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CERAMIC CHILD​

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Difficult to describe, I sat in a theater watching my mother and God sculpt an infant version of myself from a small block of clay. My mother tenderly creating my small baby hands with the smooth edges of her thumbs. God pressing into my head and slipping eyeballs into sockets, placing each of my eyelashes delicately with callused hands.

 

I sat and watched this spectacle a few rows back in the audience. It felt something between a play and a movie, too choreographed for a movie but too surreal for a play.

 

My mother hummed a lullaby softly as she finished the minute curves of my features. Once completed, the baby flushed with color and life. It began moving fingers and toes wiggling them and looking towards my mother with an expression of tenderness.

 

God wore a magnificent armor set of golden fish scales encrusted with emeralds, a helmet on his head with stag antlers almost brushing against the ceiling. He must have been around eight feet tall. The lines in his face deep but black eyes soft and full of His love.

 

He scooped the child in the palm of his hand and got up from His squatted position, knees cracking. My mother closely followed Him out the room, both turning towards me seated in the audience beckoning me to follow.

 

We reached the end of a hallway to a set of stairs leading to an attic trapdoor. An ornament resembling an eyeball suspended by a rusted chain, He pulled on it gently letting in a cold breeze, hairs on my neck standing on its ends.

 

Around us was an unfathomably large field of tall grass, a flawless blue sky over my crown with a trim of purple mountains on the horizon on all sides. My parents stood before the three of us, much younger, my father had a few days of scruff on his face, my mother stood next to him with a face of light makeup and red lipstick, smiling at us.

 

The three of us bowed in unison toward them, He kneeled down stretching his hand out, my mother gingerly picking up the child and cradling him to the crook of her neck. My parents bowed back, turning away and walking back towards our home, I could faintly hear laughing before it was gone with the wind. I turned around and found myself alone, no evidence of a trapdoor or of Him.

 

I looked up to the empty sky and wept, I could no longer feel His love. Now bound to this field like salt to the sea, I cannot find the sun, nor can I find Him.

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