Page 112 of Apex of the Curve
“It’s not you, babe. It’s them,” I said.
“How can you be so sure?” she asked, rolling the clay flat, turning the great wheel on the slab roller, making adjustments to it to get things the thickness she wanted, all automatically without thinking. I smiled a little to myself. She was a well-oiled machine when she created her things.
“Just going to have to trust me on this one, baby. I think I may have a little clearer perspective,” I told her.
She stopped and stared at me and nodded slowly. “Maybe you’re right,” she said quietly.
“Not always,” I promised her, “but on this one, yeah.”
“God, we citizens are so fucked up,” she said and came over, dropping into a seat around the worktable. Her hands hung limp between her thighs in the hammock made by her clay stained apron.
“Just starting to come around to that fact, huh?” I asked with a grin.
She looked up at me and shook her head and let her breath out of her lungs in a woosh. “They sit there acting like spoiled entitled brats all the while looking at you with disdain like you’re somehow in the wrong and I just don’t understand it.” She stood up forcefully and went back to the slab roller to collect her clay.
“It’s sheer madness,” she muttered. “The whole world’s gone mad.”
“So, fuck ‘em,” I said. “Let ‘em go crazy. Let ‘em try and live up to unattainable expectations, constantly running the fuckin’ rat race tryin’ to get where they’re going without even knowing what the destination actually is.”
She turned around and looked at me and I smiled. “You know better, Leaf. Don’t fall into their fucked-up rat trap.”
She sighed. “Well, I feel like I am stuck in it for as long as it’s going to take me to clean up this damn mess of everything.”
“We’ll get through it,” I promised.
She brought her slab of clay over to the worktable and laid it over one of her wooden forms. She put her hands on her hips and looked at me, an appreciative little smile curving her lips.
“I don’t know what I would do right now without you in my corner, cheering me on.”
“I do,” I said, and she cocked her head.
“Oh, yeah?”
“You’d manage just fine without me, it would take a while, but you’re stronger than you give yourself credit for. You’d get through.”
She came over to me and put her hands on my shoulders, straddling my lap and her lips against mine.
“I’m glad I don’t,” she whispered.
“Don’t what?” I asked softly.
“Have to muddle through without you. I can’t imagine what it’d be like, but I can imagine it would be very uncomfortable and unpleasant.”
“Baby, your whole life is about to change,” I murmured, smiling, looking into those beautiful green eyes of hers.
She smiled back and said, “I like the sound of that.”
* * *
“What you staring at, boy?”I looked down then up from the bales of hay I was stacking in the lower part of the barn, part of getting ready for winter and over to my pops.
“I want Aspen to come live here,” I said without any preamble. “I was thinking about turning the upstairs loft into a sort of studio for her, was thinking about what it would take to run better electricity out here and where to put her kilns and shit to where we could plug ‘em in and they would actually work.”
“Not out here,” my dad said with a dubious laugh. “One malfunction and the whole barn could go up. I think upstairs could work as storage, but as for a studio space?” He looked thoughtful. “Could always build one out back of the house, out near the tree line. One of them she-shed deals. Kilns could go up against the back of the house on the outside, wouldn’t take much to put the plug in out there for ‘em.”
“No complaints?” I asked. “No telling me I’m nuts or that it’s a crazy idea?”
My dad shook his head, and heaved a big sigh, leaning on his pitchfork he’d been using to lay down new straw in the birthing stalls.
