Work Text:
In the background plays a song that no one knows.
Huan Beifong holds a misshapen pot in his hands. Ceramic. Aged and malformed and unevenly glazed. At the bottom it has been potter’s marked. A wobble-formed H, carved there by the end of an old pencil tip, sliding easily through unbaked clay.
His first sculpture. The oldest. The first.
It has no eyes. No face. He was too young then to think of giving it a name, so it doesn’t have that either.
He smashes this one first, throwing it hard against his converted-studio wall. He stops a moment after the shards fall to the ground, but no one comes running. The Beifong estate is enormous. It’s more than likely that no one hears.
Around him stand an army of statues - some paintings - some with faces, some without. Some with eyes. Ones made of glass or stone or metal or else that have been painted on.
A few feet away stands a strange amalgamation of iron and marble. Rock dust, thick around it’s base and piled like snow. The half-made figure of a woman. All sharp angles. All gray and black, with only the slightest hint of spray-painted gold. She (it?) has no face, leaving only uncut rock where one ought to be. He never could find the right features to put there. Never. And so it (she?) has been gathering dust (of the other kind) for a long, long time.
He cannot smash it, not completely, but he does hit hard.
The statue topples, taking a few more down on its way. Another ruckus. Clanging metal and ground-shaking stone, and shattering ceramic and glass. Huan watches as eight statues fall like dominos around him. All but two almost on him. He takes a few steps back.
Behind him looms something large and abstract. A passion piece made years ago. One of his few paintings. Vibrant colors and shapes like eyes. Something only acid could have pulled from him. It isn’t the original. That’s long since been given away to… someone else.
All that remains is a laminated sheet of paper that the upset of the statues has blown part-way aside. When he strikes, his fist goes the whole way through.
And he bruises his knuckles on the thing behind it.
Another painting, this one not so psychedelic and done on a panel of wood. Sturdy but not well-sanded, and with the varnish put on too thick. The half-finished print of an animal. A two-legged frog, caught mid-leap.
Huan has never been a strong man, but now he’s angry enough to take the slab of wood and to break it over one knee.
He throws the pieces to the floor and kicks them away.
One elbow knocks against a tall, tall cylinder of multicolored glass. Layers of pink and purple, white and green. Blue and black and flecked with gold. This one shatters. Thousands of sharp fragments; shining like broken spotlights on the ground.
Another piece. A line of pieces. Six of them. All arranged in a perfectly imperfect row.
The first was an experiment. A creature, an amalgamation of swine and butterfly. Red-yellow wings woven through with ribbons of green. Something not exactly lighter than air. Still it seems to ride on currents, dangling from strings as it does. It moves as if from breeze to gentle breeze. He can’t remember now what the body is made of. Wire probably. Wire covered in the hair of what he would like to tell people is a boar (but really came from his sister’s pot-bellied pig). He has shaped it, given the thing a snout and porcelain tusks. And these: almost-perfectly glazed.
He rips it down; rips it to shreds all too easily with bare and bloodied hands. The hair goes everywhere. The tusks snap and prick at his palms.
And he throws them aside.
Next in the line are a pair of mobiles. A childhood art project made when his mother announced… well.
Beads and paper stars. A constellation. He made them to look like Gemini, to fit together just so. And they almost do. Even after this sum of sixteen years.
He swipes at them and the ancient strings snap all too easily. Bits and pieces scatter across the floor and he crushes them to dust beneath his bare feet.
Another pair. Statues. The Lovers, he thought to call them. The love-locked bodies of a woman and a man. A warrioress in real plated armor and a man dressed in a robe sewn from an old suit, long out-grown. His arms are spindly things (or the illusion thereof), raised to hold the woman high above him.
They snap at the wrists when Huan flings himself at the thing and knocks man and wife to the ground. His leg goes to kick at it and the man’s limbs break at the elbows. He stamps down and crushes the face and, while he’s at it, the woman’s knees.
The last of this little collection is a portrait, and not one of his. A man with dark hair and glasses, his own eyes and light brown skin. At his side, a woman with a severe face and a beauty mark on the one side of her face.
He’s graffitied them. Childishly. In the way of mustaches and devil horns.
He slashes through the picture as best he can with too-human nails. The frame, he throws against the wall.
He kicks and tears at the shreds for the better part of half an hour more.
A decorative lantern is next, hung from the ceiling and casting the room in muted shades of yellow and orange and red. He tears at it. Smashes the bulb in one clenched-tight hand.
He watches as the paper circulates around the room, blown about by the ceiling fan. Floating for once without the aid of a mounting. Without needing a post.
He spins again. Looking from carnage to rubble and finding one piece already damaged there. Another sculpture (what else?). A gargoyle-like thing made from clay rather than stone. It hasn’t been fired yet, remains that dusty brown color of something left unbaked but well dried, though he knows he planned to paint it green.
What fell before has broken it. Caved in the thing’s back and severed neck from head.
It stares up at him with almost pitiable goggle eyes and Huan reaches for it, only to cut himself on the fragmented edge.
Glass dust gathering on it like a layer of hurt.
He hisses, and moves to hurl it at something, anything… but there’s nothing left to destroy. Almost nothing.
The room is one his mother used to dance in. Where she had her classes with all those girls. With… well.
A floor-length mirror still runs along one far wall.
Filthy now and, in places, splattered with paint, but a mirror nonetheless.
And in it are the eyes of his reflection.
A moving painting of a man with stringy hair and a face soaked in sweat. Soaked in tears. And in blood when he goes to wipe them both away.
Is that him? Is that really him?
The painting - reflection - in the mirror has ragged breathing and his chest heaves like a thing possessed. In and miserably out. Something dark and deep and hurt in his lime-green gaze.
He and Huan both raise up bloody, glass-spiked hands and then the picture man shatters into a thousand bits.
And Huan stares down at the shards around him and sees one hundred segmented eyes.
The door comes down. It’s only now that he notices the pounding coming from the other side of the wall.
Small wonder.
His throat burns.