Due to the vagaries of public transport, I ended up sitting on the DLR for an inordinately long time, on a wet, dark morning, on my way to being horribly late to work.
This is the result.
The Remains of the Clay (600 words)
The rain is still falling. It has soaked through my heavy woollen coat at the shoulders. A good coat, well-greased, but it can’t keep out the rain of this winter.
My father made me take it. “I’m old,” he said, “the rain’s never managed to kill me
yet.” No, it wasn’t the rain, in the end.
He was a good man. Stubborn as a brick, absent-minded, exasperating, but a good man.
His studies were meant for everyone’s good. His clocks and engines, his toys and mechanisms, and finally, his monster. “Think of it!” he said. “My darling girl, think! No more bodies crippled by toil. No more days and nights of brutal labour. And think,” he said, waving his spatula and spattering the walls with wetness, “of what can be achieved if we have no need to work for our mere bread!”
I looked at the cat. She had no need to labour, as she lived well on our leftovers, and caught mice only, it seems, out of habit. I didn’t notice that she’d achieved a great deal, but she seemed happy enough. Humans, on the other hand, are not so simple. Even at fifteen, I knew that much.
Some of it was the winter. A wet, thin harvest. Sickness. Pirate raids along the coast. Young men back from yet another war, too crippled to earn but still hungry. But some of it…some of it was just people.
Father laboured over his beloved creation, and led it out into a dank grey morning with all the pride of a man whose child is learning to walk. Its huge, blocky body and nearly featureless face had some of a child’s solemn concentration, though it was never going to laugh with delight if it triumphed, or weep if it fell. In my own way, I had become strangely fond of the thing. I stood out of the way, as was my habit, and watched, smiling.
“Look!” Father called to the neighbours. “Look, this will free you of all your toil and hardship! Look!”
I don’t know who first cried ‘witchcraft!’ though I know that Spitty Lumer, whose hands I’d been fending off since I was ten, joined in early and loud. Then they closed in.
One of Father’s few friends grabbed me and clapped a hand over my mouth, dragged me out of sight. When it was over, nothing left but my father lying silent, with his eyes staring puzzled up into the rain, surrounded by thick grey shards, he let me go and told me to get away before they thought to look for me. I suppose I should be grateful.
I managed to get to the house before it occurred to them to look there; I collected the cat and some of Father’s books. I didn’t run; I found a cellar to hide in.
I came out at night. Someone’s taken Father’s body, I don’t know where to, and it hardly matters now. The rain hasn’t let up: what’s left of the golem has sunk to thick lumps and smears of clay. I grub it up, cold and gritty-slick in my fingers. Some of Father’s blood is mixed with it. That will help.
It was very easy to smash, for all its size. Father made it gentle, made it to serve these people, this rain-drenched pen of slinking cowards and murderers.
I have enough. I wrap the clay in my skirts, to take back to the cellar where I hide, with my cat, and my candles, and my books. I can make it again.
But Father was good.
I’m not.
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