Rupture, and: Contained Things

Rupture

There were nights I just had to cook marbles. I knew Mother would hit me when she discovered her wrecked frying pan the next morning. We had no special oil for frying glass, and cooking only with dry heat did much harm to the pan's surface. I had just begun learning English in school. The word harm never appeared in any of our textbooks. All the same, I would reach for a jar of marbles on the spice shelf. The cheapest kind for children, each marble held a primary-colored flame at its core, vivid as a pupil. I heaped them on my palm, listening to them squeak as they rubbed together. No one taught us how to love foreign words, nor the logic behind their syntax. Soon, marbles would start their rattle and roll in the pan. In the workshop below, Father was building a crystal radio on the cusp of two Japanese eras. The emperor he had once believed was divine was dying, said the news. No longer a god, but a symbol emptying itself. Blindly I kept cooking in the midnight kitchen. The moment the heated orbs grew ready to pop, I transferred them to a bowl of ice water—the sizzle, the crackle inside each glass sphere! Fissures, silver scars, radiated: nebulous damage contained within clear little balls.

Contained Things

They speak to me: paperweights, snow globes, crystal dumplings in Chinatown, Super Balls with glittering confetti or gnarled rainbows inside. Glass eggs. Cornell's cabinet full of vials housing medicine for the soul: a speckled conch, colored sand, miniature maps.

Once I was in Lyon, sitting in a loud café, spooning île flottante with a man I was interested in and a woman who was to sleep with him that night, had they not done so already. While they drank from the same bottle of wine, I could taste nothing—not the land of egg whites nor the pale puddle of a sad custard sea underneath. Without being tipsy, I could hear the wings of invisible bees between two people. Over their shoulders was a spherical vase on top of the counter. It had no opening, and, in place of flowers, it held a goldfish in water. The fish was never still. Its double fin flowed like red brocade in circles. And that was enough. The man and the woman, English and French; the girl, stuck with a lousy dessert, speaking nothing; and the flaming tongue barely contained inside the perfect dome of glass.