Yutka

His hospital room was seething with frustrations. His duvet was flimsy and slithered from him like a snakeskin as he lay, one knee pulled up, the other leg dangling down the side of his bed. Having called the nurse in his irksome voice, he bent backwards to avoid brushing against her dangling bosoms when she tried lifting his headrest to make him more comfortable. So he could sit up, a pitifully thin figure in his flapping knee-length night dress, his face drawn in at the cheeks, his needle-sharp nose rising over a thin-lipped downward crescent mouth. The straggly hair on his chin called out to be cut with scissors. Sometimes he slid down the bed like a fish that wants to return to the water, but was now caught, wriggling uncomfortably as if attached to the wrong electrodes, twitching feverishly from one pole to the other.

He hates darkness. Light becomes essential. His demand for well-lit space is legendary. Holding the lump of clay he kneads, caresses, strokes it alive, turning an amorphous world into a globe. With iron callipers he measures