Full Body Chills - My Art Tells The Future

Episode Date: October 25, 2019

The thing I love most is killing the people closest to meMy Art Tells The FutureBy: Caedmon HollandYou can read the original story at FullBodyChillsPodcast.comThis episode is brought to you by Simplisafe, to learn more check out simplisafe.com/fbc Looking for more chills? Follow Full Body Chills on Instagram @fullbodychillspod. Full Body Chills is an audiochuck production. Instagram: @audiochuckTwitter: @audiochuckFacebook: /audiochuckllcTikTok: @audiochuck 

Hi listeners, this is Ashley Flowers, and today I want to tell you a story about the power of art. So gather around and listen close. For as long as I can remember, I've always loved building things with clay. My favorite thing to play with as a young child was Play-Doh, and I would spend entire afternoons molding different items and animals and people without ever getting bored. As I grew older and matured, my passion for sculpting grew with me, and by age 11, I was already taking pottery and precious metal clay classes with adults mostly like four times my age. It didn't

matter to me that most of my friends weren't interested at all in what I did. The act of creating, glazing, and firing pieces captivated my imagination, and while most kids my age wanted a game system or trendy clothes and shoes, I was bugging my folks for my own pottery wheel. I come from modest means, but luckily both my parents supported my passion. And by the time I was 13, my bedroom was more like an art studio that happened to have a bed in it. All my time and effort were paying off too. And the pieces I made began to become more high quality more often. In fact, by my freshman year in high school, I was confident

enough in my skill that I began to look into submitting my art for contests and making pots and vases and sculptures for friends and relatives as gifts. But that was the beginning of a dark path that I've walked down up to this very day. I first noticed it on a bowl that I made for my uncle for his 57th birthday when I was 14. My dad told me his older brother had been a heavy smoker for most of his life, but the day my now 18-year-old cousin had been born, he smoked his last camel and hadn't looked back. I thought this was a great accomplishment, and so I wanted to incorporate it into a piece that I was making for him. I used a different color glaze for his initials within the bowl than I used for the rest of it, and then I designed the piece to have some cracks in it after firing. My plan was to try out the art style of Kintsugi,

which translates to gold joinery, and it's basically this art style from Japan. Kintsugi is the art of fixing broken pottery with a special lacquer that's powdered with gold or silver or platinum. It's supposed to be a means of recognizing a piece's unique history by highlighting the cracks and the flaws instead of hiding them by turning those flaws into beauty, making the piece even more unique than it previously was. So my idea was to have a piece like that for my uncle to show my esteem for him on how far he'd come in his past when it came to his health something went very wrong though something I couldn't explain and all the research in the world couldn't answer the special lacquer though it was powdered with gold came out as black as obsidian. I was completely bewildered at the spectacle before me. As I said, all the research turned up nothing, but the bowl itself wasn't a failure in my opinion.

It seemed to have kind of this dark beauty about it, and the special lacquer turning black instead of gold was only a heightened uniqueness in my eyes. I ended up giving it to my uncle for his birthday and he was absolutely thrilled with it. Six months later, my uncle was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. After three months of intense treatment, his body couldn't handle it anymore and he passed away. The whole family was devastated. I was given a week off from school so my parents and I could travel across the country and attend his funeral. It was a hard fact to swallow my uncle's death and the fact that we were staying in my now widowed aunt's

house for the trip made it even worse. It's kind of hard to get to sleep and you can hear your own aunt crying quietly to herself in her now lonesome bed and more than once I was shedding tears too as I drifted off to sleep. It was on the last day there that I did a little snooping in my aunt's room. My parents had taken her out for breakfast early in the morning and I knew they wouldn't be back till later. So I decided to see if there are any things, any kind of like memorabilia that I could sneak a peek at before I might never see them again. Well, one of the first things that I noticed was the bowl that I made for him displayed proudly front and center on their dresser. I couldn't help but smile at the memory

of giving it to him. I then decided to look a little bit in his desk, which was often a corner of the room. And I know I probably shouldn't have, but I was a teenager filled with angst at the time. I didn't see any issue in what I was doing. So going through his drawers, I didn't find anything of interest until I saw a very large envelope from the hospital. Opening it, I found out that it was an x-ray of his chest from when they discovered the cancer. Holding them up to a window with the morning light shining through, I grimaced at the sight of his lungs filled with long black streaks that showed the damage his years of smoking had done. As I looked more though, a wave of familiarity washed over me. I'd seen this somewhere. I knew I had. I continued staring in hopes that it would hit me, but the knowledge just evaded me and I ended up tossing the x-rays to the side of the room in frustration.

The x-rays flapped through the air a little bit and then landed on the floor in front of the dresser. But as soon as I stood in front of the dresser, about to bend over, my eyes fell upon the bowl again and everything clicked. Every blackened crevice, every vein of obsidian that was in the bowl looked exactly like it had been transplanted directly from the x-ray. I looked back and forth between the bowl and the x-ray, the x-ray and the bowl in complete shock. There was no way this could be happening. Yet the evidence was right there in front of my own face. I ended up saying nothing, trying to dismiss what I discovered as some weird coincidence and just try to move on with my life.

I kept up with my pottery and sculpting, but never attempting kintsugi again. I just couldn't bring myself to do it, and I would just end up recycling any broken pieces back into clay. Now fortunately, I didn't have to do this very often, as my skill had increased by leaps and bounds, and it was rare any time that something broke. During summer break after my freshman year, one of my old friends, a boy that I'd known since elementary school, asked me to make something for him. He was a huge nerd and into card games and Dungeons and Dragons and anime and all that stuff. He wanted me to make a dragon or an ornate goblet for him,

but I decided to do something a little different. I made a nice vase and glazed it so that it would look like there was a Japanese cherry blossom on both sides. I'd done things like this before on other work, so when it got back from firing, I was a little confused. Everything seemed normal except for the cherry blossoms on the tree. I knew I had used a pink glaze on them, but instead they were this blood red. And not only that, they weren't in the pattern that I had originally glazed them in. And listen, I know from experience that sometimes glazing doesn't work out exactly how you envisioned it. But this was different from anything I'd experienced before. Plus, the new pattern the glaze had taken looked very disturbing to me.

I couldn't place it at the time, but something about it evoked a primal disgust in me, and I wanted to destroy the vase right then and there. Unfortunately, my friend was with me when I got the piece back from firing and he told me he absolutely loved it. Even when I pointed out the change in color and the weird pattern of the leaves, he told me he didn't see anything wrong with the vase and even if it wasn't what I had originally planned for, he didn't care. He was so excited about the vase that I decided to just be happy that he liked his gift. I wonder to this day if I had been more aggressive in my complaints and had broken it right then and there, if it would have changed things. I found out what happened to him on the first day of sophomore year. The principal came into the loudspeaker and announced that he had passed.

And it was a day or two later that I found out that the day before school started, he'd been out walking his dog at night. A drunk driver in a pickup fell asleep at the wheel, drove off the road into the sidewalk and plowed straight into him. After the scene was cleaned up, there were only splatters of blood and gore on the sidewalks. And the pattern of that blood and gore matched the blood red cherry blossoms on the vase that I'd given him exactly. It took until my freshman year of college before I was figuring out the pattern, and by then,

four more people I cared about had died. Two were friends from school, one was my first summer crush, and the last was my aunt, leaving my cousin without parents at 23 years old. Each piece they'd received from me was different, and each had varying times from when they received it to when they died, but the patterns on each work of art never lied about the method. The worst was the flower vase I'd given my aunt. I made it as bright and colorful as possible, yet somehow on the tree I designed onto it, some unexpected running of glazes had happened, resulting in a long brown line hanging from the branches of the tree,

ending in an open circle. I didn't notice it until after I'd given it to her and she refused to part with it at that point saying it was absolutely gorgeous and she felt a sense of calm and peace looking at it. They ended up cutting her down from the elm tree in her backyard on the anniversary of my uncle's death. Like I said earlier, I realized then what the pattern was. You see, I made hundreds of pots, vases, and sculptures up to that point, but it was only the ones I'd made for someone specific that seemed to foretell what their death would be. This brought up a major conflict in my mind. On the one hand, if I just made things for the sake

of making them, nothing bad could ever be predicted by my work. But in that case, I could never give anyone anything that I'd ever made, even though sculpting and pottery was my life and I wanted to share my creations with everyone I loved. In the end I decided to play it safe and though I continued my art degree through college I did as little work with ceramics and clay as possible to the disappointment of all my professors. It's been three years now since I graduated. I have an apartment in New York City, and while I lived there for a while, I worked at the Museum of Ceramic Art, New York, but that was up until about a week ago. You see, seven days ago, I decided to call my mom to catch up. We talked for a little while about how life was going for my parents,

how life was going for me, the past, whatever. And it was then that my mom brought up that I had never made her anything despite my talents. And I quickly thought of the excuse that basically, I never thought I would ever be skilled enough to make anything worth my graduate degree that she paid for and the love that I had for both of them or whatever, whatever, yada, yada. My mother laughed at this and she said, well, certainly you didn't think that way when you were younger. After all, your father still has that weird little clay figurine you gave him when you were just three. At that point, my blood turned to ice. I had no memory of ever making anything like that. I pressed my mom for

details. She said, oh yes, you came to him all excited with this little figure claiming it was him and he just absolutely loves it, even to this day. It's a shame we didn't get you better clay back then as a lot of bits of clay have fallen off of it, making all these tiny little holes in the chest. But he still loves it as much as he did back then. It's part of the reason we decided to support your love of sculpting in the first place. As she's describing this, my heart is pounding. I asked my mom where my dad was at this very moment, and she told me that he was at the bar with a few friends.

I hurriedly said goodbye to my mom and hung up to call my dad. I ended up calling three times in a row. Each time, it went straight to vo my dad. I ended up calling three times in a row. Each time it went straight to voicemail. I was going to call my mom back when I forced myself to stop and think. I gave him this supposed figurine when I was three years old and nothing has happened to him in all these years. Why should something suddenly occur out of the blue just because I discovered that I gave him something? I should calm down, take it easy. Maybe I could organize a trip and dispose of the thing when I was visiting them next time. After all, I'd never tried getting rid of

one of these things before. I mean, granted, I'd never gotten the chance either, but I had a few glasses of wine to kind of calm myself and relax. I watched some Netflix and I went to bed with the plan that I was going to get rid of this thing. It was three o'clock in the morning when the call from my mom came. Through sobs and wails, she told me that a fight had broken out in the parking lot of the bar where dad was drinking at. Being the good Samaritan that he was and fueled up with some liquid courage, he walked over to break it up. But it seemed the fight was far more serious than he had anticipated, and his attempt to do a good deed ended up with a blast from a sawed-off shotgun to the chest. He died shortly after the ambulance got to him. I cried until the sun rose the next day. I still feel like I'm somehow responsible for the deaths of all the people that I'd given to.

The thing that has brought me the most joy in my life, what I feel like I was born to do, has brought nothing but misery and death to the people that I love. I just feel lost and confused and angry. Why me? Why them? Why do I have to be the one who sees death before it happens and somehow always be unable to stop it? Why does the craft that resonates within me, body and soul that gives my life meaning,

have to be cursed? Cursed to show me the deaths of those who I want to live the most? Like, what kind of God would do this to me? With all that in mind, yesterday I began to work on my final piece. I've never worked so hard on a single project before in my life. And by last night, it was done. It was a sculpture of me, standing only about a foot high, but getting every last detail of me absolute. I made it so detailed because it was a gift, a gift to me. All the other pieces I'd ever made, while I kept some of them, I'd never made one for me specifically. But this piece was different. Every second I spent on it, I knew I was making it for myself because I had to know. I didn't want this weight, this curse on my shoulders anymore. I had

to know my end. I spent all day sculpting and glazing and then fired it overnight in my personal kiln. I was surprised this morning when it came out perfectly. Not a single crack or imperfection to show. No broken bones or dismembered parts. No glaze dripping or discolored to suggest blood or gore or anything. It was a remarkably beautiful sculpture. Even if I don't tend to think of myself as all that beautiful, it truly was my best work yet.

But I'm telling you all of this now because I now know the truth. You see, my avatar made of clay had been sitting on my desk all day. And I was just waiting for something to happen to it. And nothing ever did. And a slight spark of hope ignited within me. Maybe I lost my power to foretell death. Maybe with this act of creating just for the creator, I'd freed myself from whatever curse had been hanging over my life since the moment that I first took breath. In my excitement,

I decided another glass of wine was in order. Even though I have, or rather had, a long drive in the morning to reach my mother's house to help plan for the funeral, I felt that this heavy burden had been lifted from my shoulders. I stood up suddenly to go to my kitchen, and in my flurry of movement, the statue was knocked from my desk. I watched it fall. I watched it hit my tiled stone floor, and I watched it shatter. Thousands of fractures encompassing the body, arms, legs, and head. Just staring at the broken body, my broken body, I start to realize that the stone floor, and especially the one large tile that the sculpture landed on,

looks familiar. In fact, it looks almost identical to the broken, worn, inviting concrete sidewalk 15 stories down from my bedroom window. This episode was written by Cadman Holland. It was produced and performed by me with production assistance by David Flowers. Our theme was created by Justin Daniel, and the story was modified slightly for audio retelling with the author's consent. If you'd like to read the original version, you can go to fullbodychillspodcast.com. And be sure to come back tomorrow so I can tell you another story that will give you full body chills. Full Body Chills is an AudioChuck production.

So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?