Cotton Candy and Purple Punch

In the words of the old-timey bangle maker, ceramic was pretty shallow work. If you respected yourself, then you made bangles. That was it. That is why come November, when Diwali was done and all the wares spread open like magnolias sprouting up on street corners had to be packed away, the bangle maker decided to take a heavy, saline, somewhat unconfident piss on the ceramics ware. Their goofy and tilted heads soaked wet, they remained still looking for someone to cover them with a tarp, throw a sheet over them, something – but their maker was gone and so they had to remain, silent, seeking, happy.

When the bangle maker was done, he felt a slight heaviness on the underside of his stomach. It felt like his organs had become weighted. He pushed the piss-soaked ceramics down, and as they came tumbling to the ground, he thought, how unimaginative to draw faces on containers, how utterly unimaginative. But the dull throb in his belly got just an inch sharper and so he had to sit down.

There was among them a pen stand that was halfway between a face and a brain. A sharp glass-blue eye was painted just below the wrinkly folds of the forehead, where ideally the brain would be. A brain that had eyes where the brain would be. Pff, thought the bangle maker. He had spent an entire day carefully spacing out where the gold glitter went on the green glass bangles so they would look even. And how luxurious the velvet bangles felt against his hands.

He lifted the brain-face and brought it closer to his face. The pain in his belly was now the shooting kind and he felt himself thinking at least the brain-face had one thing going for it. The glass-blue eyes were a nice colour. He wanted to swim in them. Or dip his cracked toe in, feel how the briny tear would wash away the mud or the dry peeling layers of skin.

Cotton Candy and Purple Punch

It was a nice blue colour. He liked the irises too. They were well-spaced irises and for some reason, they reminded him of a day when the alignment on his bangles was off and he had to undo the whole thing the next day and start all over. That wasn't a good day and these irises had no symmetry. Yet, he liked them.

The bangle maker's insides were on fire. The wrinkles on the brain-face were smooth. They looked like they could be licked. He wanted to lick. He did. The sides of his eyes were filling up with tears and he didn't understand why the damned brain-face looked so lickable and why he couldn't get the weight out of his organs, and the ceramics said, it's okay. They understood what it was like to have no control over things and he said he knew that they would understand. It was just so telling that they would understand.