Silvia Suseno

Clay

My mother is losing density. The honeycomb that holds her together on the inside is becoming little more than a thin calcium web. On the surface, she is held together by skin freckled with age, soft like sleep, but she’s hollowing out. In effect, she is disappearing before my very eyes.

Left out in the open, clay quickly turns leather-hard. Still damp but keeps its shape when handled—at the same time, vulnerable to the glinting edge of tools, to be trimmed, gouged, or sliced. Out even longer, clay creeps towards bone-dry, little water in the body, the color lightened, the surface cool to the touch. This is when the clay is at its most brittle.

III

She tells me about her diagnosis as we wait in a polyclinic near our flat. At first, she frames it simply as somewhat concerning weight loss, showing me a paper that declares her a meager thirty-eight kilograms. These kilos sit in the hard plastic chair next to me, unperturbed. Only when I prod her further does she admits osteoporosis, but in a loose, offhanded way that makes me wonder if there is another, different diagnosis that she is hiding from me, like so many other things that she has hidden from me, or like the things she has told me to hide from others.

In a process called water-smoking, bone-dry clay is put into the pre-heating kiln to fully dry out. The kiln is called candling. In the bisque fire that follows, the clay turns into ceramic. Then, the ceramic body is dipped in or painted with glaze and put back into the kiln. The fire melts the glaze into liquid glass, fusing to the ceramic surface and hardening, returning solidity back to what was once just mud. Body turned vessel, a hollow heavied for holding.

I believe that all my mother’s untold things could make up for the weight that her body lacks. They lay inside the cavity of her clavicle, a lump crouched in the back of her throat, quiet and still, thick as mucus. Things we do not talk about: how I didn’t drink water last night before I went to bed, how she met my father some, I don’t know, thirty years ago, how I let a place called The Devil’s Scribe run through my head with my seventh and eighth piercings, how she found my grandfather on his kitchen floor, how I hid clattering soju bottles at the back of my closet, how she might long and long for different children, how I grit my teeth and held myself back from jumping, how I was once lost and scared in Paris on a bitterly cold May night, how I keep moving, how she keeps moving. In the end all these untold things might even be heavier than her, gathering as her body dissolves into the atmosphere.

One day my mother will fully disappear and leave only her heavy secrets draped around her skeleton. In anticipation of this, I fashion a mother for myself out of clay. I sculpt a body for her that is slight but not flimsy, big eyes, bird-like. I carve her mouth open. I shape her with open palms, making her hands out of my own. When I am done, I cover her with a thin plastic sheet. Its underside waters as the clay exhales, condenses the air. In the dust-quiet studio, my mother made of clay slowly turns leather-hard, then bone-dry, lying in wait. The day that my mother must be cremated, she will go into the kiln to be reborn in the fire, and through the bisque and the glaze become ceramic, solid and dense, with no complexities, just the firmness of clay, and glaze, and clay, and glaze.