YOU. THE BOWL SPINS A LITTLE, A LOPSIDED CENTRIFUGE,as it leaves your fingers. The slick smooth of the china grasped a bit on the friction of your fingertips, on the oil and the fingerprints. And the bowl floats a moment, floats from that friction with just a little loft hanging there as your brain understands how it must maneuver your hand to catch it, but your body won’t move. The anticipation.
The bowl is your parents’. A gift for their wedding; for their commitment to one another. White with a platinum lip, white that is like a mirror it is so smooth reflecting the room in a convex ghostly hue. You are there in the spinning hub, and so is the kitchen table, and the globe with the three 60-watts, and the melted ice cream residue, and the spoon, and the dishwasher which contains all of the everyday bowls which you would normally use. And so is the tile floor, and so is your look of anticipation.
The bowl is gone even as it hangs there. You understand this. The china, the baked mud, the mud drawn from the earth same as you, is still there and will always be, most likely, but that craftsmanship is unsalvageable. The fine-spun platinum wire will remain intact proving that there once was something there, even hinting at the shape intended.
You reach and grab, once even twice, but you don’t even touch the dish.
You will pick up the bigger pieces, and then you will see the sharp shards of dust buried in the grout of the tile. You will run through the list of possibilities: glue, sculptors, there are only so many ways to fix a dish.
You sit on the floor, like a hurdler pressed down on the tile in your child-only flexibility, and you pull the pieces together in a pile. What is there left you can do? It’s broke.
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