"Kitchen" 10/27/16

And here was the bowl —

a curious, misshapen thing her mother’d brought from India, where she’d danced under the stars and moon and sung songs native to a place for which she had no affinity. All she’d thought to bring back was a bowl, for she couldn’t fit the moon, and the stars in her luggage. So on the third day of her visit she went to a shop that sold old wooden things, and she bought one for herself and one for her daughter:

a curious, misshapen thing, cracked in three places. Worse for wear but smooth to the touch. It had existed somewhere else but now it could be bought and so that is what her mother did. It was very much a bowl, if you say the word a hundred times it starts to sound how this bowl looked. And the daughter, whose bowl it became, had no use for such things with cracks and scratched wood, no matter how smooth and no matter that it held the moon and the stars which had held the song for her mother. And so the song died, a damp and dark death sitting on the shelf under the kitchen counter, one which no one but the House heard. And the House held a vigil for the song as the girl attended her mother’s, who had died singing an old rhyme that she had sung for the girl on days when the song was feeble in her heart.

‘The river is flowing

Flowing and growing

The river is flowing

Down to the sea.

Mother, carry me

Your child I will always be

Mother, carry me

Down to sea.’

And the girl was sad when she returned, and she walked to the kitchen.

And she knelt down below the kitchen counter and she whispered the song straight to the shelf.

And she opened the cabinet door and took out the curious bowl, brushed it with a soothing hand,

And she watched the dust fall as carefully as she had brushed it.

And she sang her mother’s song which had become hers to her bowl for years and years.

And she withered away and her dust became part of the House.

And the bowl was a bowl and dust was dust and still the House remained.