BLOWN GLASS: A LOVE STORY

The Barn is what they all called it, but it had never been a working barn, only some rich city couple’s idea of one that was made from the start as a gallery. At first they specialized in paintings but no one who worked there could acquire memorably and so most of the drab portraits and seascapes didn’t move, just sank back into the walls. Then the wife of the couple announced that she knew everything about sculpture, and that era was a little better, some nice boats and mama ducks sold, but it ended in bust just like the paintings. The rich couple cleared out then back to the city and sold it to Hank, who had an eye for nothing except glassware, and also a glass eye. He stood by the front, lip up with snoose, and announced colors and locations of recent acquisitions to everyone coming in, one tailored recommendation per customer, diviner-style. “Red by the back window,” he said to the Antropols. “Green, outer restroom wall,” to the Sidneners. Garrick hoisted a hand as he approached Hank. “Bluish,” Hank said, “streaks of ocean, near the stack of postcards.” Garrick was never the same after that. The piece Hank meant was shaped like a tall teardrop, with a base that went more one way than the other, and Garrick was long gone the moment he saw it. Its beauty was in line and hue but something else, too, something that drove straight through his eyes and down the stem of a soul he had not previously been sure he even had. He breathed heavily through a suddenly dry mouth. He was afraid to lean in close and see the price, and he should have been. Garrick was a teacher at a local school that insisted it was an academy, and the vase was eleven hundred, as much as six months of bandaging and medicating the piece-of-shit car that took him back and forth to work. He could not justify the expense any more than he could deny that it was the purest love he had ever felt. But life without access to this beauty was no life at all. and so he convinced his best friend Frank to buy it and visited Frank’s house as often as he could, caressing the vase when Frank went to the kitchen or the bathroom. Just to see light come through the swannish neck of the thing: life wasn’t all bad, was it? 

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas