L'Origine du Tunnel
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The late afternoon light hisses through the oversized factory windows, hazed in a falling sparkle of clay dust. Outside, the sun bleeds against the skyline of Hell’s Kitchen in sheets of exhausted gold, but inside, there’s only the dry scent of refined, mineral-rich soil and the metallic tang of unwashed tools rusting on their hooks. You stand, feet hips distance apart, in nothing but black boyshorts riding high on your hips, the elastic stiff with grey smears. Every inch of you is smudged in some manner of hardened clay—cracked patches along your thighs, flaking streaks up your arms, your bare breasts dotted with accidental grazes from your subject matter.
"I didn't know I needed you," you tell the thing you've made.
It doesn't speak back, so you crouch low, bare knees aching against the sealed concrete, fingers twitching in the air just inches from the hollow mouth of your newest piece. The sculpture towers over you—a grotesque head, warped far beyond anatomical accuracy, the mouth stretched so wide it devours its own nose, up to the space where the forehead begins. A gaping wound of expression, it yawns upward, lips peeled over as if pried open by invisible force.
You blink, seeing orgasm and horror, wondering if what you've made is a simple revolt against everyone's perception of you, yourself, and your work: simplicity, chastity, a beacon of hope for men in a sea of liberated women . Unfinished statues stare blankly at you, dwarfed by this monstrosity you've made. They're all clean lines, sculpted arches with feminine curves too softened to be provocative, though there are too many... and there that hatred returns. The same self-disgust that had you up all hours of the night, working your body to its limits to birth this... this thing...
Its eyes gleam with cheap stage jewelry, gaudy and glittering in decaying sundown lights. Citrine and topaz, garnet and glass rubies, all nestled into those tunneling sockets with surgical precision—an idol bedazzled—a golden corpse mask or something you saw in a book about martyred saints, maybe. Clearly inspired by the sick parody of opulence you saw in the alley, but not wholly original. The false stones leer at you knowingly, as suspicious as magpie eyes.
And still, you stare upwards, aching. You don’t know what to name the feeling that’s been rotting slowly in your gut since that night outside—the installation, the smell of blood and burnt-cedar cologne, the breath on your throat and that hand so tight against your belly it felt inside you . That heat it made in your stomach hasn't faded, only fueled your digging hands, wrist-deep in wet clay, molding and forcing and pleading with something shapeless to become something more .
Maybe inside you'll see what's missing...
You slip forward onto your palms, clay crust crumbling beneath the press of your hands. Your body sways. You exhale slowly, then lean in, crawling inside the mouthpiece.
It's a tight squeeze—the sore curve of your back brushing the clay palate. You nestle deeper until you’re curled inside it, limbs folding inward, palms cupping elbows. Your spine molds to the ridged interior, right hip pinned by the tight crescent of the lower lip packed with metal wiring and salvaged rebar. The air is thick inside—humid, smelling of old sweat and powdered gypsum. Like a womb or a freshly cracked tomb...
Your phone begins to ring. The sound is thin and shrill, bouncing off concrete, echoing through the extensive studio like the sirens outside. You bury your head down, forehead sweating across the hard ridges of your knees, arms wrapped tighter around your ribs, nipples pebbling in the warm gap between chest and upper thighs. The ringtone keeps going. You know who it is: Sylvan. Or maybe your agent. Could be some other leech wanting to negotiate with the artist herself... but something holds you within the mouth, as if it has teeth locking you within.
You were wrong to come in here, a voice in the back of your head warns—your inner critic, maybe. You should’ve stopped, should’ve cleaned it all up, should’ve kept your/the mouth closed. Should’ve taken the mallet to it until it looked like nothing.
You fall asleep eventually, lulled by the whispered vitriol between your ears and the oppressive comfort of being completely obscured from the world. No feasting eyes. Not here. But there are and there have been...
All day he's been watching, sometimes pressing close to the window when your back was turned, other times observing from the defunct warehouse across the street... coming and going, watching you cast off layers of clothing as grey stains took their place... visualizing what you'd look like in red—in blood and bloods—in artful cuts, bruises, brushstrokes of grime and chaotic splatters of hot, frothing cum...
When your eyes pry themselves open again, peeled from the weight of sleep, the studio has gone cold. It's dark, everything blue lit by the night with slivers of gold highlighting angles here and there, cast upwards from street lights below.
The silence that greets you is brutal: no barrage of evening traffic, no hiss of brakes, no layered shouts from the streets away, only the groaning cycle of the boiler kicking to life and the soft, domestic hum of the refrigerator. What time is it?
You cannot recall the moment your eyes last closed, just a gravitational pull inward. You remember the mouth—not yours, but the sculpture’s—its interior pressing around you like wet heat, as it continues to do even now. You shift inside, as snug as a fetal slip, and groan at the pull of stiffness in your lower back, your knees, and cervical spine, where a headache begins to unravel.
You groan at the ache, and someone groans back...
Suddenly, the space around you inhales, gulping you deeper into the clay mouth as fear bathes you in fine sweat. The tiny hairs along your forearms rise in warning, your skin crawling and though you have not yet seen it with your eyes, your body knows that someone is watching.
You do not spot the hewn outline at first, not clearly, but then he moves, and the light reveals him . One gloved hand lifts to press flat against the grimy glass while the other remains curled around the iron banister, his head tilting the way an artist studies a still life—quiet, calculated, and endlessly patient.
He does not move, does not break posture, does not falter in his watching, and so you blink—once, hard—your limbs cramped from the tight curl of your position, your chest rising and falling in such restrained movements to feign death... to become invisible.
He sees you anyway.
And even as your throat aches from dryness, you hold back a whimper, watching his fingers extend against the old window. The sound of it opening is agonizing—a warbled creak of wood warped by humidity and disuse.
He shifts, dragging through the opening shoulder first, the barely-clothed trapezius muscle snagged by a leather suspender strap. Your heart skips as a tri-buckled boot hits the innards of your studio. He's past the threshold of inside and outside, sauntering past your kitchen, around a lounge chair to stop several feet away. He's here... the thing that cluitched you in the alley... unmistakably human in form, yet too—
He breathes in, a ragged pull through the cloth covering his face. In the darkness, he's weeping ink, but the eyes beneath soaked tears that shine red and black. Buttery fabric clings like gauze dipped in plaster, impressing every ridge of muscle, every slant of bone, black suspenders carving down his sides and framing the low dip of his waist. Below, his pants hang loose, but the shape beneath it all is anything but...
The only thing you manage to whisper—to yourself, to the shadows, to the heavy air—is, "I'm dreaming," because anything else means you let him pant into your neck, touch your softness—let him come inside your home.
So you stay silent, motionless, your body sinking tighter into the curve of your creation’s mouth, seeking protection, but the broad-shouldered leviathan just watches, silently choosing not to enter further.
And then his voice—low, sadistically devoid, and made faint by the weave of cloth—replaces the silence. “You're lucky, you know… time clings to your medium like training wheels. Forgiving. Patient. Unlike blood that dries too fast—it demands instinct. Demands sacrifice. Like watercolor, maybe. Slippery. Honest."
"But all that time you have?" He snorts, inspecting his gloves, tugging the right up his wrist a little higher until the fingers spread, long and steady. "Maybe that's the real curse. Too long to think. Not long enough to feel.”
You do not answer, not because you are unwilling, but because you're not yet ready to admit he's right. Instead, you just breathe and tell him, "You're not real," to which his chest hitches with quiet laughter. You close your eyes again—not to sleep, but to force him out—and whether time passes or not becomes irrelevant because when you open your eyes next...
... he's gone.