She’d stopped believing in love but not art, and joined a pottery class on their twenty-first anniversary, first it was veiny hearts, then enormous sculpted feet, and finally penises using local music students from the university as models, all accepted mores in the fine arts, and in her decades-long marriage.
The penises were crooked, long, bald, Asian and Black and one was a hairy vagina of Daisy, who worked in the rented space next to her. Dot was sick with guilt over penises that lined the windowsills, the hallway to hallway to the guest bathroom like flags at Disney.
She took to carrying one under her skirt, no easy task, since the ceramic took hours to warm against her thighs, stretched her lace undies beyond belief but made her feel like a rebel, living outside the lines of social construct, who needs love anyway, she’d proclaim to Daisy and fire the brick kiln, that is, until a man answered her online ad for a model, and in their first conversation he admitted to being in a loveless, sexless marriage and said there’s no shame in seeking what you’ve lost, and could she either sculpt him a penis or a new heart to which she replied I don’t do metalwork and he said I’m flexible so she fashioned him a medium-sized number with an oil spout head, to align with his overall aesthetic and she moved her hands over the clay, whereas he felt a stirring, which he believed to be love and began to cry, and seeing this she suspected that his heart was probably still there, so she got permission to check him out, and lo and behold inside she found a bundle of itchy, salmon-colored insulation, wrapped over a heart, chain-locked, and stuffed deep inside, and with a barely audible thump, and she looked at him and he looked away, ashamed because she knew without asking that he’d done it to himself, she held a mirror but he pushed it away, so she said, just look, at how the valves open and close like a clarinet, so pink, like a baby bird fallen through the chimney and see, how it fills your chest, now that we’ve undone its chains?
