a vase

by Michael Thériault

Nothing tells me how I came into this vase. I may have been here from the instant the new glass cooled. Memory does seem to recount, if very imperfectly, times when I was not this, but walked among women and men and filled lungs with air and evenings with words. Maybe the reincarnated do not necessarily – or even usually – arrive in something they once called “living.” How would they communicate to humans in human form their presence in something they had themselves long believed inanimate?

I do feel obliged to explain my present way of being to myself, or at least to hypothesize. The memories I believe are mine include having angered others. Some hated me. Rationally, I attribute to none of them the power to have put me here, but my situation compels me to reason beyond reason. Curses once had wide credence. They have some still. I have therefore sometimes hypothesized that I am here by a curse, but ridiculed the hypothesis, as seems also obligatory.

By “came into” I do not mean as a bouquet of flowers might, as content, but as substance – by transubstantiation of the vase, if you will, as of wafer into flesh, wine into blood, the vase become me, I the vase, the vase’s “accidents” unaltered, these understood not in their common usage, but in their Aristotelian sense, as the physical characteristics of the thing, the thing that now I am.

I am of clear glass. In this, a curse may have been apt. What seem my memories include having been a glazier and catching in gloved hands panels of glass wheeling below a crane hook in winds high above the sidewalks of San Francisco, and gulls wheeling, too, beyond reach, higher. Given the thoughts that come to me, I may have been someone before even this –philosophy student, maybe, seminarian, even priest. But I may have been just a tradesman well and widely read. The “I” that I remember or seem to remember prior to being in this vase is susceptible of division and variation.

I perceive, but only within the limits of my “accidents.”

I “see” by refraction of light through my walls, and the refraction’s mutations through my various curves and thicknesses. Unable even to discern presence or absence of mirrors, I know my shape entirely through these variations. For most of my height I am a narrow bulb. Stylized branches, leaves, oblong fruit maybe olives swirl up the bulb, not cut but smoothly molded. I narrow to a neck, which in turn opens at my top to a mouth. No word can come from this mouth. It accepts, it surrenders; all agency belongs to others, not to me.

I have no gaze, no focus by which to distinguish objects. I know just light, upon light, upon light, endlessly diverse. This brings to my thought somehow Dante, the Paradiso, though again memory fails to tell who I was when I read it, if I read it.

I “hear” to some extent as does anyone, by being vibrated by vibrations of ambient air. Having no organ specific to this purpose, my hearing is worse than crude. Among my “accidents,” however, is a capacity for sympathetic vibration. Here, I mean “sympathetic” in both its physical and its emotional sense.

I “feel” … I cannot say how I feel, just that I do, if only through direct touch. To my surprise, this sense has been more refined than others.

Taste, smell: I have neither. I tell myself I remember them, but trying now to reproduce them in memory, I fail.

I do recall having loved, and more than once. Whether or not any of these loves ended in hatred, and so in reason for a curse, this escapes me.

Until not long ago I dwelt – or did I “live”? I ask myself – in a cabinet, in a residence. I can’t say whether the residence was apartment or house, but the patterns of its days were not those of office or shop or – if I was cursed, the curse did not extend here – funeral parlor, but of somewhere someone considers home. After a regular period of complete darkness, a vertical line of yellow light appeared at the edge of what early in my consciousness of myself I understood to be a cabinet door. Not long after, the door opened, and on one side of me was the regular procession vertically of glints of what were clearly stacked plates and bowls, on the other the horizontal run of glints of ranked glasses. A clatter followed, in which I never distinguished clatter of glass from that of plate or bowl. Sometimes then the door remained open awhile, sometimes it closed, then reopened, and new clatters sounded, and the sum of glints either side augmented by one. I understood this sequence to mark breakfast.

The door would close again, and the yellow at its edge would shortly be replaced by the dim gray of daylight attenuated by passage through obstacles into an interior. This practice of the vertical line – with some variation in its color – opening into wider light, then closing back, and this convention of clatters and of the count of glints either side decreasing and increasing recurred in such ways that I understood what was breakfast, lunch, dinner, what the weekend, what the workweek.

Of course, I was not always confined to the cabinet. Two hands, always the same hands, sometimes freed me from it. First one held my neck, then, exactly as my base came clear of the shelf, the other caught me. The hold of the hand on my neck was gentle, no firmer than was necessary to guide me safely onto the support of the other. The fingers were long and slender. I felt them even to the whorls on their tips and the lines across these. I felt the strum of their blood, and, by feeling, somehow heard the pentatone given them by their varied sizes and blood vessels. This tuning passed into and through me as though I had been made for it.

The fingers belonged, I was sure, to a woman I loved. Memory gave me a woman with shoulders a firmament of freckles, across them coiling strands of copper hair, between which I kissed; it wasn’t her. And a woman whose black hair hung straight until it curved out below her waist, and whose silk blouse, when I unbuttoned it slowly, released a scent of vanilla (which I recall not as itself, but as having remarked it in thought); not her, either. Memory did not give me these fingers. I could not be sure they were of a woman I had loved before, although I believed this so. My certainty was in the present fact.

The voice reinforced it. Curious curse, if curse it was: I had been made also for the voice. Spoken or sung, it traversed me exquisitely.

I see no necessity to name her. Why would I delimit her so? But even if she said her name I could not have heard it; I was constituted physically incapable of dividing her voice into words.

She acquainted me with seasons. I came to recognize spring by the realization that I held daffodils, bright green stems smooth against my smoothness, blooms smeared to a yellow corona somewhere above; then irises, the corona purple, the stems a darker green and imparting a suggestion of vertical fiber. Summer was polychrome riot, orgy of texture, pollen yellow-dappling the light through the shoulders of my bulb, even now and then a stowaway insect abandoning concealment to perch a moment at my rim before doing what I never could, leaving to explore the rooms of her life. In fall sometimes it was daisies, massed chaotically, rude in their touch; sunflowers sometimes, the Pleistocene bulk and bristle of their stalks. In these seasons I dwelt often outside the cabinet, on what I knew must be her kitchen table, where at moments I heard the plates, bowls, and glasses that had been my cabinet companions now in faint clinks. Winters, I was returned to the shelf and to the door’s mutating stripe of light. I was brought out sometimes even in this pale season. Twice I knew it was ferns I held. Once, by their woody clack into me and red as of dried blood, I believed it was branchlets of manzañita.

I never kept count of seasons I spent with her. I simply rejoiced in their turns of light.

Here, oh, then, Dante recurs to me:

La prima luce, che tutta la raia,

per tanti modi in esse si recepe,

quanti son li splendori a ch’ i’ s’appaia.

Onde, però che all’atto che concepe

segue l’affetto, d’amar la dolcezza

diversamente in essa ferve e tepe.

In so many ways I received light, in so many splendors.

One winter, however, I was brought from the cabinet and into me went what I knew, from thorn pricks, were roses, and from the corona that seemed so dense that it must descend and crush me, red roses. I had no way of counting stems, but I assign them the cliché: A dozen. Accompanying them was a voice deeper than hers, for which, from which I felt no sympathy, and footsteps bestial enough that – unlike hers – I felt them vibrate up through the table.

This voice, this low thing like the gurgle of a drain, and the taurine footsteps came back three more nights. Then they were gone, and also the roses, and evenings passed without them, and for the first time I felt some joy in my return to the cabinet.

No joy endures. Too soon I was out again, and here again was the cliché of roses. Now I heard the execrable voice, felt the brutish footsteps morning and evening. Rose petals fell, brushing along me in their perishing. I was emptied, washed, returned to my shelf. This did not spare me. The voice, muffled, and the footsteps, dampened, followed me.

I dwelt in darkness, in constant powerless rage. Now I felt sure of the curse, and that it was succeeding to be as had been intended, terrible.

Weeks of this; spring must have approached, the bowed heads of daffodils starting to rise and unfold. The cabinet door opened and closed for meals, but not for me.

Then, nothing. Steps and gurgle gone.

My relief was ineffable.

In the subsequent period of quiescence, which turned through several cycles of seasons, I permitted myself dreams. I was glazier again, harnessed from midback by lanyard to some point of trust and leaning out from slab’s edge, below me the tall plane of my accomplished work. Again and again I caught the new panes of glass, suspended by their vacuum cups and windspun in sunlight, in foglight. With them I caught fistfuls of wind. I brought wind home by armloads to her, its freight of islands and a far continent, its scents of errant waves.

Or I brought her a stolen orange, a stub of bread, a few wild radish leaves, a little silver surfperch with tail a dusky pink.

I tried to dream her words. They trickled through me, still undifferentiated. I dreamt often of speaking three to her. Before the third was quite out she had always vanished from the dream, and the third sounded in a room where I was alone.

I could have dreamt more of her than her hands.

I could not have borne dreaming of more than her hands.

Contemplating this, I understood my error. I saw the pain on the other side of my limits. I could ever be only what I already was: Object of her attention only by occasion, vessel for things ephemeral but beautiful to her. My continuing existence was not a matter of my choice. My only choice was to exist in an unending pain of impossibility, or not in it.

When next a deeper voice came to her kitchen, and stayed, and I felt footsteps again through the table, softened sometimes even and shoeless (I recognized) in mornings, I argued to myself the pointlessness of anger, the idiocy of a sense of curse. I was to serve her happiness.

No one could achieve such self-abnegation perfectly. I achieved it deficiently at first.

I heard his laughter. Though full, it stumbled; bursts and halts alternated. I came to think of it like a three-legged dog, joyous in running, incognizant of the loss that sometimes staggers it.

I heard her laughter more than ever before, and in broader range, from brief and gentle to carillons in full jubilee.

Their laughter freed me. I wished him to be her happiness. I wanted her happiness to span daffodil through daisy to daffodil for something like forever.

Really, it did. The longer it did, the more I feared its end, and for her. At first, I feared something convulsive between him and her. I imagined unbearable shouting. I imagined even the cabinet door opening, and the glints of my shelfside companions flying out, and the brief jagged rings of their shattering. I imagined that others by curse or reincarnation inhabited them as I did this vase, that I had been unable to know them even through years beside them, but that now somehow I heard their screams. I imagined, finally, a hand reaching for me, and my own short flight.

After many years, instead, by increments I noted through only the most devoted attention, the footsteps became infrequent and almost undetectable. The deeper voice weakened. Whispers replaced laughter.

I feared quiet now. I feared correctly. In time, the deep voice and attendant footsteps ceased.

She persisted. I was returned to the cabinet a long while, where I ached for her. When next the door opened and fingers grasped me, they were hers but had changed. They quavered, held me longer in the travel from cabinet to sink, sink to table. The five tones were faint.

One evening, setting me beside the sink, they removed spent flowers from me. They did not return to drain me, to wash and dry me and replace me in the cabinet or charge me anew with blooms.

I have not felt them again.

I did the next morning hear voices not hers in the kitchen.

I have heard no voice since then.

Seasons have passed. The water long ago evaporated from me. The slough of once-living flowers and the carcasses of microbes that had once thrived on them gray my interior in bands and films.

What do I serve now? Whom do I serve? No one witnesses me; I bear witness of the woman I love to no one. I love her now not in her person, but in her memory. So long as I stand unbroken I am a vessel for memory of her.

That this memory is in half-tones and smudges, but for the touch of her fingers, this, yes, is a curse.

That I hold any memory of a woman I have loved, and love still, this is a glory.

And what lover’s perception of the beloved is complete, and completely correct? Whose memory is entire?

I hold her memory alive against the gray of deaths.

I hold it through changes of days, turns of seasons.

I hold it in light upon light upon light.

Photo of Michael Thériault

BIO: Michael Thériault has been an Ironworker, union organizer, and union representative at various levels. He published fiction in his twenties, half a dozen stories in literary magazines, but abandoned it for decades to support first a family, then a movement. In his recent return, since 2022 his stories have been accepted by numerous publications, among them Pacifica Literary Review, Sky Island Journal, and New World Writing. His story “An Invitation to the Gulls” was shortlisted lately for the Leopold Bloom Prize for Innovative Narration. He is a graduate of St. John’s College, Santa Fe and San Francisco native and resident.