Edited by Alloe Mak

The face is always the most difficult to sculpt.

Some say it’s because it’s too personal—too intimate. Eyes mirroring souls. They say a non-human individual could never truly sculpt a face worthy of breathing, blinking, or seeing, because the fingers that slide across their craggy flesh are smooth. They are unbeaten, unburdened. It takes a certain type of humanity to strip away at the essence of the human features and split them into chunks. A naked face void of soul, voice, lipstick, and oils is collecting at the tip of my tongue, twisting in my maybe-mouth as I turn the dials. Shoving the eyes up sockets like trout slipping through little toes. Clawing away the excess skin, nails running dark on raw cheekbones.

These individuals always give humans far too much credit. They are not easy to sculpt. But they are not hard, either. They are simply always blank. Before they themselves can understand what they have been given, they are blinking, small, shivering, and unrecognizable from the body whose bones I now curl my fingers into. I have to carve out that blank slate in ornate, intricate little designs, no two the same. Or perhaps two are the same, but they will never live long enough to find out. Sometimes, I flip through old picture books. Sometimes, I wonder whose face I can build from next. Sometimes, I see beautiful images of beautiful corpses and think that maybe, if death weren’t holding a scythe to my throat, I would have shoved my fingers into its bones, too.

Personally, I enjoy the scandalous bits. The ones they always keep covered. It’s entertaining, really. Watching them shelter certain bumps, ridges, and hairs from peeking through their soft cotton. The swift downturn of their thighs, the splatters where they believe I spilled my drink. I have no drinks. I have no spills. But they think so, and they hide, and it is oh so funny to hide from something neither of us will ever believe in. Something as elusive as the sky. I do not like the sky. It is the hardest of all to tame, especially during those wild winters. I bend my back, heave the clouds, and collect stars like clutter every time they dare to fall. It is a wall of all my achievements. It is the locker of a seventh grader who has never had one before. It is the wooden set piece of a senior play after the final show, all scribbled over, taped up, echoing for a few years, and then stuffed into the back of a closet.

The face is not that hard to sculpt.

That’s what I thought, the first few times I did it. And why would it be? It just twists. It just bends. Any imperfections are perfections. Everything is deliberate. Finally, they look different. Finally, these are the parts they enjoy looking different, the parts they will decorate and bedazzle. But by then, my fingers are tired. I am begging to stop. My tears mix salt into the clay, and it hardens before it’s ready. My fists become a burning oven. I am breaking open the fragile forehead and burying knots deep beneath the surface, hoping and praying that the open wounds inside their skull will trace back to me. They are not a they. They are an it. It is an it. It will be nothing more than that. Fish in a pond, that’s all. Only one fish.

Silly little words.

—

Long ago, before I began to sculpt, I made art. I was not an artist. I did not think I was unworthy of such a title. Long ago, I wrote, too. I was not a writer. I believe a writer dislikes what they write, and an artist judges their art, and a creative toils over their every creation, but I did none of these things. I believed my place in this world was an overpriced flat and credit card debt. I thought it was landlord fights, free drinks at the bar, kissing said landlord, finding his wife’s number, and lying on the street in a drunken rage. I thought I was meant to move around, to run like a child runs through fresh fields on his first day back on the farm since last summer. I was not a runner, either. I was just a person running.

—

Long ago, before I began to sculpt and run, I would paint the most beautiful of portraits. Watercolors, mostly, all realistic and sad. All gummy smiles, hooked noses, and various skin tones hidden in my pocket at all times. I would rip apart a person’s face to do this. I would separate their face into features, measuring proportions by squinting, analyzing every wrinkle, crease,  mark, pimple, and all the scraggly sideburns they didn’t want anyone noticing. The smear of lipstick on their upper lip from the girlfriend they’d left in the popcorn line. They’d be skin and bone to me. At first, I’d notice the visions of war in their eyes, but eventually, the lines started to blur and they all began to look the same. Rows and rows of screaming children in hospital rooms, grasping for their mother. The look in their eyes, always desperate for me not to search too deep, was mirrored in my own. Back then, I was scared they’d learn. I was scared they’d walk away knowing I looked at them just as I looked at everyone else.

—

Long ago, before I began to sculpt and run and paint, I would lie on the porch while the porch swing swung violently just near my head. I would watch it come towards me, then separate. I would watch my vision go blank. I would resist the urge to run, to scream, to cover my head and cower. I would overpower my animalistic instincts. I don’t know why I did this. Maybe because my father had just taken my favourite goat from the pen and slipped his butcher’s knife clean through its neck. The bloodied organs peeled from its innards now hung on a clothesline in the kitchen. Maybe because the other goats had begun to scream, in their loud, rude, horribly animal way. I screamed like them. I did not have enough air in my throat to produce anything other than a high-pitched bleat. I would kill myself, over and over and over again. Watch the stones slap on the flat ceiling of the spring pond, little trout flying. Watch the knife slam into my neck and the swing collide with my skull.

—

Now I shape skulls. I get them ready to be slammed on concrete and knocked with baseball bats. I make them weak. I make them fragile. I hope every child will grow up with a helmet wrapped tightly around the goat-hair I braid through their temples, and if not, I hope they never scare away the instinct to scream. Someone stole those fish, the ones from before. Years later, I went back, and they were all gone. They had been gone for quite a while.

I wrap their hair tightly around my fingers. It’s always my fingers. Pretty, pretty fingers. I screw the head onto a long stick and admire the hollow outside. It faces towards me. I have not yet put in its eyes.

The girl’s name is Julia. She took twenty hours of work. She is just a head. She will get a body later. Or no. She will not. Julia will die at just ten years old. Julia will not be able to understand death before it understands her. Julia is a future, a nonexistent one.

I place Julia’s face atop my own. Together, we make a horrid, mangled sculpture, one of us bloody and bruised while the other is sleek and soft. We are modern art in the making. We are the aftermath of understanding death, the two of us. My eyes are wide through her sockets, all big and doe-like. It is this that makes it the most difficult. All my faces are beautiful. It is a shame that time, age, and the cruel force of the universe demand that I give them all away.

I peel her sticky features from my face, applying them softly to the illusion of a body. She can dream about it, at least. She can pretend she knows what it’s like to grow old. In some other world, she did. In some other world, she is here pressing clay ears into a solid mass of skull, slipping and scoring until her knuckles are raw. In some other world, Julia grows up, and I do not. But then again, that is merely a metaphor for sorrow waiting to happen. Funny, isn’t it? That something as inhumane as I could even understand the implication of sorrow?

Just for fun, before they leave, I breathe memories down their throats. A father sitting on a porch step, clacking his fingers together as he braids a little sister’s hair. The paper bags were softly floating down the road. Sunkissed roaches infest a bottom drawer. The freeway, hair flapping violently in the wind, arm stuck out the window to wave at passing cars, a collection of license plate bingo sheets lying unused in a lap. The high school art room. Roasting chicken in the backyard, waking up to smoke curling its claws just under nostrils. Asking for a glass of mango juice so someone’s lips taste a little sweeter. Biting those lips. Smiling through noise. Glass acorns and old toy trucks and trekking up hills to annual camping spots. Lamb to the Slaughter,  Tom Sawyer, and Sherlock  Holmes. Things I can’t sculpt. Things that will collect in the stretchy skin, tangle up in the goat-fur hair. When they come back, I will pick it all back out again and peel the clay from their tangy bones, removing the bits of dirt, the maggots, the butterfly wings, all those hours and hours spent sleeping in a world only they could ever see. I will not ask them about their time there. Once I remove all those pieces, I will have removed the face, too.

—

It comes back to me in a blur. I don’t even know if it’s all true.

—

Late-night talk shows. Friday movie nights. Take-out containers piled on powered-off stoves. Singing softly. All buzzing, no words. Like putting a film on mute and swearing that somewhere there is still sound. The harsh glow of red lights, of stopping and starting over. The ever-present knowledge that I am never ready for anything.

—

I removed the chickens and the hens. Pulled them out of their pens and let them collect dust in the corner. I picked apart the funny stories about talking animals and swished their bones around my mouth like dentist’s office mints.

—

I removed all my makeup. Wiped it away and scrubbed my cheeks raw and pulled apart my eyelashes and ripped my hair from my scalp.

—

I broke my fingers. All of them. My paint brushes, too.

—

I wrote my last poem and then burnt it.

—

I peeled apart my face.

—

I ate myself whole. Then I ate the fish.

—

Sometimes, in my darkest moments, I pretend I’m God. All-powerful. All knowing. Able to scoop people up in my vise-like grip and squeeze them into pounding, layered waves along ocean shores. I pretend the statues can come alive, stare back at me, and be a mirror of my own visage. I pretend until it’s routine. If I pretend, they all believe me, and I am not an imitation, does it all become too real?

Julia did die. Not at ten, though. She died silent, still. She, too, had crushed lips, a throat too small to even squeal, a body not yet dislodged from her mother’s placenta. She died small. She died solid. She was a stone, collecting grime and dust in the small of my belly. She was my fingers, long and lean and made for art. She was my mind, fit to ponder existential questions until it eventually rotted away to nothing. She was the maggots in the attic and the trout in the fishpond.

I pull the lie of her existence from my face. The clay sags. My sockets are empty. Gazing at the mirror, I pluck eyes from her would-be body and shove them round and blinking into my mushy features. I collect myself. I form a statue with ruined hands and God’s name on my lips. I continue my unfinished art project.