Samantha is a soft person, with a core of reinforced steel. Her brown hair falls to the middle of her back, in tight ringlets, and no effort is ever made to contain it. When she's working, she wears a black elasticised headband, to keep it from her eyes, but other than that, the hair goes untouched. It is washed, and a leave in conditioner in sprayed in, and it sits, in perfect coiled beauty, as though it had a serene mind of its own.
Her skin is olive. Long a point of contention in their household, as relatives quietly whispered to each other that perhaps Sam, the second of four siblings, had a different father. She had no proof that this was true, but none that it was untrue either, so Sam shrugged it off, and let it fall away with all the other detritus of life that carried no consequence either way.
She is short. And round. Her face is warm, her hands always soft from working so much with clay. She is a creator, filling the spaces around her with the beautiful ceramics and blown glass of her trade, filtering light through coloured glass until she calls forths rainbows from nothing. She makes life brighter, calmer, and more inviting by her very existence.
She is a person filled with desire. She feels life with all of her senses. She finds happiness in kneading bread, thudding it against the massive wooden bench in her kitchen. In the smell of pastry baking, in the crunch of a good apple, in the delicate crumbling of cheese. She plays music in her house almost constantly, she does not own a television because she is easily distracted and works at home, and so must ensure she is able to focus. But she goes to the movies every single weekend. She learned how to churn butter because she had a persistent curiosity as to how it was made. She makes macrame animals and hangs them from the ceilings in her niece and nephews bedrooms. She sits in the sun, and feels her skin burn, and doesn't care because she, like all creatures, is going to die anyway, and she loves the feel of the heat.
Sam was born this way. As a small child she faced the world with wide eyes, wanting to absorb it all, wanting to taste colours and record the sound of bacon sizzling, and listen to the wind every day of her life. It didn't take long for her parents to mute her enthusiasm for life. Living in that house, growing up, with a mother who resented the presence of her children, and a father who preferred to step out of the line of fire in any conflict situation, quietly excusing himself to let the children fend for themselves against his wife.
A Tyrant and a Coward are the names of two ceramic creatures Sam had forged when she first started getting good at it. She made a tall, skinny golem, with pointed features and a massive hammer extending from an outstretched hand. Its mouth was open in a bellow, its other hand curled into a claw. 'A Coward' was a ceramic fish, sitting on its hands on a bar stool, a monocle in place, a top hat on. After the graduate showing where they had been displayed, side by side, Sam had brought them home. They lived on the windowsill of her living room, catching the light through coloured glass, and she greeted them every morning with the finger.
When Thomas had died, Sam had felt as though she might never live again. His pictures hung around the house, unchanging, at the same time as the pictures of the other children were taken down and replaced with more current ones. An angry youth stared out at them from the walls, alone and silent, and Sam eventually began running past them, certain her big brother could see her from the Other Side, and hated that everyone else was still alive, hated that no one spoke of him anymore.
She was certain of ghosts. Tommy had always told her about the footsteps he would hear shuffling past his window in the middle of the night, and though he looked for the person they belonged to many times, he could never see anyone, even as they reached right under his window. Their mother had always complained about people flushing the toilet in the middle of the night, which woke her, and everyone swore black and blue that they it hadn't been them. Perhaps they were all just evading blame, but to Sam, this was yet more proof that the veil between the living and the dead is uncomfortably thin.
