Clayman's Terms
FARIA BASHER
With clay the woman makes me and it is the clay by the river that runs behind her house and when she gathers me from the riverside she takes some of me but not all and she uses her hands to make me and as I spin on her wheel I feel her fingers in my eyes and in my nose and in my mouth and in my ears and when she is finished making my head and my body she puts me inside a big oven that is so hot and it is so hot inside I think that the pain will break me in half but it does not and when I wake up from the oven the first time I open my new eyes and the woman says to me hello I’m so glad you’re here. I look around the room and I see plates and cups and bowls and some of them are made from my clay but some are not and some are colorful and some are plain like the color of the earth that the woman uses to make them. The woman says to me I made you because I was lonely. I think about the time when I was clay and I was always alone but I did not need to make a man to be less alone. The woman says I am sick of the men of today so I made you I made my own man and you were tailor-made for me how many women can say something like that. I think did the woman make me or a tailor? The woman says to me say something say something but I do not know how to make noise the way she does with her mouth but still I try and I use my mouth until finally a small noise comes out and the woman says to me oh oh you can talk and she tells me this is my voice and I need to use it to talk to the woman but I am not used to making sound because clay is always quiet. The woman says to me you’re going to make me so happy my beautiful clay man and she comes close to me and she puts both her arms on my shoulders and holds me tight and she smells like the water from the river and she is hot but not too hot like the oven. On the day after the day I open my eyes after the hot oven the woman says to me I need to paint you and I think that she will paint me to be colorful like the bowls and cups and plates in her clay room or the flowers by the river so I follow the woman to the clay room and in a bucket she pours in some paint but the paint is not beautiful colors like her bowls and cups and plates it is only a light brown like the clay that she used to make me and she paints my whole body my face my neck my chest my arms my legs the thing between my legs and everything else and then she uses different colors and smaller brushes to paint my eyes my mouth and my hair and everything. She uses a long time to paint my head and she says it is because she wants to make me beautiful and I think is the woman beautiful and how does a man know what is beautiful and what is not in this world? When the woman is done she says to me you’re perfect and she takes my hand and holds it too tight and we walk to the big oven. No no I say and I also say it hurts and the woman says back to me it will not hurt so bad this time I promise and I believe her I say okay and I let the woman put me back inside the big oven and I wait. The fire starts and I think the pain will be less because the woman said it will be less but there is more pain than the first time and it is hotter than before and with that pain inside the oven I learn how to use my voice and I scream. I scream please please please please please let me out let me out. I let out a lot of noise and from the outside of the oven the woman says to me shh shh stop screaming. I do what the woman tells me to do and I let the heat give me its pain and when it is done and I am cold the woman pulls me out of the oven and stretches her mouth open wide to smile so I can see all her teeth and all of them are brown and she says to me oh you’re beautiful but I do not know if I am really beautiful or if the woman is wrong because she said the big oven will not hurt the second time but she was wrong and there was pain. The woman pulls me and makes me stand in front of a big mirror and the river is a mirror sometimes when the sun shines on it but this one moves less than the river when I look at my face and my body in it. I do not look like the woman but I do not look like the clay by the river either. The woman says I am her man now but I do not feel like a man I only feel like the clay before I was the man. I ask her what makes me a man and not a woman like her. She does not answer my question but she says I’m sorry I lied about the oven and then I ask her what is lied and she says to me it is when someone says the wrong thing but knows it is wrong and I think this was not a good thing to do to me. The woman says to me you’re perfect and I do not know what noise to make but the woman says to me say thank you so I use my voice to say thank you.
This is your home now the woman says as she shows me the house which has two floors and then up the stairs she shows me a bedroom a bathroom a closet and another bedroom and another bedroom. In the closet she puts clothes on me called some pants and a T-shirt. When I stand on the second floor I think to myself that when I was clay I was buried so deep into the earth and now I am so high up as high as only the birds and the squirrels can be.
Every day when the sun takes the place of the moon the woman stops sleeping. Good morning the woman says to me when she stops sleeping and then she puts her mouth on mine and she says this is a kiss but the mouth of the woman does not smell good and every time she puts a kiss on me she says sorry morning breath. Then she cleans herself and changes her clothes and leaves the room and the house to work. She returns when the sun is almost gone and the moon is nearby. I do not sleep and the woman does not teach me how to. I lie in her bed every night next to the woman and look up at the wall at the top of the room but it is dark so it only looks black like the sky outside the house but there are no stars. Just try to rest the woman says but when I was clay the only thing I did was rest. Now I am a man and I do not have to rest anymore.
Can you take care of some of the household chores while I’m at work please says the woman. I say okay and when the woman is at work I clean the food on the dishes that are in the sink and I use the broom to clean the floor. Every day there is a lot of hair from the woman on the floor. She shows me how to put meat and vegetables from the dirt inside of a pot to make dinner for her and I do it every day. The woman is very hungry every day. She is very big like a lot of clay was used to make her. Do you get hungry she says to me one time. I say to her I don’t know. Guess that’s a no says the woman.
Some nights the woman does not sleep like me and she puts the thing between my legs inside the hole in her body and gives me a long kiss and moves around and makes a lot of noise with her voice. I think does every woman have a hole in her or is it just this one. The woman says oh god many times and please please please. I do not know what she is asking for or why she says please to me and I do not know who god is too. I ask her who it is but she tells me to be quiet. Sometimes the woman asks me to move and make noise and I do whatever the woman asks because it makes her happy. It’s important you keep me happy the woman says to me a lot.
The woman says to me I love you you are the best thing that ever happened to me. I do not know what to say so I stay quiet. But the woman says say it back and to make her happy I say it back. I say I love you but I think this could be a lie.
When the woman is working I turn on the television with the remote. I learn the names for colors and shapes and numbers from a cartoon. When I was clay I measured time by the sun and there were only days and nights one after the other but people have different ways to count their time. I learn the names of days and learn that seven make a week and four weeks make a month and there are twelve months in the year.
The woman’s sister comes to the house to visit the woman and meet me. I wonder if I have a sister and think that if I do she is probably still the clay by the river.
The woman’s sister looks like the woman, but her skin is rough and some of her hair is painted white. The hair of the woman is brown but not the same brown that is the color of my clay.
Oh my god what have you done, says the sister. I think to myself does the sister have her own god and does everybody in the world. I thought there was only one.
The woman looks at her sister and scrunches up her face. Don’t start, she says.
This is unnatural this is sick this thing is a freak of nature you need to get rid of him straight away, says the sister.
No, says the woman.
You’re sick. How did you even do it, says the sister.
I’m a good potter, says the woman. I love him, she also says and then she looks at me and smiles.
The woman’s sister leaves in anger and I ask the woman what anger means and I wonder if I ever felt it before. The woman says when something bad is done to you and you want to do something bad in return that’s anger. I think does the woman’s sister want to hurt her and I think about when the woman put me in the kiln the second time and if that was that anger, what I felt afterwards. The woman holds my face in her hands and says I love you you know that.
The woman says I love you a lot but I think that she can lie like she did about the kiln and what if she is lying to me again.
Say it back, won’t you, says the woman.
I love you, I lie.
Do you really mean that, asks the woman.
I am not sure, I say and this is a truth.
There is a book under the television and I open it and look at its pages. I do not understand anything, and it is like when I was clay I did not understand the sounds of the chickadees when they flew above me, but between each other they could understand. The woman comes back to the house and sees me holding the book and asks me do you want to learn how to read and I say yes and the woman teaches me slowly on the weekends when she does not work. I learn all twenty-six of the letters and how I can put them together to make words.
Time passes, and I start to count the days and nights like people. One hundred and fifty-four pass in the woman’s house. This is twenty-two weeks and a few days more than five months. Seven more months and it will be one year that I am in the woman’s house.
I do what the woman tells me to do because I want to make her happy. When she is not happy, sometimes she turns angry and I think she wants to hurt me but she cannot because I did not hurt her.
Some days the woman wakes up in the morning and does not kiss me. When she returns as the moon replaces the sun she is quiet and asks for alone time with her food.
I tell her, You made me to not be alone.
No, she says, I made you to not be lonely.
I continue with my work every day. I wash the dishes in the sink. I sweep the floor and make the bed when she leaves for work. I cook food. Sometimes the woman does not like it or eat it. When I finish my work, I look through the window at the crows flying over the backyard. I watch how they cut through the air.
Two hundred and twenty-six days and nights pass in the woman’s house. I begin to feel something called “boredom.” To feel different, I leave the house when the woman is at work and go on long walks in the forest behind it. This forest used to be my home. The river recognizes me and so do the trees.
I walk by the spot where I used to exist as clay. There is not much here, only soil and dead leaves and a few weeds and sticks. As I look down, I wonder, Will I ever be clay again or can I never be what I was before?
It starts to get cold outside and the sun does not want to stay out. I can feel the cold but it does not hurt me. It hurts the woman, whose blood is hot. At night when she sleeps, she shivers. She cannot touch me because I am cold like the air outside.
I learn that god is a man in the sky that makes wishes called prayers come true. I think of what I should want that god could give me. Should I want what clay wants or what men want?
I am walking by the river on a misty morning when I am frightened by a loud noise. But it is not a noise from a person or the forest. I sense something charging toward me from the back.
It scares me. I try to run, but my foot catches on a tree root. I stumble and fall. My head hits a rock on the ground and I hear a cracking noise, like glass breaking, but soft.
I stand up and look at my attacker. It is an animal, a creature. A dog, and it is big and golden. I saw one like it on the television once. It starts to lick my hand.
“Buddy! Buddy!” yells a voice from behind me.
I turn around. A man is running over to us. His skin is dark brown, like the bark of a pine tree. He sees me with the dog and says, “Hi there, sorry about that. Buddy gets excited around strangers sometimes. You alright?”
“Hi,” I say. This is the first man I’ve ever seen, except for the ones on the television. The dog, Buddy, walks over to him and sniffs his shoes. I reach my hand out to shake the man’s. I saw this on the television too.
The man grabs my hand tightly and shakes it. “Cold hands you got there,” he says. “Oh, your head,” he adds.
I reach up and touch where my head touched the rock. There is a crack.
“I hurt myself,” I say.
“You okay?” the man asks. A moment passes. “Doesn’t seem to be bleeding,” he adds.
“Yes, I think so,” I say. I do not feel different, and the crack does not hurt.
“Alright, well, sorry again. You should patch that up.”
The man smiles at me before he leaves but he does not really look happy. Sometimes the woman smiles at me this way and I do not understand why. How the body can act happy when the mind is not.
When the woman returns home from work that evening, the first thing she notices is the crack.
“Oh no,” she says. She runs a finger across it and sticks it inside me, right through the crack. There is nothing there but air. “How did this happen?” she asks.
I don’t know why I do not tell her the truth. I think the truth will hurt her and then she will hurt me. I cannot feel pain like I did in the kiln again. “I fell in the kitchen,” I say.
“Oh, my poor boy,” she says. She begins to walk from one side of the room to the other. “This is not good, this is not good, this is not good,” she cries over and over.
“It is just a crack,” I say.
“It’s not just a crack!” the woman screams. “If you get water in you, that’s the end of it. And I can’t fill the crack in with clay, or glaze you, or put you back in the kiln again. You’ll fall apart.”
“How can I fix it?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” says the woman.
“I am sorry,” I say. I know she will want me to say this.
The woman begins crying.
“Hold me!” she screams at me. I put my arms around the woman and move gently back and forth, the way the tree branches above me used to, in the wind, when I was only clay.
The woman puts what is called a bandage on my crack. To make sure it does not fall off my head, she uses a special type of glue. “There,” she says once she is finished. “Good as new.”
I still feel like the old me. The bandage seems to make the woman happy, and life between the two of us resumes as it used to be. I clean, I cook, I watch television when I am finished, and I go on walks when I feel boredom.
At night, I do not sleep. Sometimes, I do not lie in bed like I used to. Instead, I stand by the window and look up at the sky of the night. I count the stars as far as I can.
My walks become longer in time. I’m always looking for the man and the dog named Buddy. I wait by my old spot from where the woman gathered my clay to make me, but they never come. I even ask god to make the man revisit the spot but it doesn’t work.
The woman catches me returning from a walk one evening. I find her waiting for me by the back door of the house. She says nothing as I enter, but I feel that there is a lot inside her that she wants to say. “Where were you?” she asks. I think she is angry.
“Outside,” I say.
“Yeah, no shit,” she says. “Outside where? Were you meeting someone?”
“No,” I say. “On a walk.”
“Oh, on a walk, were you?”
“Yes.”
“And how long have you been taking these walks?”
“Seventy four days and nights,” I say.
“Oh, my god,” says the woman. She rubs the sides of her head. She does this every time she gets a headache, or whenever I seem to annoy her. Lately, that has been frequently. “You—” she starts. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“What if someone saw you?” she asks.
“Nobody did,” I reply. I do not want to tell her about the man and Buddy.
“You’re just like the rest of them. Just like the rest of them.” The woman begins to cry. She looks at me like I’ve given her a lot of pain. “Did you hurt yourself on one of these walks?” she asks.
“Yes,” I admit. “Sorry.”
The woman’s eyes, red and watery, open wide. She glares at me. “No, you’re not sorry!”
She uses her hand to hit my cheek. It is a hard hit, and I feel the force of it throughout my head. I feel it in the crack on my forehead. There is some pain, but it is not as bad as the pain from the kiln three hundred days and nights ago. I place my hand on my cheek.
The woman uses both her hands to cover her mouth, like she is surprised. I don’t know why she is surprised, since she is the one who decided to hit me.
“I’m so sorry. My love, I’m so sorry,” she says. She hugs me close and tight, and kisses the cheek she slapped. She kisses it over and over. “It’s okay,” I say. The woman does not say anything. She only hugs me tighter, and cries into my chest.
The crack on my forehead grows in size, and a large chunk of my head breaks off. I take the bandage off and never put it on again. I’m left with a large hole in my head, but it’s alright. Unlike people, I’m empty inside. Nothing can fall out of me.
The woman barely speaks to me anymore. She barely looks at me either. I think she can’t tolerate the hole in my head, its hollowness. I’ve looked in the mirror a few times and seen the hole. I think of the trees in the forest that have holes in their trunks, of how birds make their nests in there. I’d be happy to have a bird’s nest in me. I tell the woman this but she doesn’t laugh.
She begins to spend more time in her pottery studio, long hours that I don’t hear from her. One day, curious, I enter it while she’s working. I hope to have a conversation with her.
“What are you doing here?” she asks.
I take a look at her pottery wheel, which isn’t spinning. A small mound of clay lies on it, a different color from mine. It’s lighter than the clay I’m made of, possibly purer too. Peering closer, I see that the woman is shaping it into a head.
“What’s that?” I ask. But I already know what it is. I can see it in the way the woman becomes protective of it, puts her hands over it like she’s shielding it from me. Still, I ask the question like people do, even when they already have the answer.
“My pottery,” answers the woman. “Can you leave? I’m busy.”
“What are you making?” I ask. I want her, for once, to tell me the truth. “I’m just curious.”
The woman takes her hands off the clay head and sighs.
“You speak so well now,” she observes. “So eloquent.”
“Yes,” I say. “I have been studying, from the television and books.”
“It’s a shame,” she says. “You finally learn the words to explain how you feel, just as you start falling apart.”
When I look into her face, she looks the way she did just before she hit me.
Twenty-seven days and nights pass. Parts of me chip off from the hole in my head. The woman and I stop speaking entirely, but I can tell she is happy. Something good is coming for her.
While she’s at work, I enter her studio.
His face looks like mine, nearly identical, with a few small changes. A smaller nose, a bigger eye. It reminds me of how no two snowflakes can ever be the same, but they can be similar. His body, taller and wider than mine. He looks like how I would look if the woman made me with more clay and attention.
He could be my brother, when the kiln burns life into him. I can tell that the woman is finished making him, and he’s only drying before she puts him in the kiln for the first time. Then there will be two of us in the world.
I wonder if one of us must go, like the sun and the moon cannot live in the sky at the same time.
I see the rain before I hear it. I watch as gray clouds creep closer and closer to the house, ready to water the forest and the house. When I was clay, I welcomed the rain. It washed me clean and gave life to the river.
Before I leave, I pay a visit to the woman’s new clay man. He’s still sleeping, the way I did before the kiln brought me into life. I run a hand over his face, beautiful, still whole and uncracked, unlike mine. Keeping a hand on him, I look toward the kiln, thinking of how the pain of it never truly left me, even after its fire died down. I think of what the woman took from me.
Then, for his sake, for both of us, I press my hand down. I smash his head flat until it is no longer a head. Only clay again.
Thunder rumbles just as I leave the woman’s house for the last time. Slowly, I make my way into the forest. It welcomes me back as if I had never left. Ultimately, all things come from and all things return to the earth. Never clay again, and not fully a man, I walk. I keep walking.
FARIA BASHER splits her life across Bangladesh, the Philippines, the UK, and the USA. She was selected as the Regional Winner (Asia) of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2025, and later served as a reader for the 2026 prize cycle. Her desire to write stems from a lifelong desire to make sense of the human condition, often incorporating elements of the surreal, the macabre, and the just-plain-uncomfortable. Faria is on most social media platforms under the usernames @basherfaria and @fariabasher.
