Trent was backed up with head sculpting appointments, but his boss Mr. Tritl, whose bulbous skull had been carved by Trent’s coworker Nisi into an adorable likeness of a baby panda, wanted a word.
“Trent, Trent, Trent, Trent,” trilled Mr. Tritl, clomping over on his two big hooves while Trent prepped his next client. This was Twala, a large, bosomy lady who visited Fashion Sculpture regularly for her head-shaping needs. Like Mr. Tritl and all Tilians, she possessed an enormous outcrop of pinkish bony matter at the top and sides of her hairless cranium that if left unchecked would quickly grow to the proportions of a washtub. Two weeks ago Trent had sculpted the mass into a lovely and almost life-size swan, and Twala was back in for touch-ups. As Trent briskly cleansed the hard but lightweight bird before taking a sanitized hammer and chisel to it, Mr. Tritl got his word in.
“Trent, my lad, we’ve received a number of complaints about your work,” Tritl screeched into his ear. Besides having the Tilian pinkish malleable blob of a head and hooves for feet, he had a short, sharp beak for a mouth; his “words” were the screeches of a boisterous parrot. “You’re supposed to be doing head designs, not hoof creations, or pedicures as you Earthers call them. But clients are saying their heads end up looking like hooves, or sometimes like your own two Earther feet.”
“What?” said Trent. “Hooves and feet, seriously?”
Twala, who of course had hooves for feet, overheard this and instinctively reached her hands up to check on her swan. Was there a hoof in its feathers she didn’t know about, or an Earther-style sandal like the ones Trent wore, open-toed and rather exciting?
“But I don’t see how that’s possible,” said Trent, preparing to trim and shape the swan that after growing out for two weeks again required his attention. He lifted his hammer and chisel and retouched the swan’s bill, now grown several inches too long, and while doing so eyed the bird’s outspread wings, now also longish and unkempt. The substance of the Tilians’ skulls grew at an alarming rate, much faster than Earther hair, and kept the customers coming back. While Mr. Tritl observed, he chipped away at Twala and restored the features of the graceful creature that formed her head.
“Look,” Tritl honked. He pointed to a spot on one of the swan’s magnificent spread wings that seemed to bear the creature aloft. “I see a hint of hoofedness here … and over here,” he added, moving his finger along the swan’s body, “a suggestion of your unsavory sandal.”
“Hoofedness?” said Trent, “Hoofednesss? I don’t see any hoofedness in Twala’s swan, Mr. Tritl, I see two large wings and two webbed feet. I don’t see any sign of my sandal, either.” Defiantly he took up his rasp and file and went over the rest of Tala’ gorgeous swan, straightening its plumage and redefining its webbed feet and long, thin neck.
“Nisi!” Mr. Tritl screeched loudly over his shoulder. “Could you step over here a moment?”
Trent’s coworker Nisi, easily the best fashion sculptor in the shop, as Trent wouldn’t hesitate to admit, had supported him in his recent promotion from hoof stylist to head sculptor, and was his friend. She stomped over on her well-polished hooves somewhat breathlessly, as she too was busy with clients today, busy enough that she still grasped her chisel and mallet. Trent couldn’t help but admire her strong but exquisite Tilian hands, with their twelve long and furry fingers that lacked nails. “Nisi,” warbled Mr. Tritl when she had joined the others, “What do you think of Twala’s head? With all due respect to Trent here, doesn’t it remind you of a hoof?”
Nisi took in her boss’s temper, her coworker’s frustration, and Twala’s alarm, and then admitted, “I do see some hoof in the swan. Sorry, Trent.” She then thundered back over to her client, a Mr. Ndr whose skull she was transforming into an ancient Greek temple. Nisi was so good she could turn a Tilian’s blossoming sconce into classical Greek architecture in forty-five minutes flat. Indeed Mr. Ndr had walked in half an hour ago with a head like a tree stump, and already it looked like a scaled-down Parthenon, well-known to the highly educated and art-hungry Tilians.
“Finish up with Twala, be sure to smooth her head with sand blocks and rub it with our special Luster Lotion, and then I want to see you in my office,” Mr. Tritl squawked to Trent before cantering off.
A short while later Trent entered Mr. Tritl’s office with fear. Tritl had gone out on a limb to hire him in the first place, when he applied for a job as an unemployed Earther with no professional sculpting experience. But he had shown compassion and started the obviously talented youth on hoof sculpting, a more demanding but less glorious task than head sculpture. For six weeks Trent had tackled the tough yellowish material of the Tilian hoof, much more resistant to styling than the pinkish head matter, and soon could do all the designs: wings, serpents, dice, the noses of rockets, and so on, and had even boosted trade among teenagers by nailing to the underside of their young hooves old-style U-shaped iron shoes like those worn by Tilians centuries ago. The old is always the new, he reasoned. Mr. Tritl had hated the damage to his tile floor, but profits allowed him to line the aisles with long rubber mats that absorbed some but by no means all the shock and noise, and he seemed pleased. Only Trent was not pleased and begged for the chance to do heads. His talent and dignity demanded it, he felt, and besides the tips were better. Finally Tritl had relented and granted him a trial period. It looked like that trial period had now ended in disaster.
It had, and once again he was assigned to hoof creations -- lowly pedicures as he thought of them. After work he cried on Nisi’s shoulder. “How do I get back on heads?” he moaned. “I can’t go on doing hooves. They’re beneath me.”
“You must always express the head,” she told him. “Even when doing hooves, think of the head, the head, and nothing but the head.”
“The head,” he mouthed in agreement, but how to express the head? He could think of no sculpture that related specifically to the head. Any design, from an eye to a span of antlers to an egg, could be carved into a head or a hoof and look like it belonged there.
“Alternatively,” she said, “give up the head and embrace the hoof. Think of the hoof and nothing but the hoof.”
“You’re some help,” he told her, “but I love you.”
When Twala came in for her next regular appointment two weeks later, she sat at Trent’s station out of habit, not knowing that he did only hooves now. After greeting and seating her, Trent took her pair of hooves in hand, caressed them and rubbed them, even ground his body against them, thinking of the head, the head, and only the head.
“Honey,” Twala said to him after a few minutes, “I don’t know what you’re doing to my hooves, but I wish you’d do it to my head. I’m tired of old Mother Goose anyway, what say we break out something new?”
Mr. Tritl rushed over as soon as he saw what was happening, but Twala insisted that Trent be allowed to do both her hooves and her head, and Tritl finally chirped his agreement. He also promised to let Trent do other heads, after Twala took his side. Overcome, Trent ran to Nisi and asked her to marry him. But she was moving to another planet in three weeks with her same-sex partner, a giant aquatic centipede named Liz.
At least Trent was in above the neck again, and Twala’s tip for the monumental pair of breasts he had transformed her head into was most generous.
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