The Vase by Dennis Kohler

She bought it at the annual Presbyterian rummage sale. The small handwritten tag said 75 cents. The little girl who was watching the money box smiled at the 25 cent tip. In the end, they both got what they wanted. The little girl was a dollar closer to going to college, and the old woman got a small part of her childhood back.

The vase was heavy in her hands. Inside the heavy glass walls, there were bubbles, trapped like flies in the ancient amber of the land of its birthplace. In her memory, however, it was transparent and flawless. She studied each of the defects, trying to remember their source. Like so many other things in her life, her memory was as flawed as the glass.

She walked it home in existential kinship, held close to her chest. Filled with flowers on her kitchen windowsill, it made her think of her mother. It was a memory she knew would make her happy during the short few years she had left on earth. So much of her youth escaped, but in a miracle of circumstance she knew the vase was the exact one her mother carried across the ocean from Russia. It was a living thing that spoke to her. The glass was what convinced her, deep yellow, it flowed at will, and as the sunlight came through the window, and through it to the floor, she was once again a young child in her mother’s upstairs apartment. Mother always had flowers, even when they didn’t have heat.

Inside that frozen hovel was where she first saw the fairies.

She remembered them dancing through the flour on the floor of her mother’s kitchen. While her mother cooked, they danced, and while they danced, she watched. There for her entertainment, they traced pictures with thin white lines, and she forgot the cold, and hunger. In her later life, there was always the memory of them. It amused and haunted her as she looked forward to growing old, and forgetting, and soon, very soon, dying, and though the thought of it haunted her, she wanted to see them once again.

One last time before she would accept death.

-x-

Home, alone, sitting with her pale spindly arms stretched across the hand carved arms of her dead husband’s favorite chair, she smiled and gazed at the vase in the windowsill, and she waited.

Just past midnight, they appeared.

She clapped as they skated across her own polished wood floor. Unlike her mothers, its sheen spoke of money. Her husband had willed her a life of luxury. The little creatures danced and sang a lover’s tune she hadn’t heard since childhood, then formed ranks and swirled in a scene of majestic, though minute beauty.

Somewhere between the second and third promenade, she fell asleep, a smile stretched across her too thin face.

-x-

The widow woke to what became her longest day. She wanted more than anything for the moonlit evening to whisper to the vase and beg the return of the fairies.

Her checklist of duties for life, a remedy against failing memory, did not show fairies. It showed pills, food for herself and fish, checking mail and reading the paper. The list was her treadmill for life, never changing, a shield against a part of her not trusted.

At night, she welcomed them with smiles. They did not dance, but stood, dressed as a memory from her childhood. She leaned toward them and wondered how their delicate wings could fit under the rough wool coats.

The closer she looked, the fainter the wings became, then she blinked, and they were gone.

She fell inward toward the scene, tried to scream then felt stillness. She looked up to see her mother, standing in the cold kitchen. The smell of beet soup and flour filled the air. She remembered how much she hated the smell of beets.

The room looked much smaller than it had from the eyes of a five-year-old. That was before…

Her memory faltered, less now, then it hit her. Her mother would put her under the table, she turned her head, and wrap it with blankets, an improvised prison.

The sight of herself as a baby dropped her jaw and put her back to the wall. She waited until the voices rose above her frantic heart.

The words were Russian, but felt like home in her ears, as she subconsciously, translated them to the language of the majority of her life.

“If you were more of a woman, I wouldn’t need to go out,” the man said – her father said.

“The money you spend on women is more than I need to feed the baby.”

“You work at the sewing mill,” he said. “what about that money?

Then the baby saw her mother, accidentally, turn ever so slightly toward the cupboard above the sink. The motion was barely noticeable, but noticeable enough.

The woman, who she had spoon-fed in the last days before her death, put herself between the man and his desires.

He threw first the woman to the ground, and then the cupboard off its hinges. Near the back was an aspirin bottle that didn’t rattle at his touch.

Her mother screamed while he twisted off the lid and emptied the contents of the bottle into his meaty hands. He looked down as if to say, “Is this all,” then for good measure gave her the back of his hand.

She could feel her mother hope for his death as the empty bottle bounced to a stop.

The baby’s eyes lifted to the vase.

-x-

She woke in the chair with a head full of memories of her mother – memories of how, after father had left them the last time, things were worse. In their minds, however, the world was brighter because of hope. They had each other.

The nothingness that she had come to expect when looking at old photos or reading the clippings had been replaced with honest memory, memory of loss, memory of growing, but most of all, memory of the night that her own father had stolen the rent money. What happened after that, she didn’t know, but the memory of that night was more vivid now than any day from the last five years.

It was a memory, that, inside the great absence of other memories stood alone. She gave it a chance to bake in her mind for a while, trying to deconstruct it, to make it into something that wasn’t true. She wanted it to be false, a half-truth at best. She wanted it to become a figment of her imagination, but in the end, she admitted it was not. It was real, it had happened, and of all the things that she might have remembered, she wondered why the fairies had shown her this.

She waited until nightfall, hoping that they would undo that cruelness of choice. In their kindness, perhaps, they might return her to the comfort of emptiness.

The music made her heart leap at the thought of seeing the grand promenade, but there were again only three figures.

Her mother was the same, but the man wore newer, much nicer clothing.

She fell and looked out through the slots of a bedroom door. She remembered the men, and the sounds from her mother, but most of all she remembered the feeling of the revolver in her hand, and how it was that she mourned for the loss of her own youth. Thinking about killing to protect her own mother from the violence of certain men was no way for a 12-year-old to grow up.

When the man started to beat her mother, she felt the pull of puppet’s strings. First the door, then the gun, then the bone chilling fear that the sound of the shot would bring the police.

Her eyes turned to the vase.

After the mopping, cutting, and rolling of carpet they were sorry to lose, they went through his wallet. They saw then that the police, though in somewhat of a disconnected state, were already there. Next to the driver’s license was a policeman’s union card.

Sergeant William Pulzaki.

The vase was the last thing her mother packed.

-x-

The old woman woke, again, to new memories. She remembered vividly the years that followed. The seven cities, the constant parade of men, and most of all, she remembered how her mother had turned from a woman who she loved into something different.

A tear dripped from her eye at the thought of drugs and whoring, and what her mother had become in the end.

She only ever wanted to dull the pain of living.

The vase was where she left it. The petals, fallen from flowers 72 hours cut, blanketed the window sill with color. They, too, would soon dry and lose what connection to life remained. If she left them on the white painted, wood, she knew from experience, they would leave stains, colors only the last reminder of what they had been. Like herself, she imagined, they would be nothing, and like herself, there would be nobody left to remember what had been.

After the flowers, and petals were gone, she held the weight of the vase in her hands. Empty, it felt lighter than when she bought it. Lighter perhaps through freedom from burden.

The vase’s color was less than it had been when she first found it in among the boxes of books. Instead of the multicolored matrix of bubbles in its surface, there were now only two bubbles, much larger than the others.

She watched them move in tandem, up from bottom to handle then across distended belly to rim. Then they hesitated for a moment before the first launched itself into the air.

The room became cold and dark.

This time, there stood a single fairy.

He grew bigger and bigger as she grew smaller, then he was her mother’s newest of many. Mother didn’t notice how he looked at her daughter when they were alone. They were alone that night. Mother was working the late shift at the clothing factory. He calculated how many hours could take as he turned the bedroom doorknob. Covers pulled up around her head did nothing to protect her.

The pain of it was too much to bear, and she mentally insulated herself against the thought of what it was. She raised her eyes to the vase.

A new bubble formed inside its thick glass walls.

-x-

A snap and the second bubble broke into the air.

Her husband.

In old age he had been the last sanctuary in her drift from absent-minded, to forgetful, to a point of more bad days than good.

Her husband, the white knight, had rescued her from her mother’s bad habits of men and drugs. He had saved her from a carbon copy life.

Now, she thought about her white knight, she thought about his smile, and his constant, caring, availability.

Then, it all came back to her. His dalliances, his drinking, his double set of ledgers. All of it she had forgiven. All but a single night. She had left to choose an Easter ham. Both cook and maid had the weekend off to spend with their families. She returned for a forgotten pocket book and heard the unmistakable sounds of the closet and her childhood.

Her eyes turned to the vase and her faeries. She watched them dance, heard the music, and forgot.

At 70, she was whole. A lifetime of pain and anguish once stored was now returned. Rage and hate led to the harsh mathematics of memory. In her last minutes she paid an honest, but far too dear, price.

She fought first the compression in her heart, then the paralysis in her limbs. She tried to stand, but her body was no longer under the control of her fading mind. Through a last act of will, she was granted a few seconds of lucidity. With her last breath, she pulled the vase down to the cold wooden floor.

She closed her eyes to the sound of breaking glass.

-x-

After all she had been through in their life, after what her father had done to her, after everything she had done to herself, it was almost too much to bear.

Her mother, the stately septuagenarian widow, barely remembered her name, but she was still her mother. She looked so small on the hardwood floor of the big kitchen.

The daughter pulled out a chair, sat down and cried.

Then, her eyes lifted to the vase.

She didn’t recall her mother owning one like it. Maybe, she thought, it was something that her father, damn him to hell, had brought home from his travels.

Her father – she looked at the vase and shook her head at the tricks that a solitary bubble played with the light – their white knight.

Dennis Kohler

Image: Yellow crackled glass vase from Google images.