Clay Heart, a Christian Tale

The warm scented door is left ajar. With two fingers, push it open, and there sits a stark white statue. Around its indented stomach and its waist, around and around its goose-like neck, from the bottom up, head resting against the knee propped up, is covered in white bandages. Three of its little toes peep out. The intruder steps forward and is confused. Now, what is it? A statue? A doll? Or it would be the most peculiar if perhaps, this thing once alive, having been mummified, fell beyond human recognition. The girl becomes horrified and saddened.

Out of an extremely weird impulse, she hugs it. Her chest is shocked at its coldness. and suddenly the idea of the mummy jumping out and crushing her feels very real. But impossibly, when the wrapped marble arms do touch her, behind her ear she hears a slight hiccup. The arms fall back and someone is sobbing. She opens her eyes and gapes.

A masticated ballerina encircled in white ribbon from up to its neck down to its toes, a Tim Burton corpse, cries into its bandaged hands. The linens burn brightly, but the skin is dull: dirty white, no longer alabaster, the color of the inside of a rotting grave. The mummy, doll, statue, or whoever, faints from its stool. It hits the rotting floorboards with a thunk. Whoever cannot lift itself and keels. The girl falls with the creature and her fingers flutter around helplessly on its sinking frame. Whoever lets out a wail. Its eyes are lined with tiredness, and then Letitia realizes underneath its watered blackness, its mouth. 

Its repulsive mouth was that of a shuddering old man’s dying breath...

“Let me help. Let me help.” The girl caresses its head, but Whoever careens away, wretches itself out of her hands to plant itself back on the stool. The Whoever clings at its body parts, digging its fingernails in, and begins to talk.

“Beautiful! Me! Why, how so?”

Letitia cannot stop staring at its lips. Lips quivering bloodless and shriveled and crusted yellow.

“But not enough to die. And certainly not enough to live.” 

The eyes find Letitia, and Letitia has 

one last look at herself and she’s gone.

Letitia awakes.

The leaves fall and stick on the glass pavements. The dog will soon start barking and the baby birds will be crying. 

White ribbons, linen. For mummification. Injured and hollow screams.Letitia has already forgotten the dream. 

Immediately, she ruffles the bedsheets away from her, yawns, dresses, and goes down for breakfast. Like any day, Letitia screams at her mother’s cooking and yanks and pulls Amille away from her new coat. Her skin is blotching again. Galloway has the treatment, but Letitia detests his place. Someone could catch her in there and laugh. Except he’s useful and though a frightfully odd man, she finds herself often visiting. 

Walking across the cobblestones in London in an oversized trench coat, Letitia hurries her stubby legs into Galaway’s Fitting Potions.

The bells chime, and as the door slides, Letitia whispers, “Stupid title. Fitting Potions. He loses customers because they walk in just to walk out, thinking it’s some sort of hippie, weed-smoking town bar. And right of them too. A recycle-bookstore. Can’t believe-!”

She adjusts her back heel which has slipped. Black leather pumps, 500 pounds. Not enough for the rich skinny girls and their cinched jeans and jellied eel glasses and runway shows, but Letitia is a frugal spender. The girl’s hair, dry and gristly, bite at her neck. She tucks it underneath her back collar and reapplies Marrakesh on her lips, calling out, 

“Old man, the cream for rosacea. It’s itchy, now please.” A voice on her far right heartily replies.

 “Again, Letty? I’ll meet you around the back shelf in a piffy.” 

There is some shuffling, and book closing, and Galloway comes out, wearing a white, woolen chino under a bright, crimson sweater vest. Galloway was not a frightening odd man at all. He was old and frail and full of gladness. A gardener, a bookkeeper, and a person so efficaciously understanding, that his granddaughter could not help but wriggle at the sight of the fellow. The kind eyes. His pitying heart. All of it was meant to mock her, she just knew. Her feet inch a little towards the doorway. Letitia nonchalantly looks past the store owner, eyes the small mantelpiece, crackling in red and orange flames, to the fat Siamese cat sleeping by it.

She repeats, “Galaway, my cream. I need it. I’m in a hurry.” She lied. She had nowhere to go but home.

Galaway smiles, a little less so, and quietly goes over to the drawing cabinets. As he searches, he says, “Your brother Amille was here. Came in here crying, and so has your mother. Your father passed by as well. They are worried for you, my dear.”

Letitia barely lets him finish.

“Yes, and what of it? I’d already apologized. They want me to change, except it’s not just on my end. Mother is overdoing everything and I want simple, but she insists I eat! Amille too daft to make good conversation. And this man supposedly my father works until I sleep and leaves when I wake. And for not much time at all, he walks into this loony bin and visits you?” Letitia stops short and clenches her teeth. She still, after all these years, cared too much. 

Galaway looks down, clasping his hands. He solemnly looks up at her. His gaze is unwavering. He says, “If a man fathers a hundred children and lives many years, so that the days of his years are many, but his soul is not satisfied with life's good things, I say that a stillborn child is better off than he. For it comes in vanity and goes in darkness, and darkness its name is covered. Moreover, it has not seen the sun or known anything, yet it finds rest rather than he..”

Letitia reddens. The weasel somehow knows about her thoughts. Her plans to be beautiful and rich and stunningly wanting nothing from no one, how the faster she gets things, the feelings of loneliness and wrongness aren’t so present. And that she misses her father. 

“Don’t quote the Bible. I hate it.”

Galaway smiles a little. As Letitia is leaving for the door, with the skin cream in her hand her throat pulsing and her eyes stinging, she hears him say, 

“Your father was here briefly last night for you. He is sorry, Letty.”

“Don’t call me Letty.” Letitia walks out. 

~~~

Mr. Galaway Still Runs The Bookshop After Mrs. Galaway. Where They Met

The bookstore is still empty after many hours. People jingle the doorbells, poke their heads in, skip out, or strut in, fooled by the outside sign, desiring a drink, only to feign awkwardness by lingering amongst the bookshelves. Others hastily buy a fifty-cent book for pity’s sake and leave. But like Galaway, the shop is warm and welcomes all. It doesn’t mind. He sits with a steaming cup of chamomile with a hand on his desk. His fingers drum on a thin book. The cover reads Hinds’ Feet On High Places by Hannah Hurnard. He hasn’t opened it yet. 

His son Aquila, Galaway thinks in his cup of tea, has grown remorseful. Greed makes you a poor man and his son has made many mistakes. Aquila’s labor to compensate for the money foolishly spent is not half as difficult as toiling under the loss of a daughter’s love. Indeed, his granddaughter is just like his son and will know soon enough, just like he did. That greed makes you a poor man. 

The Moon Man

Aquila drinks hot water in a cup and relaxes on a bench outside his workplace. He is reading in the bitter cold and with the moon whom he calls Lady. She shines her blue light on his torn pages. Aquila’s only solace is the bookshop and the midnight moon. Here, he does not have to be anyone or anything for the world. His lapels hang loosely, and the man named Aquila feels like a boy again. He sits with his feet crisscrossed on the narrow bench and his back hunched over, an uneaten apple on his left. Between the living of the day and the dead of the night, the moon makes its appearance. She is there as his only friend, there to talk and explain himself. He sings songs to her, dances around the lampstands, jumps over bushes, yodels, and is for a moment, no one. Outside here, he is free: from guilt, responsibility, memory, and faces. He wishes to live in this moment, to be liberated, and to imagine stories forever. And yet, he greatly asks the moon if he could be a better man. To have the strength to return home and try reality again. He is trying to find the balance in that, that inner contentment and self-forgetfulness which he sometimes can feel and taste, but it blows away like the wind hitting his green-rimmed glasses. Although a strong businessman, Aquila is beginning to become very much like his father, though he doesn’t know it. He could be the next Galaway thinker, even a religious man. But the 34-year-old boy howls instead. 

~~~

When Letitia gets home and goes to her room, there is a duplicate of the skin cream on her cushion and a letter. Letitia sees it and doesn’t read it. Her unmet cries to an exhausted mother, a needy brother, and a poor working father, made her hate them. She ignores the letters and refuses the cream her father gets at night from Galaway. 

At home, when day befalls tonight, she shrugs into her two-set silk pajamas, feeling naked and free. 

“Old man doesn’t know what he’s saying. He’s a prune and I won’t stand for it,”  Letitia mumbles, slips into her mink covers, huffs, and falls asleep. 

White ribbons, linen. For mummification. Eyes that beg to eat.

It was not a pounding in her head, but a buzz. If a buzz could clatter and make noise, could twist in and shatter, to burst and give torrent, the buzz grew rambunctiously louder and louder, flooding everything, causing everything to tear itself apart, inside her soul.

 Letitia groans awake, bleary-eyed. She gets on her elbows and coughs. Letitia is distracted by how thirsty she is. Her mouth feels incredibly parched. Then suddenly feeling sick, she turns onto her pillow and spits something foul. The acrid taste is absurdly familiar, like crayons. But girls do not eat crayons at age fourteen. Letitia tries to feel around her mouth, but she can’t. Her tongue is missing.

Breathless, Letitia gets up from the bed and goes to the bathroom. She turns the bath and shower faucets and steadies herself on the sink counter as the water pours out. When the water faucet sputters and then steadies to a flow, she leans over and drinks in large gulps and swallows. Like an abusively ridden horse, she drinks, but the thirst doesn’t abate; she is left frightened and wet. 

The hallway echoes as she stumbles the floors. She leans against the walls until she gets to the kitchen. The night is still young. The moon outside is iridescent. She yanks open the kitchen cabinet and brings to the table arms full of glassware. Forgetting the glasses, she downs one pitcher of water and then two funnels the rest of it down her throat. She crunches on ice from the mini freezer. She goes to the overflowed bathtub a second time before circling back. She tries getting drunk. But the shot glasses of vodka were the last resort. The last cup rammed down, she surveys the total wreckage. Five flask bottles. Ice cubes are scattered on the floor. Eight plastic milk jugs. And a carton of orange juice was a big mistake. She was an accursed Tantalus, an immortal going senseless from thirst but never being allowed to die. Isn’t there a limit to how much her liver can take? 

Letitia’s foot slips in the spilled water and she lands painfully on her tailbone. Dry sobs and hiccups. Her hand rises to get something wet off her face, but instead, the hand comes away with more of the substance. Absurd, she observes her hand.

The hand was melting. Like a piece of heated pottery, like a soft mud cake. She clamps her hands together and two fingers break off and fall to the floor in wet, orange, and brown clumps. She is out of words. No words do come to mind when your fingers fall off. Letitia blankly acquires a rolling bottle of chardonnay on the floor and walks back to her bedroom. She goes to her pillow where her tongue fell: brown and misshapen. She doesn’t touch it.

Next to her bed is the mirror. When Letitia appears in front of it, she wretches open her button-collared pajama shirt with one hand. She screams and drops the wine bottle and slips down her pants. Peering down, Letitia Backus, from the inside out, saw that her body had turned into clay. 

~~~

Letitia was shriveling in size, like salt monsters were gulping up all her insides. She felt trapped in her despair without a single tear to show it. And that is when she knew Galaway was right since the beginning of yesterday’s evening. She would go, begging him for help. In her night clothes, Letitia storms out into the early, cold morning, walks down the cobbled streets of London, and knocks at the door of Galaway’s Fitting Potions once more. 

Galaway creaks open the CLOSED sign door, sees the girl’s shrunken face, and ushers her inside immediately. He leads Letitia to his study chair, and she plops onto the cushion,  his hands gripping hers. Cracks are forming in her neck and wrists, dust whirling and settling like powder around Letitia and she huddles closer to Galaway, trembling. Letitia doesn’t speak. She looks down at Galloway’s hands, praying, but if she had looked up, she would have been struck by the intense, powerful emotions taking over the old fellow

Galaway was at first altogether unsurprised. He guided Aquila when he had shown mild symptoms, and now it is Letitia who is experiencing the same when his boy stormed in here. But he is desperate to save her heart, because any minute, she could become a broken, lifeless statue. Her case is the worst that he has ever seen. Galaway talks in sharp, hurried speech. 

“My dear. You have a most extreme case of clay heart. You must follow exactly what I say, do you understand?” Galaway yelps when Letitia opens her mouth wide and slaps his head. 

“Why, you can’t speak! My poor lady, your tongue has gone first! I assumed that mostly many would recognize the pain in their hearts for turning so bad. For this, we must-” He hurries to lift her to her feet, but is forced to have her sit down again when she bends over and gags.

 “Water..you..no..?” Her tongue still absent, Galaway pales at her raspy breathing.

“Oh, my poor dear. Come with me. Come with me this way. Slowly and quickly now.”

 Supporting her, Galaway leads her to the backdoor outside to a romantic fairy garden with lavender, cherries, and more, which the two hardly take notice of. Galaway stops near a cherubim fountain, takes a hose off its reel, props it in her mouth like a thermometer, and turns on the faucet. The water’s flowing sensation lulls her to a deadened state. She is convinced that her body has turned into an infinitely dry oasis. 

After she stands still like a fish on a hook for around 10 minutes, Galaway pats the girl in relief and chuckles nervously. Then he grows quite serious and proceeds to explain. 

Galaway speaks, “Why, I am afraid if you had arrived any less sooner, you would have been beyond my rescue! Now listen very carefully, dear. You have Clay Heart. You get this when you are so selfish and self-absorbed out of your mind, that your heart hardens, as that is what lost, terrible thoughts do to all of us. Though for most of us, we do not know or feel it quite really. But when the heart only cares for wanting and having, there are physical effects in the rarest cases. The heart’s disease can spread out to the rest of the body. Now, to combat these effects, true repentance in your heart must take place. Only then can your body soften into flesh. And I believe you know exactly what I mean.” He imploringly looks at her. She stares back, solemn.

“If you cannot, I fear you will be only dirty clay mounds and ashes before the next hour sounds. And so I must have you repeat and confess these three words. I am blessed. I am blessed. Say this, believe this, and the thirst will stop and so will the fear.”

Letitia felt nothing. She merely nodded and obeyed. 

I am blessed I am blessed. Have me be content. Oh Lord, have me be content. I am sorry. I am blessed. I am blessed. For Amile, my gentle mother, my beloved father. I am sorry. I am so sorry.

Suddenly, she is extremely embarrassed. So bitterly ashamed of herself, Letitia began to cry. 

Cried, cried, and cried. Crying fountains, waterfalls, and floods, her tears pervading the garden, the place drowning itself into a lagoon. It spreads near the borders of the bookshelf, then relapses back into the pool.

When the tears finally drip to a stop, Letitia gags and takes the hose out of her mouth. After a few coughs and tear wipes, she exclaims and presses her fingers hard into her right cheek. It comes away smooth. 

Galaway beams. He breaks into song. “Now, it seems that the spell has indeed worked itself into your heart! Now live! Live what I have said for you to do, and you will not have Clay Heart, not ever again.”

Letitia whispers, “Galaway, I am sorry.”

Galaway looks at her kindly. “I forgive you, child. And your suffering, though it was needed, is now over and done with.”

Letitia falls silent. She observes the flooded, ruined garden. She had so many things she needed to do. But first, she wanted her mother’s hot brisket and cocoa. She would eat her entire fill, praise, and thank her Mama every day. She thought of Amille, how she would pick him up, go to the sofa, and tell him stories. And most importantly, she would wait for Papa to return home, as she would stay awake until midnight to say hello. Letitia looks at her grandfather.

“Galaway, your beautiful garden. I am sorry. ”

“Oh no, believe me, my dear. The garden needed some fresh watering anyway. Now, let’s get you started home. And bring a good book from the shop with you as I see that you won’t be resting easily tonight with all your excited thoughts.”

 Galaway patting her smartly on the head, both retreat quietly back inside, safe and dutifully inspired. 

Lady and Man

The moon will find to her disappointment, that her friend no longer appears outside as much, for the man is often inside the home with his family, the windows frequently lit inside, and with the sound of chinking glasses and noisy laughter, she feels left alone. But every once in a while, the man comes outside silently with a book, and reads below the moon, or dances in the streets with the Lady as it effervescently smiles back at him.

-THE END-

Acknowledgements— I give my thanks to myself, for writing this in a cold, refrigerated dark room without a heater and with frozen toes and fingers. Praise the Lord. He is faithful.