The Clay Thing

Tam pressed his thumb into the blob of clay and frowned.

It was supposed to be a horse. Mrs. Hernandez had said they could make anything they wanted for the art show — anything at all — and Tam had known right away. A horse. A galloping, mane-flying, legs-stretching horse, just like the ones in the book his dad read him at bedtime.

He could see it perfectly in his head. The problem was his hands didn't know what his head knew.

He tried to pull up the neck, but it drooped sideways like a melting candle. He tried to shape the legs, but they came out thick and lumpy, and one of them fell off completely and rolled across the table.

Tam stuck the leg back on. Now it pointed the wrong direction.

He looked to his left. Sophie had made a perfect little owl with tiny feather marks all over it. She was using a toothpick to give it eyes.

He looked to his right. Marco had made a race car with wheels that actually looked like wheels.

Tam looked back at his thing.

It had a body like a potato. A neck like a bent thumb. Four legs, if you were being generous about what a leg was. And a head that was — well, it was round. Horses didn't have round heads, did they? They had long faces. Everyone always said so. He tried to pinch the head longer, but then it looked like a duck. He tried to fix the duck face and made it worse. Now it looked like nothing. It looked like a thing.

"What's that supposed to be?" asked Sophie, leaning over.

Tam's ears went hot. "A horse."

Sophie tilted her head one way. Then the other way.

"Oh," she said.

That was it. Just oh. Tam knew what oh meant. Oh meant it did not look like a horse.

He wanted to smash it. He wanted to press it back into a ball and start over. He wanted to say he didn't care about the art show anyway, which wasn't true, because he cared a lot.

"All right, everyone!" Mrs. Hernandez called out. "Set your pieces on the drying shelf. They'll be ready to paint tomorrow!"

Tomorrow? Tam thought. He wasn't done. He wasn't even close to done. He was the opposite of done.

But everyone was already carrying their creations to the shelf. The owl. The race car. A flower, a dog, a lopsided but still recognizable cat. Tam picked up his thing and carried it with both hands, walking slowly, like he was carrying something precious. He wasn't sure why. He set it on the shelf between the owl and a turtle that Devon had made.

It looked even worse on the shelf.

That night, Tam lay in bed staring at the ceiling.

"You're quiet tonight," his dad said, sitting on the edge of the bed. "Thinking about something?"

"We're making stuff out of clay," Tam said. "For the art show."

"Oh yeah? What are you making?"

Tam paused. "It was supposed to be a horse."

His dad waited the way he always did — quiet and patient, like he had all the time in the world.

"It doesn't look like a horse," Tam said. "It doesn't look like anything. Everyone else's looks like what it's supposed to be, and mine just looks like a… a clay thing."

His dad nodded slowly. "That sounds frustrating."

"Can I just not be in the art show?"

"You could ask Mrs. Hernandez," his dad said. "But you've still got painting day tomorrow, right? Might look different with some color on it."

Tam doubted that very much. You could put a hat on a potato, and it was still a potato.

His dad kissed him on the forehead and turned off the light. Tam rolled over and tried not to think about the thing sitting on the shelf in the dark classroom, looking like nothing.

The next morning, the clay pieces were dry and hard, and Mrs. Hernandez set out cups of paint in every color. Tam sat in front of his thing and stared at it.

It stared back at him. Well, it didn't, because it didn't really have eyes. Just two dents where he'd poked his finger.

He picked up a brush. He dipped it in brown, because horses were brown.

He painted one side. It looked like a brown potato now.

He stopped.

He looked at the thing for a long time. He turned it around. He tilted his head, the way Sophie had.

And something funny happened.

When he stopped trying to see a horse… he kind of liked the shape of it. It was round in some places and lumpy in other places, and the neck had this twist to it that was sort of interesting. The leg that pointed the wrong way made it look like it was doing a little kick.

Tam put down the brown paint.

He picked up blue.

Not horse-blue. Just… blue. A bright, wild, wonderful blue, like the sky in summer. He painted the whole body that color. Then he took yellow and painted the lumpy head. He gave it orange eyes — big, round, friendly ones, right in the dents. He painted each leg a different color: red, green, purple, and the kicking one he did in gold, because a leg that kicked like that deserved to be gold.

He used the smallest brush to paint tiny white stars all over the blue body.

He didn't know why. It just felt right.

When he was finished, he set the thing down and looked at it.

It was not a horse. It was absolutely, completely, one hundred percent not a horse. But it was…

Tam smiled a little.

It was something.

The art show was on Friday evening. Families walked through the cafeteria, which had been turned into a gallery, with all the projects on tables covered in white paper. Each piece had a little card next to it with the artist's name and a title.

Tam had spent a long time on the title. He'd thought about calling it "Horse," but that felt like a lie. He'd thought about calling it "Mistake," but that felt wrong too.

In the end, he'd written: "The Clay Thing" by Tam Nguyen.

He stood near the back, by the water fountain, watching people walk by the table. His stomach felt like it was doing flips.

A woman stopped in front of Sophie's owl and said, "How lovely!" A man pointed at Marco's race car and said, "Look at the detail!"

Then a little girl — she was maybe four or five — stopped in front of Tam's thing.

She didn't move. She just stood there, staring at it with big, wide eyes.

"Mommy," she said, tugging her mother's sleeve. "Mommy. Look at this one."

Her mother leaned down. "Oh, that's fun! What do you think it is?"

"It's a star creature," the girl said, like this was the most obvious thing in the world. "See? It has stars on it, so it comes from space, and that gold leg is for kicking asteroids."

Tam's mouth fell open a little.

"It's my favorite one," the little girl said.

She said it loud. She said it in the voice of someone who needed the whole room to hear this important fact.

Her mother smiled and took a picture of it with her phone.

Tam felt a fizzy, floaty feeling rise up from his stomach all the way to the top of his head. He tried to stop the grin spreading across his face and absolutely could not.

After the little girl moved on, Sophie walked over and looked at Tam's piece again. She studied it — the blue body, the stars, the gold kicking leg, the big orange eyes.

"Tam," she said. "This is actually really cool."

"Thanks," he said. "It's a star creature. It kicks asteroids."

Sophie laughed. "Obviously."

Tam's dad appeared behind him and put a hand on his shoulder. He looked at the clay thing sitting on the table, bright and strange and like nothing else in the whole art show.

"That's the one?" his dad asked.

"That's the one," Tam said.

His dad squeezed his shoulder. "I like it."

Tam looked at the clay thing — his clay thing — with its potato body and its bent neck and its one wild, golden, kicking leg.

"Yeah," Tam said. "Me too."