Mud, by Rosie Copeland

Various Vessels, by Elias Sime (Ethiopia) contemporary. Photography by Anika Carpenter (New Zealand) 2024

Mud
 
The young man worked from daybreak to sunset, carting mud from the banks of the nearest river two miles away. It was hard work; the mud was heavy, but he carried it cheerfully in buckets, one in each hand and one hanging from either side of a long rod balanced across his neck and shoulders.

He trudged up and down the hills all day long, whistling, in no particular hurry to build his hut. He could sleep out in the open at night next to a fire to keep lions and leopards away, so he got to know the stars well. 

One night, he saw a constellation that had not been there before. Curious, he lay awake all night staring at it.

The next day, he made the long trek to the nearest village to consult a shaman he’d heard about who could speak to the ancestors. He’d carved the constellation on a stick to show her. 

The shaman stooped, and her gnarled hands moved slowly as he handed her the stick. Then she started speaking rapidly to him in an ancient tongue, waving her hands in excitement.

Bewildered, he shook his head. He didn’t understand her. The shaman called to someone outside her hut in her raspy voice.

A young woman, his own age, with two small children in tow, translated for him. “The constellation is a sign that you will meet your beloved soon. She will appear from the mud once you’ve finished preparing a hut for the two of you to live in. You will have a child together, a girl, and you will be united forever.”

The young man made an offering to the ancestors to show his thanks and pressed a coin into the shaman’s wrinkly palm and thanked her profusely, although he knew she didn’t understand him.

Scarcely able to believe his good luck at this auspicious sign from the heavens, the young man increased his efforts to build his hut. He toiled eighteen hours a day, carrying the mud even in the dark, and became skilled at seeing the whispering shadows of animals that might threaten him, but he was not afraid. He carried a stick of fire to ward them off and light his path so he could walk faster and increase his trips to the river.

At last, the hut was ready. The young man, remembering the prophecy from the shaman, set about fashioning a woman out of the remaining mud. Then he waited for the woman to take her first breath. 
But nothing happened.

That night he lay awake listening for the sound of her first inhale, but it never came. The woman remained as silent and still as any hunk of mud he might have plonked on his mud hut.

Many years passed with him sleeping beside her under the stars at night, not wanting to leave her alone. The constellation he’d come to think of as their own was still there, shining as brightly as before. 

Lonely and not willing to give up on his dream of love, he promised her he would come back and made the long trek back to the village. He was middle-aged now, and the shaman was now well into her nineties, bent double with age, her sunken face wrinkled like cracked mud.  She was blind and hard of hearing, but she recognised his voice. She held his face in her hands and traced the lines around his eyes and the furrows in his brow.

Then she spoke to him rapidly in the ancient tongue. This time her grandson translated her instructions. “Take these two ceramic pots, boil water in them, then pour the water from each pot at the same time over your beloved. Then she will come to life.”

The man was doubtful but took the strange pots offered to him with thanks and, as before, made an offering to the ancestors who’d spoken through the shaman. This time, he pressed two coins into her palm. She took his hands and smiled at him with a toothless grin.

When he got back to his hut, he made a fire as instructed and put the two pots on to boil with water he’d collected from the stream earlier that day. When they came to the boil, he held them over his beloved and poured the boiled water poured from their spouts. One had a male organ for a spout, the other a female opening.

Before his eyes, the mud woman hardened, then became solid. Her skin was delicate and smooth and her eyes and mouth moved freely. She could twitch her nose if she wanted to. The man rejoiced. His beloved had become flesh and bone. She was as human as he was.

His dream nearly complete, he held her hands, and they danced around the fire until the embers died out. Instead of sleeping inside the mud hut that night, they lay out under the stars and studied the constellation. They named it Family because right below the original constellation of two there now twinkled a smaller one to complete it.

That night the man slept deeply and dreamed of the child he would fashion from mud with his bare hands, a girl who would bounce in his arms in the morning.

Rosie Copeland

Rosie Copeland is a New Zealand writer and artist. She is currently writing a novel for YA. Rosie completed writing papers at the IIML and belongs to several writing groups. Mayhem, Reading Room, Tarot have published her work, and she has also been a finalist in several poetry and fiction competitions in NZ. She has also poetry published in the USA and several NZ anthologies.

Various Vessels, by Elias Sime (Ethiopia) contemporary. Photography by Anika Carpenter (New Zealand) 2024