Child of Clay

A collaborative horror tapestry for Earth Day

Image by Keith Long

The ground was fresh-turned and soft in the lavender light of the dying day. The graveyard lay quiet, nothing but the thrumming wings of insects and the distant roil of the sea dared disturb the peace.

I was born with my soul still in the earth. God formed me from dust and mud but left my spirit in the ground. I had the earth in my skin instead.

But the crow, black claws clenched tight around a slick oak branch, heard the sweet song of death. It was a gentle hum, a whispered incantation.

My father was a sailor I never knew. He had the sea in his eyes, but I picture him with freckles like me. Mama says when God made me, He put the dirt in my skin so I'd stay with her on land. I picture Him loading a buckshot full of grit to pepper my arms and cheeks with earth. It worked either way. I grew up in the dirt, never seeing ceiling from sunup to sundown. Cut my teeth on blades of grass. Tested my mettle against the woods.

Spring was on the verge of emerging from the sticks and mud, buds swelling, flowers flaunting their garish colors. Fresh leaves, frilled and furbelowed, flirted with the breeze. The crow hunkered down against so much affronting life.

I stayed out in the quiet coastal forests all day, not a care in the world. The sun knew me from all sides, the sky had counted every hair on my head. I had memorized the highways of bark on the trees, mapped each molehill, heard the secrets of every bird. But it wasn’t enough.

The crow longed for winter when the bones of the earth were laid bare. When nature and death danced on the hoar-frosted wings of snowy angels. Even summer was better, days growing shorter with hardly anyone the wiser. But not spring. Never spring.

I didn’t want to know the forest, I wanted to be part of it. Part of the earth. I yearned for my soul and the dirt yearned for me. We both held a piece of the other. Somewhere below the skin of the earth was a part of me I never knew, a piece I never had, and below my skin was the grit God took from the earth.

A child of not ten years, I began to dig.

The crow shook himself, returned his attention to the song below. The melody was familiar, a lament forged in forgotten ages, a primal moan, a transcendent lullaby for a body put to rest. But the words were ever-changing. A litany of wants and wishes, dreams unfulfilled, sights left unseen. The crow had heard it all before.

I padded on moss feet deep into the wood where the trees gathered to sing. Every day, I dug. Deeper and deeper, clawing scraping, pulling the earth apart until it would let me in. I would reclaim my soul, or the earth would reclaim me. It worked either way.

But there was no time left for such fugitive desires. The world beyond always answered the song with silence. The crow answered with a rusty croak, a sickly echo of the song in the soil. And then he spread his night-dark wings, beating them once, twice, before tucking them in close and diving down into the clod-strewn dirt.

I burrowed, tunneled, dug deeper, down to where topsoil and sod gave way to the densely packed, muddy wet flesh of the forest. I plunged my fingers into the dirt like wriggling worms and raked out my burrow with ten keratin shovels.

The earth swallowed the crow easily. She knew him well, after all. And though he was a creature of the air, he found he never minded her embrace, whether it was of loam or peat, sand or silt.

Weeks leapt by and the hole lengthened into a tunnel, a throat, the day swallowed by the earth's mouth. Sky shrank steadily, a well at my feet, then a platter, a plate, a cup, a teaspoon.

A pinprick.

She was warm, welcoming. The wild of nature, fierce and unforgiving, was for the surface. Here, among the roots and rocks, here was the mother, the giver, the dark breast of the world. The crow slipped through the soil, his soul-sheen easing him down, down, six feet down, to the one whose bones sang that old song of the heart.

Deeper and darker, tall enough to lay and crawl, wide enough to slither on my stomach and turn around. The tunnel was my obsession. The dirt filled in my fingerprints until I lost myself to the task.

“Child of clay,” the crow said, his voice transformed by the mother’s magic.

“Leave your bones and flesh behind.

They were only yours for a time.

I will take you where you’re meant to go.

The quiet of the far below.”

I needed to burrow deeper, dig myself into Mother Earth’s womb, nestle into her cool embrace because somewhere in there was my soul, my essence, and it called to me like a horizon.

I had to get there. I had to find it.

The crow waited for the soul to slip loose of the moldering skin, the shrunken gums, the fetid organs, the effluvia of life. The mourning song ceased. The wistful words fading on the dead one’s worm-chewed tongue. The crow waited. He was very good at waiting. And nestled in this earthen aerie he could outwait even the dead.

When the hazy blanket of summer heat lay across the woods to crawl into the spaces between the green leaves, I dug through salty sweat.

The crow let the ceaseless wanderings of emerald-backed beetles, of inching grubs and ripple-footed millipedes be his serenade. He let the rich tang of frass and castings and rot fill his lungs. He let the soft soul-glow of the dead man light the dark. Oh, yes, he could wait. Until spring mellowed into summer and summer sank into autumn and autumn splintered into winter. Winter. The season of bones. The season of the crow.

When the cold hands of winter pressed the ground stiff and erased the orange fire of fall, I dug with throbbing fingers.

The crow sighed at the thought of it. Safely lodged in the earth’s embrace until the world forgot such foolishness as petals and fronds. But no. There was work to be done. A thousand thousand souls to see to, and this but one. He could tarry no longer.

The tunnel was cool when summer hissed in, it was warm when winter blew through. The work had to go on, and so the work went on. Where some would seek to claw their way out, I clawed my way in.

He readied his feathers for the silky strands of the dead man’s essence. But still the corpse glowed, blue-white in the all-dark. The crow cocked his head. He blinked, pearlescent membrane sliding across his obsidian eye. And still the soul sat, twined around corrupt flesh.

While I was digging in the wet spring, the tunnel collapsed. The earth swallowed, digesting me in darkness.

He had just opened his beak to sing the song of the dead once more, when from between necrosed lips a word wheezed. “Please.” The crow twitched. This was not part of the mourning song. This was not the litany, the lullaby, the moan of life forgetting itself.

I could see nothing. I heard the thick sound of dirt tumbling in, felt my breath get bottled, sound crawling up close to sit in my ears, muffled, quiet. It smelled of my mother's freshly pulled carrots and time spent coaxing dinner from the ground.

I wasn't scared.

I knew I was close.

“Please.” And this time the crow saw the eye of the dead man, miraculous and whole, staring at him through the veil of dirt. A gem shining white and opal in its underground ossuary. “Please. The horizon. This old sailor would see it. One last time.” The crow regarded the eye, let the rusty, salt-rimed words settle. “Please.” The dead man’s lips shuddered and heaved. “The horizon. Bring me the horizon. Sailors aren’t meant to sleep in the ground.”

I kept digging, pulling dirt, burrowing down, toward what called in the dark. When God made me, he left a piece of me here.

The crow regarded the eye, and he was moved by the sailor’s plea, but he couldn’t say quite why. Maybe it was the way he spoke, words still warmed by the flame of life. Maybe it was his smell, the sweet-tar waft of oakum, the tang of the briny sea. Maybe it was the sound of his voice, cracked and broken but resonant still of December squalls and January mists. A man of winter, bones and all.

My fingers bit into the mud until something bit back. Hard and strong as a root, light and thin as a prayer. I coaxed it from the earth's embrace to hold and keep. I didn't need to see it to know, it was a skull. It had called to me. It was the missing part of me.

The crow draped himself in the sailor’s soul, felt his essence ease onto the feathers of his back and run silken over his wings. And then he plucked the eye from the skull with careful claws.

I held what I sought; the earth held me. Only one of us could keep what we wanted. I was born with my soul still in the earth, made from the dirt with grit under my skin.

Up through the earth now. The down below could wait. And they emerged from the ground, a strange rebirth.

For the first time, I wanted out of the earth. I thought of my mother and with the smell of her garden in my nose, and my prize under my arm, I dug upward.

The crow lifted into the air, feathers light despite their extra burden, nacre-bright eye clutched tight. And he found a swift current that lifted them high, high above the trees to where the sea glistened gold in the final throes of the sunset.

The earth pressed in, squeezing me, clutching at my legs. I tasted mud and fear, scraping away at the ceiling of my tunnel, clods of damp earth collapsing in on me, air thin and hot with my own breath.

The crow felt the sailor sigh, felt his soul shiver and shift, felt it come loose from his feathers and drift away on the ocean’s breath. The bright eye winked once as the red sun slipped out of sight and then it was only dust in the wind.

The quicker I tunneled out, the tighter it got. I hadn't realized how deep I had gone, how far I had come, until I tried to go back. I struggled against the dirt hands cupped around my body, trapping me like a firefly. The earth had her prize, she would not give me up so easily.

The crow flapped down to the oak branch, gray now in the gloaming, and all was quiet save for the thrum of insects and the faraway roil of the sea.

When my mother found me, it was by the tips of my fingers growing from the ground. I watched her weep from high above, through the beats of black wings. From the feathers of the crow I saw the sea, then,

Nothing.

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This collaboration is inspired by tapestry poems in which two poets write nine lines each based on a common theme. They then combine them into into a 18-line poem, interweaving their separate threads into a brand new whole.

Keith and I created our stories based on the words burrowing and horizon with the overarching idea of tying our tapestry to the earth and Earth Day. We also decided to keep the mood dark and horror-tinged, the feel of the words more impressionistic and stylized, paying homage to this piece’s roots in poetry.

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If you’d want to check out more from Garen, you can find her other dark fantasy and horror stories here, including the folk horror tale of a werehare, The Angel’s Share. Ready to subscribe? Hit that button!

And as for Keith, he writes whatever is on his mind, which is always fiction and more often than not, the beauty of horror. Subscribe below!