Tanishe swiped her brow with the back of her hand, leaving a smear of red clay behind. She crinkled her nose, aware of the mistake but not stopping to fix it. Leaning over the table, she kept her eyes on the crude wet hunk of clay that was slowly forming into a figurine. One long braid escaped from the colorful headscarf she wore to keep her river of black tresses in place. The ends of her hair were stained red and stiff. She’d have quite the time getting clay out of her hair in the shower later. The table she worked on wasn’t much of a table at all. It was a huge piece of plywood nailed onto a cheap block of salvaged wood. The floor beneath her was rough concrete but even so, she liked to be barefoot. Her sandals were shoved off to one side of the table, out of the way of the paths that people might take.

Her workroom was a low ceilinged building attached to a larger museum off a lonely highway in Arizona. The town was around an hour and a half away and the thing that really drew people here was the gas station. Of course, once here, they would tumble out of their cars, backs aching, hot, tired, shambling to the bathrooms. Bathrooms that were The Cleanest Around, Guaranteed! An easy guarantee to make when these were the only bathrooms for nearly two hours in either direction. The manager of this fine establishment did make a shocking amount of money, though. Selling gasoline, cute drinks with ice that clinked on the sides of fired clay cups, and then, of course, the experience of walking through a real artist’s studio.

Before she’d taken up residence here, she’d been languishing in Las Vegas, working for a man whom she was positive was drug trafficking to keep up rent. That and the showgirls coming in and breaking things with their hard, too-perky-fake tits as they wandered drunkenly around the studio had been enough for her to want a break. She could only handle so much neon and none-too-subtle offers for sex from tourists. Pardon her for not wanting chlamydia from some asshole from Washington state who’d never seen a black woman before. She wasn’t interested in being someone’s experiment.

Which was a funny way to think, considering her entire studio now was an experiment. One that was going...okay. Her friend was married to the manager and their resident artist had rudely up and died on them. So they had a vacancy. “You can make whatever you want,” Jessa had promised. “Make giant phallus art, I don’t care! Or whatever it is you were making in Vegas.”

Tanishe squinted. “Phallus art? No...I was making fairies…” Jessa waved that off, apparently disappointed that they wouldn’t have an enormous billboard featuring a huge fired clay Penis with the tagline “Drinks, Gas, and Shlongs.” Privately, Tanishe was appalled that her friend would ever want such a thing, but after having worked near The Strip and having seen more than her fair share of weirdness, she wasn’t exactly blushing, either. Just...a little grossed out. Far be it from her to be called a prude but there were just some things that didn’t belong on a billboard. The word ‘Shlong’ being one of those. At least be a grown up and call it a dick.

“Excuse me?” A soft voice close to her ear made Tanishe look up from the graceful arm she was working on. The fairy was extending her fingers upward, reaching for something unseen. The face was as yet unformed but Tanishe had the impression that the expression should be pleading but elated, as though maybe there was a falling star or a dream to be snatched. So close. Just at the edge of hope.

“Yes, hello,” Tanishe found a pretty brunette smiling at her. The brunette pointed at the fairy, asking questions about technique and how long each sculpture might take to create, and where did Tanishe get her ideas? These were the kinds of questions she got every single day, multiple times a day. “I’m going to keep working while I talk,” she said with a patient smile. “The clay dries pretty quickly.”

“Of course,” the brunette cooed, lavishing undisguised wonder at the as yet undone fairy. Tanishe never tired of that. It was part of what drove her to continue. And though she tired of the questions, she wasn’t annoyed anymore. For a little while, these sorts of questions were fun to answer, but then she’d realized that people were only half listening. They didn’t want mundane answers. They wanted fantastical or even weird stories, of which Tanishe had none. She could only tell them the truth; the ideas just...came. There was no magic font of muse that she had mystical access to. But now she’d answered so often and to so many people that her phrasing had become practiced and almost always identical.

The brunette listened with uncommon interest and once Tanishe had finished explaining all that the young woman wanted to know, she found that the woman’s eyes hadn’t glazed over. They were still bright and interested. That lit a little candle of hope in Tanishe’s chest that swelled to an open flame when the woman gestured behind them to the shelves. Shelves that dominated the room top to bottom, filled with fairies, mushrooms, mythical creatures, more respectful sculpture replicas of what the native americans used to make who’d lived here before, and a host of bowls, cups, plates, ashtrays, and anything else that happened to interest Tanishe at the time.

“I’d like to purchase something,” the woman was saying. “How much is this?” and here she picked up an exquisite fairy pairing, delicately kissing one another. Their expressions were of the purest love and it was a piece that Tanishe had dedicated to an old girlfriend. She’d debated with herself about selling it but eventually it became too painful to look at. However, she only wanted someone to buy it if they really wanted it. So she’d put the price a bit high. For this woman, though, with these vivid eyes and gorgeous smile...she’d lower the price.

“It’s $175,” she said and was about to tell the woman something lower but the brunette put it right back on the shelf, her face scrunching up.

“I don’t know, that’s awfully high. You’re very good, I mean very good but I don’t have that much…”

Tanishe felt her heart give an unpleasant squeeze and she half stood, wiping her hands on her stained apron. “It was of me and my-” she started to say, but then a man came in, spotting the brunette at once and sliding his hand around her waist.

“Ready to go, love?” he asked. The brunette beamed up at him.

“Yes. It was good to meet you!” she said to Tanishe, who was now an afterthought and the couple left.

Tanishe sank back down onto her stood and looked at the fairy. Maybe she wouldn’t make the expression elated. Maybe she’d make the expression desperate because apparently she was. Imagining some kind of connection with a total stranger.

“I wish….,” she muttered to herself. She so desperately wanted another person, of whatever gender. She wanted a soulmate. “I wish I had a soulmate…”