootmaking. Best boots in the region, so I was told. A decent place to live. Not a fantastic one, certainly not a home for anyone with ambitions, but a home nonetheless. And then, of course, came the reason for my job. The draft struck the town hard. Nearly all the young men were brought west. And how many returned? Certainly not enough to keep the town’s industries going. The local authorities tried the usual thing, giving cash incentives to get people from the cities in, but the migration was inevitable. The woman and old folk started abandoning the place in droves, fleeing to the eastern cities in hopes they could wash enough dishes to put a roof over their head. And Redbranch died.

It’s an odd feeling, to be sentimental about towns you’ve never been to. A town isn’t a creature. It doesn’t breath, think, or have an opinion on what cheese is best used in stuffed peppers. With the people gone, it is a hollow mess of concrete, steel, and glass. Things with value to construction workers and the army once the tax agent’s gone through and counted them all. Nothing but numbers to move into the coffers, that we say the government will eventually pay back out in efforts to build new towns here, or large construction works in the east. But then the materials all go back into the trenches. And I am here, moving numbers into numbers, numbers that will make the number of dead towns go up. 

It’s all grim, and really, really boring. How much is the steel in a thousand square foot house worth? About fifty. What about the glass in those windows? Two. You write them down in the spreadsheet, move on to the next house. Sometimes a little grasshoppers will jump out of the weeds onto your shoe, or a bird will squawk in your general direction. Those are nice little distractions. They allow you to keep your mind on the little numbers, the things they pay you for. Because if my mind is so crippled by boredom…

It’s illegal. I know it’s illegal. Everyone has family and estate that they can leave property to. The war rages on, grinding the nation to dust, yet they still can’t pass the bloody bill to allow immediate requisitions. And then the bloody money goes back into the machine anyway. Even in its cruelty it is inefficient. So I’m not allowed to enter the houses, least not on the first run. It’s against the law, and against our code. But my eyes wander. They find things which tell me what the town is, something more than bricks and steel. A teddy bear, covered in mold. Used to be beloved by a child, but that child grew up to die with a piece a shrapnel in their eye. A busted shop window. The old lady who ran the dress shop took great pride in arranging the displays which used to sit behind there. A hundred buildings, each with a story as complex as my own. Now only echoes, and, later, numbers.

So, I broke the code today. This is a reminder to myself to of course never mention this fact to anyone else, friend or otherwise, and to burn this journal whenever I get a chance. But I entered one of the houses. It was a squat green little place with four rooms. I’m not sure what attracted me to it in particular. It wasn’t the chipped paint or the crosses outside, no. I just… it just happened to be that house I was standing in front of when the fancy took me, and it just so happened that the door was unlocked. 

Inside was no fancier than outside. The family had, of course, taken most of their small belongings. There were several clean splotches of wall where photos had once hung, and deep scratches were made into the floor where chairs had been scraped at dinner. There were only five rooms, and besides the primary fixtures (toilet, oven, etc.), the only things of importance left were a moldering sofa, a pile of old baseball magazines, and a free standing cabinet. My curiosity getting the better of me, I opened the cabinet’s drawers, expecting nothing.

The top drawer was home, unfortunately, to a nest of spiders. I am no longer afraid of spiders, so I closed the thing in mild disgust before the guys could bite my hand. The second drawer had a pair of scissors covered in splotches of glue, and the third… it had a journal in it. 

Salacious gossip, here I came. Or it could have been a diary where someone just listed the types of food that they ate. I didn’t know. Never wrote anything since the front, and then I never talked about anything which wasn’t how soggy my feet felt, or how badly my head pounded. Not interesting in the slightest. But I pictured other people would have more interesting things to say. That’s how it went in stories, after all.

The thing was very dusty. No, not dusty, a bit earthy, like whoever wrote in it liked to dig around in their garden before they did so. It was odd, given the relatively tidy nature of the house (tidy for a place that’d been abandoned for months, that is). The first few pages were the usual local young girl nonsense. Mark is dating Joan, chemistry class stinks, the writer had cereal for breakfast. They talked about their boring discoveries around town (Mrs. Johnson’s wedding ring, the stairs by the sewers), for pages on pages. I was tempted to just toss it aside and let such thoughtless words get the lack of attention they deserved. Besides, I had a job to do. But it was still light out, I had time, so I kept flipping. Then I found the last entry. Although it’s nonsense, I’ve copied it word for word here.

“I found the village today. I’d been wondering who was taking tomatoes for the past few weeks. Mom keeps blaming me, but I found them. Mrs. Johnson was right. It’s just past the fens. There’s a whole island that they live on, but the trees cover the shoreline so they’re hard to see. They’re there. All of clay. All of clay. No flesh, just clay. But they breath.”

Ramblings of a lunatic, no? There’d been a couple of entries about the war earlier, so I figured the little girl was just suffering from a stress attack. But, again, I’d almost finished my ledger and it was still light out, so I figured, hey, I’d strap on my rain boots and head out to the fens, see if there was anything actually going on with the notes. Nothing. There was one clay statue of a man with a big mustache just on the edge of the river, on a park path that was almost completely covered over in grass. Plaque read out to Lewis Fenley, town founder. Nothing else. I did my least estimates, then got back to my car. 

As you might be able to tell, my disappointment was real. But then again, this is the boring job I signed up for. I’m a glorified corpse picker. But, hey, the checks never bounce.

And again, remember to burn this, self. We’ve just confessed to some crimes. 

(Big ol’ tonal shift to stressed and serious) I am adding this as an addendum. I feel like context has to be here for  me to not think of myself as a crazy person. Scratch the burning. I forgot to do it before, and I feel like I’ll need this now. Even now it’s just a memory, but… but memories were once reality. They must be reinforced so the present does not sag on a poor foundation.

Shortly after leaving Redbranch I transfered over to requisitions, thinking that overseeing the stripping of federally purchased properties would be more exciting than just doing the estimations, simply by virtue of the fact that I’d be with other people. It was too many hours of listening to the radio and the somber echoes of my own thoughts. Not as bad as the front, mind, but then there were many better times in my life that I could compare it to, so I figured I’d make a change. Plus, they kept me at the same rate, so my little nest egg has gotten quite a bit more sizeable. 

I will, however, be taking a vacation. I’m not sure how long at this point. Maybe a couple of months. Or three. I think I need it. I don’t… I don’t like what’s happened. 

There were a few towns we stripped before we got back to Redbranch. Those were fairly uneventful, save for the arguments I had to have with the union. There’s constant reports that the bastards are making gains in the west, so I received directives from home to drive our laborers faster. Of course, men are men, so they would have none of that. There was enough yelling to fill the whole sky. But at the end the government triumphed, as it must, and we made our way back to the uneventful town. We took apart a good third of the downtown before I finally got it in my head to take a day off. And what do you think I did? I went back to that statue at the edge of the park. Wasn’t even recognizable as a park now, but I remembered the general location. Statue was surrounded by the fens, of course, on its own little island. Nothing special. But then I looked to my left.

I can’t believe I was so blind before. Or, well, I can believe it, because I was. Just to the west, past the trees that bordered the fins, was another island. A real small one, no larger than three houses, but it was there. Crazy me, I set out to it, amused and annoyed at myself, but devoured by curiosity all the same. Water got in my boots, I cursed a bit, and that was that. 

The island was exceptionally strange in size and shape. I’m no geologist, but I immediately figured the little thing to be older than the river itself, for once I got a clear picture of it past the trees of the first little isle, I noticed that the thing stuck out of the river like a sore thumb. Its elevation was far past that of the shore, and must have served as a little knoll before the river came to carve out its basin. I noticed no structures on it as I dragged myself to its shoreline, and once again felt disappointed. The thing was simply too small to build a single building on, let alone a whole village. I thought about turning around and returning to camp, but I figured I’d wasted enough time wading over to the dying hill, so, hey, why not.

It took all of a couple of seconds to notice the pillars. There were eighteen of them in total, no taller than two feet, half a foot in width. But they were there, made out of bland clay. A place for children, I figured. And then I walked into the bushy muck of the island’s interior. 

In the middle of the place was a series of four holes, about big enough for a burly man to slip through. Their surfaces were covered in silt and mud, so I figured there was no chance in hell I would risk sliding down into them. But they were there all the same. No animal I knew made burrows of that size, besides perhaps a whole army of meerkats. But then they didn’t live in this climate, and beaver had been hunted to extinction in the area a good five decades ago, so I was forced to conclude that the large gaping holes were nothing more than a phenomenon of weather. Just another strange detail of weird little island that would get local children to think the place was mystical. But, in reality, of course, there was nothing mystical to it. In a couple years time the river would carve away the island, and, for whatever reason, whether it be tree roots or rocks, it had managed to carve the thing out from the underside first. Yes. That was it. That and nothing more.

I was wasting time, and I had a job to get back. Well, not work exactly, but I had some warm towels my now soaked limbs were crooning for back at camp. I’d tortured myself for nothing. That was it. 

I came back to shore at the edge of that same park. It was simply the best spot for it, I felt. Everything else made the journey too long and soggy. And there was another statue. Just beside the first one. They almost looked identical, and I wouldn’t have been freaking out, if not, well, for the fact that the statue hadn’t been there thirty minutes prior. Now that was weird, and more than anything, unsettling. So, of course, I crept closer to drink in its features. It was Lewis Finley, no doubt about it. Same eyes, same build, same over sized mustache. A near exact replica of the statue I’d grown familiar with, except… 

This statue was not terracotta. The rains that rolled in told me that, as they lightly tapped away at the thing’s features. With a couple of minutes the thing was completely soaked, and the clay was once again moldable. I took out my knife. I tapped it against the thing’s arm. I started cutting. Little layers of clay. More clay. Then a red liquid. 

Yeah. And then a red liquid. Needless to say, I freaked out. I ran straight back to camp, the rest of the crew thought I was high. That’s going to be on a report for sure. But the thing… I remember that feeling, after I got through the top layer of clay. Back at the front, I had to help Andrew amputate his finger. It was like that. The flesh. The blood.

In a clay statue. Or not a statue. I don’t know. I don’t want to know. There’s two options. There’s actually men made out of clay there, but with blood for some reason. Or someone stuffing corpses into clay statues. I don’t like either option. It feels insane to me that I’d prefer the first, with all its implications. 

But, yeah… I don’t know. My whole perception of the world was kinda just dropped askew. I… I almost want to go back. But I can’t. I want to know, but I can’t let myself know, and if I… 

I try to imagine what it must be like for the clay men. You live in tunnels just below the river, where the soil matches your skin. Your life is slow. You get up, you eat worms, maybe, you go built little lumpen structures on your little island. You watch the people on the other shore scurry about. If they see you, they think you’re a ghost, or a statue. Something that they need to forget to stay sane. So, they forget, and you’re left alone. And so the war passes, tanks thunder on, and the only reason you know any of this is that one time some guy came around and cut your arm.

Bloody weird universe.