Her every thought is disrupted. The garbled shivers of plastic bags stuck in trees, the patter of paws dislodging pebbles, cars passing in lanes not even ten yards in front of her. Her body is stuck to the bench while occasional strands of hair fling in the wind. People walk by, but no one stops. She doesn’t want them to.

         Just four hours before, she was walking along the canal, breathing in air that blossomed inside her lungs. She pointed her toes as she walked, imagining she was prancing across the water. Closing her eyes, she was floating. She could hear birdsong, smell the fragrant dirt, and feel the sun on her eyelids. She was content as she threaded herself through the trees and wrote herself into the soil, because she was connecting on her own terms.

She believed she was molded from clay. The same clay that made the fish in the canal and the flowers in the grass. Without the penetrating voices of people, the folds of her intestines unraveled. The tight knots which sewed themselves in the presence of others dissolved in the solitary gaze of the sun. She knew she was human, but she also believed humans could destroy her. Clay could be disfigured, and in the past, she’d been disfigured many times.

She looked ahead at the towering buildings and stopped walking. She thrust her boots into the mud so that when she went to work, she wouldn’t lose herself in the horde of invading hands, because every time she looked down, she would remember the canal from the mud on her boots. It would help keep her separate, and she was safe so long as she was separate, because humans can’t pick apart what they can’t touch.

When she got to her desk, she gazed blankly at the stacks of paper and the forlorn emails on her computer. Everything was still, and she felt like the only living thing drifting in dead water without a way back. She looked down at the mud on her boots, waiting for it to offer what it could not offer, what she feared but also what she needed.

“Here are the copies you asked for,” a person said, setting them down with a thud. Bits of clay cracked and fragmented, her body crumbling at the imposing human. The person hesitated then moved on, and the woman was relieved there hadn’t been a conversation, but she was also disappointed.

She fingered through the papers. The fibers of the tree were still warm from living in the woods. She observed the pale skin of her thumbs against the crisply cut documents. The sheets of paper did not impose on her body like the skin of other humans. They were of the same clay as her and the trees.

On the way back to her apartment, she stopped at a small sandwich truck like she often did, because she liked how the steel frame of the truck separated her from the man inside.

“The usual?” he asked, and the question hung between them, his acknowledgement of their familiarity warming her cheeks. A fearful, sweet feeling, one that made her want to run and stay at the same time.

“Yes, please,” she said, “and a bottle of water,” she added quickly, thrusting the words between them, fighting to conserve the distance between stranger and friend, between control and vulnerability.

The man thought she was odd and timid, always shifting forward and backward, “like she can’t trust her legs, like they’re tugging her forward, but she’s scared she’ll fall if she steps,” he thought, spreading mayonnaise on the bread. As he handed her the sandwich, his hand grazed hers, and her eyes flashed to his. He realized with surprise it was the first time they’d met eyes, but it was the pulsating fear in hers that gave him pause. Before he could speak, she rushed off, the five dollars she left nearly blowing off the counter in her wake.

She looked down at her hand, terrified the clay would be contorted, deformed, misshapen by his dirty hands, but it was not. She marveled at her hand, the wholeness of it, and sobs broke from her body. It was catharsis, the realization that her hand was still intact, that it was composed of skin and bone.

She stopped to think about the man in the truck, and the more details she imagined, the more real he became, and the more her new faith faltered. If she allowed attachments to form with other humans, if she answered them and expected their answers, met them and let them meet her—would she be lost? Or, the thought rising like an unsteady child—could she be found?

The woman on the bench shudders. “I want to be touched,” she realizes. The thought lands like a leaf on suddenly still waters, and she wants somebody to stop. To shake her by the shoulders and prove to her that she will not fall apart. She is not made of clay, but a woman of skin and bone.

“Touch me, just my hand,” she thinks, letting it twitch imperceptibly toward the people on the sidewalk. Broken clay flashes in her mind, however, and her fingers retract.

“But I want to be touched.”

This time it comes from her heart. The voice that makes the mind shudder and the body yield. The wind stops blowing, the traffic lights stop turning, everything stops to wonder at the sudden ravine of light. Slashing straight through words and thoughts and fears, there—is the beating of a heart. White light. Even the plastic bag is possessed by her conviction, stopping its dance in the wind to watch her get up from the bench.

She knows she must fire the clay and smash it to the ground. She knows she must stagger forward and risk extending her hand. “I will start with the man from the sandwich truck,” she decides.

Bella Capezio is a contributing writer and junior editor for the Nassau Weekly.