Potter’s Field

by Aza Smith

Watson lived his life creating. He was a ceramicist, and from grade school to college, no matter how much time and thought he put into his work, it was never enough. From his teachers, to his peers, even his parents, all they ever had to tell him was that his work was phenomenal, but there was always room for improvement.

He would never get anywhere making one-off projects, but individual projects in a series couldn’t be too similar. You weren’t allowed to establish yourself, look yourself in the eye, call yourself an artist worth a damn unless you pushed boundries and test everyone’s limits, but then your work is too niche and it makes everyone uncomfortable if you even put in the effort.

Infinite growth of the self is needed, but for Watson, it was like a cancer.

No matter what he did, it was never enough.

This was why Watson had to get inventive.

Cruelty was the key ingredient. Any possessed doll, Muramasa blade, or Bible of Discord you may have heard of was spawned from a special, distinctly human form of indifference that putrified into malevolence.

Artifacts of Doom. Things that outlived the creators in their infamy.

He started small. Stepping on bugs and pulling the wings off birds. He would adopt kittens, bring them home, and snap their little necks. He moved on to stray pets he found wandering the streets and beat them to death. He even returned a lost puppy to its owner before being invited inside, where he proceeded to slam the woman’s skull in with the corner of her kitchen island.

Watson knew the smell would attract attention if he didn’t act quickly. He would take the men, the women, the children, and the animals, and process them. He installed hooks into his ceiling and bled all of them out like pork in a slaughterhouse into buckets.

He pulverized their bones and mixed them into clay. He would add their blood to keep it from drying while he shaped it on his wheel.

Watson made one pot after another. Cups, bowls, plates, flower vases, wine and vinegar casks, sculptures, models, prints, shelves and shelves of Earthenware, stoneware and porcelain, all infused with human resources. He spent an entire weekend firing them in the electric kiln in his garage and woodfire kiln in the backyard, kept burning with the human fat preserved in his fridge. Many died in the kiln, crumbling or self-destructing. He could hear the burning and wailing, which lulled him to sleep as he waited.

He found a boutique that was willing to display them. He gave away ones that didn’t sell. Wrapped in newspaper and mailed anonymously, sent to antique stores, thrift stores, and random addresses nationwide.

He would watch the news about children in Orlando who hacked their families to death because their nightmares told them to do it, or a shooting in Springfield with no clear motivation for the massacre, or a string of homeless shelters burning down in acts of arson in Oklahoma City, and he knew it was his doing. It gave him a sense of accomplishment, his work affecting so many people in so little time. The horror of what he had done had poisoned them like mold in the walls.

That same horror lingered on his property. People averted their eyes as they walked by. The mail stopped coming in. While there were no bodies to bury, or no whole ones at least, children would look at his house and all they saw was a mortuary.

It had been a week before he realized that he hadn’t left his house in all this time. The doors locked him from the inside, and the keys were all wrong.

The summer heat came in, and the air-conditioner broke. His food went rancid because the fridge wasn’t cooling.

He tried to distract himself by creating, and what had remained of the blood he had collected to keep the clay wet had coagulated. He tried to wash his hands off in the sink, but the pipes were dry. He was forced to drink old milk to keep hydrated before he resorted to his blood supply.

Two weeks went by. He perspired in the darkness of his home. He felt his whole body covered in the filth of his sweat, unable to wash any of it off.

Putrification surrounded him. He banged his head against the wall, and it was answered with knocks echoing back. His ice-box now housed a colony of flies he would free as he kept himself hydrated from melted freezer-burn and rotten fluids, only to vomit all of it again.

His filth caked the sheets, and, feeling watched by the walls, he found an enclosed space to rest his weary mind.

It had been a month since the owner of the house had been last seen, and a concerned neighbor had been woken up to see that the house was on fire. Firefighters did what they could to kill it, the dry, unmowed grass reaching back to fight back every step of the way.

When the proper authorities inspected the rubble, they uncovered bones in every room. Investigations of their identities are still ongoing, but one corpse puzzled them the most.

They pried open a kiln in the garage, which they believed to have been the source of the incident, and uncovered a life-sized sculpture of a man curled up into a fetal position. Covered in white stone clay, the blackened remains of a person hid inside.