Clay Gremlins (Fiction)

***

All her gremlins have names. They are so ugly, some of them, with mean little faces and fangs and pokey tails and off-kilter wings. But they all share a part of her chaos, each imbued with some form of her haphazard energy. Sculpting the little devils out of clay keeps her hands busy and her mind quiet. The gremlins absorb some of the wildness inside and then burn it up in the kiln. Some explode. The ones that don’t, bleach. If they make it out alive, she paints in their details. Colour always comes last.

***

She met her partner five years ago in a ceramics class. Neither had been sculpting what they were supposed to: a bowl. She was creating gremlins, and he was making a lopsided, terrifically oversized jug. Like her, he was too much to contain. Unlike her, he had not been raised in a chocolate box. No one had read Oh the Places You’ll Go to him before bed or helped him make skeleton Halloween costumes. He’d never been forced to play piano or go swimming, because he had never been forced to do anything. His parents had never dreamed for him, never fought for him, and he was chaos because he’d raised himself that way.

He commented that one of her gremlins looked like Gollum, and she had taken offense, because although it may have been a true enough statement, in her mind their essence shared no overlap. This gremlin, who had come to an early end in the kiln, had been the embodiment of her impatience. Its face was wrinkled and screwed as if the pressure of waiting had caused the creature to age too quickly.

She hadn’t been sad when Impatience exploded. The poor thing needed release. Its demise represented an end to waiting on anything ever again. When she’d told her future partner this, he’d understood.

“Death is the only way out of waiting,” he’d said, deadpan.

“That’s sad,” she replied. “But likely true. We’re all just waiting.”

“For peace,” he agreed. “And for a time when we won’t be waiting anymore.”

They shared a quiet moment of agreement before falling in love.

***

Half a decade later, she cannot sleep. Her eyes travel around the lowlight, scanning past the empty side of the bed, over her never-put-away breakfast tray, to a cluttered shelf in the far corner where a gremlin called Melancholy sits beside a heap of old books. Oh the Places You’ll Go leans over him. She hasn’t read this in years, didn’t even know it was there.

It occurs to her that empty apartments do this. Things will just be around, out in the open, things you never noticed when there was another person around. But when they’re gone, those things reappear. There are probably fifty gremlins in her room, but if you’d have asked her to give an approximate count, she’d have said “about ten.”

There are so many books it’s suffocating. Many of them aren’t hers, they were left behind in his careless packing. And there are so many art supplies. So many unused. So many ideas that it’s overwhelming, so many half-started projects and quarter-started dreams.

She gets up, goes to Melancholy, relieves him of the weight of Oh the Places You’ll Go. It’s not a heavy book, but Melancholy is a small gremlin. He doesn’t need anything else on his shoulders. She lets the book fall open to her least favourite page: the drawing of The Waiting Place. A weirdish wild space. A most useless place. She looks around her apartment and cannot help but see the similarities.

She decides at that moment that she is done. The clutter must go. No more piles of books. No more art supplies. No more gremlins.

She rummages in the recycling for a cardboard box, finds a big one, reshapes and tapes it, then starts filling it with gremlins. Melancholy’s first. The little sucker screams as she throws him inside. Then there’s Sadness, Apathy, and Gloom. Gloom puts up a particular fight as she shoves him in the box. He’s not screaming—it’s worse: he’s weeping. A quiet, pitiful display. She tells him she won’t be manipulated, that life in a box won’t be any different from life amidst her clutter—for him, that is. For her, a decluttered apartment will be the start of her journey towards un-chaos, towards a place of no waiting, no weirdish wildness.

She shoves Anxiety in the box, then Jitters, then Panic. In goes Claustrophobia, Fear, Anguish. and Improbability. She remembers the day she made Improbability. It was around the time that Impatience blew up in the kiln. She’d been told by an art lecturer that her dreams were impractical, that she ought to have a plan B, that art would likely not be her career. Improbability’s face is on the cusp of cute, which was accidental: he was supposed to be just as ugly as the rest of them. But he’s not ugly. He’s not even mischievous. Improbability is pure. Still, into the box he goes. He doesn’t put up a fight, no passive aggression, no weeping, no sorry display. Improbability accepted his fate a long time ago.

The box is getting full, but there’s room for a few final things on top, things to put away and usher in her streamlined, unchaotic life. She adds a couple more books, thin ones, so they won’t damage the gremlins’ wings. Then come her glasses (extreme, but this will force her to finally use those contact lenses), juggling beanbags (a useless hobby), a canvas she swore she would finish last year (she hasn’t come close), and lastly, for the symbolism of it all, a necklace he’d given her. She closes the box. On top, she draws a rage-filled face: beady eyes, pointy ears, fanged mouth contorted in a downwards D. It looks like a gremlin. Disturbing, as she didn’t mean to draw one. They escape her fingertips no matter what. Without pausing to think, she writes, “I am chaos, open at your own risk,” then heaves the box down to the basement.

***

At work, she cannot focus on emails. She works for a heart disease charity, which should be fulfilling because she’s helping people, but it’s a job of admin, constant emails, and tiptoeing in an office where she stares at nothing but a gray wall. Her contacts are itchy. She wants to doodle or write that melody that’s been stuck in her head or design the new layout of her soon-to-be organised apartment. More than anything, she wants to be back in her studio moulding all these urges away, losing her thoughts as well as her hands in the clay.  

She can see her next gremlin so clearly. He’s already alive in her mind, creating himself, whether she wants him there or not. His name is Waiting, and he’s an ugly little bastard, far worse than Gloom, not at all cute like Improbability. Twins with Impatience, Waiting is the evil twin who long outlived his sibling: not mischievous, not passive aggressive, but actually wicked. There’s something repulsive in the way he looks at you, eyes symmetrically forward in an impossible way, not focused on anything, lips turned slightly upwards, as if revelling in the not looking. His body is plain, no wings, skin smooth and uninteresting, no pockmarks, no freckles. He’s in stasis, frozen in a state of empty boredom, and yet he doesn’t care, not like Impatience would have. He’s content in his inaction, in his failures.

Maybe she should make him a reality. Just one more gremlin, and it’ll be out of her system. Maybe then she’ll finally, officially be done.

But after Waiting comes Yearning.

She should have known: Gremlin sculpting is always a slippery slope. After one comes another and then some more, all interconnected, breeding like the little demons they are. She had to make Yearning; she couldn’t stand the knot in her stomach every time she came home to nobody. If a stranger were to look at her life, they might think having nobody was an improvement, a chaos reduction of at least fifty percent. Nobody means less mess, less drinking, fewer cryptic conversations, fewer spur of the moment outbursts—but also, less light.

She must make Yearning, and then she’ll be done. Absolutely, completely, without a doubt, truly finished.

Yearning is a sister to Gloom, but a little thinner, a little less meaty, less sure in her misery. Unable to hold herself up. She is slumping, a slight hunchback. She isn’t pure like Improbability, but she isn’t wicked, either. She feels sorry for herself, and that can be annoying, but it’s not deliberate. Yearning doesn’t beg for your pity; she just quietly slouches. Yearning was made out of soft, overly wet clay, and drooped even further in the kiln. When she came out, she looked like she had melted under her own weight. She won’t have Yearning and Waiting adding to the mess, so into the basement box they go.

A month passes, then two. At first, all the gremlins are silent. She allows herself to believe that they’ll stay quiet, and that her contacts are not itchy, and that she does not miss the beady sets of eyes that used to follow her. Her apartment is spotless and organised. No longer any hints of the weirdish, wild space it once was. It is a focused space, and that space is focused on un-chaos. She allows herself to believe that peace has descended. A sunshineless-sort-of-peace, but peace nonetheless.

It’s not long before her contacts start to itch, and before she can hear Yearning’s plaintive cries, and Melancholy’s pitiful groans, and Anguish’s nails-on-a-chalkboard wails. No matter how loud the TV, the shower, or her singing, she cannot drown out the noise. She can hear them while she’s sleeping. She can hear them at work. She can hear them while she’s organising, or driving, or reading—barely reading, because they’re so loud. She considers taking the gremlins outside, digging a hole, and burying them under layers of dirt, but she cannot bring herself to.

For a time, it is terrible. Whimpers, moans, tantrums, and wails. The more she shuts them out, the more they cry. Then one night, she wakes to the soft sounds of her purest gremlin. It seems Improbability hasn’t accepted his fate, after all.

He only whispers. He talks in gentle tones. And she decides to listen.

***

She goes down to the basement, finds the box with “I am chaos, open at your own risk” scrawled upon it. She opens it, and there they all are, staring back at her. Melancholy. Gloom. Waiting. Yearning. Anxiety. Jitters. Panic. Claustrophobia. Fear. Anguish. And on and on. She created them with so much precision, her hands sculpting their features carefully. It strikes her how beautiful they are in their ugliness, scrunched faces and all. Even Waiting, who is perhaps still just as wicked.

She considers taking out Improbability. He’s whispering gently, and although she cannot understand his exact words, she feels the sentiment behind them. She nods in sympathy and lingers, allowing him to take up a little of her time, a little of her space.

But he is not the gremlin she needs, the one she must learn to live with. She closes the box, telling the others that she will check on them again soon. She stares at her drawing again, at the face that was never supposed to be a gremlin, and knows that she is not done yet. There’s still at least one more gremlin to make.

She sculpts Chaos to match his likeness, a face bursting with energy and life. She goes at it slowly, giving his mouth fangs, making it neither frightening nor calm. She gives him large, strong wings, sharp claws, a long tail, and enormous feet for stomping. He survives the kiln.

She paints him yellow, and knows his home is not the box. She sets him down in the centre of her shelf. The other gremlins sleep down below, but Chaos remains in her home. Disturbing her peace, but bringing with him light.

EJ Hyndman is a writer and veil poi artist from the UK. After a decade confined by chronic illness, she’s now in recovery, exploring the world and writing fiction. She loves circus arts, movement and storytelling in all its forms. Her work can be found in FLARE magazine, The Orange Rose, and Let Me Tell You a Story on Substack. You can find her on instagram @emilyhyndman.