The Angry Vase

The vase was self-sufficient because it had been broken and its pieces had been glued together, so the vase looked whole

If it were touched but with the utmost care, it would fall apart and the glue would be noticedHow it was possible for a glued vase to contain water, no one but the bravest flowers dared speak the truth, which sometimes bordered on the flowers providing the vase with that commodity liquid

The Angry Vase

The head of the family had bought the vase, broken it out of negligence, glued the pieces together, done all not only because he did not pay attention to trifle things, not just because he claimed immaculateness in all his authority, but also because he liked forbidding things, and now he forbade anyone else to touch it, fill it with water, or even change the flowers

He was the head of the household and did not want the household to learn that he had made the mistake to break something so fragile and outside his own tastes

He needed the role of example of no other right but to be flawless

The Angry Vase

The interests and dues differed, and the vase had stronger odds against those of the head of the family who was so influential inside the household that he would do anything for the vase to keep its mouth shut

Though vases cannot speak, the pieces could fall apart on their own and reveal the glue on their edges

The Angry Vase

The vase had had a very promising youth and a week of pride on the shelf in a shop where things were sold to people of the middle class only, poorer people looked in through the shop window, and richer people never paid attention to decorations that were not unique articles or fake artifact about whose fakeness they knew nothing about because such people are rarely interested in asking or checking out things, they most commonly check out people

The Angry Vase

There was a picture on the wall opposite the wall at which the vase had a stand

A picture of a man with a pipe watching every move of the vase when it stamped its only foot down in dissatisfaction with the colour of the wall

Both man and pipe saw and heard all in the household, the reality and the stories spoken or thought

The Angry Vase

Sometimes there was just one flower in the vase, and the man with the pipe in the picture on the opposite wall seemed to be contriving a title for a painting he could have made if he were a painter, the best title being ‘A Vase and a Flower’

The Angry Vase

Sometimes the man who might have been a painter because of the pipe, would argue with the view opposite him for another title, ‘A Vase Modern’, maybe because the vase looked really angry, as if one of its rights had been taken from reality because it did not exist in the chart of rights for vases

The Angry Vase

The vase often looked like an empty bag, but it lasted over short intervals because the head of the family in which the vase had found a place, hurriedly bought his wife a bunch of flowers, and placed the bunch in the vase to conceal the places where he had glued the pieces

The Angry Vase

When the vase was empty, the colour of the wall behind it seemed to come into the glue that kept the pieces together, and the glue became so evident that the vase blushed or went blue with emotions, thus imitating the colour of the wall, all because of the glue that was apt to tell secrets

In such times of emptiness, the vase seemed to get integrated in the wall, and looked like an object not only made up of glued pieces, not only empty, but an object of a completely shattered image

The Angry Vase

The vase was going through all the moods that collectively form the temper called anger

Sometimes the colour of the wall behind it seemed too bright, almost sky spring clear blue

The Angry Vase

Sometimes the colour of the wall behind it was the colour of the sea, and the vase hated the sea because everybody knows that vases sink, and the water in them can be called anything close to ‘pool’ but never a ‘sea’

The Angry Vase

At times, the colour of the wall was too yellow because of the paint or because of the sunlight, and everybody knows that vases are concerned about their place with respect to adverse conditions that may deprive them of their guardian role or of their claim on own attractiveness

The Angry Vase

Then the colour of the wall would change to blue again, not because there are not other colours, but because all the hues can be restricted in the ones allowed by light refraction

The Angry Vase

There were moments, when the light was not direct, then the vase looked almost elegant and the flowers in it seemed to dominate the picture

It was as if the vase had an absent from its environment twin whose moods it most randomly imitated or balanced with opposite moods

The Angry Vase

So half the time the vase hated the flowers because they came and went like things of no use to the vase, half the time the vase was bragging that it hosted flowers for which care of keeping them together, for whose benefit to keep them in water, and out of an own care for the welfare of the flowers, the vase was sacrificing much of its own life

Without the vase, the flowers would scatter and disappear into fractions

The Angry Vase

When the sunlight came directly into the room, and because of the angle, reached as far as the margin above which the vase had a stand, the vase looked grim and dark, almost sinister

It seemed to be grinning, like a

party member in times when his party is in opposition, says ‘We’ll see who will laugh last’

The Angry Vase

Sometimes the vase looked really shattered, and the flowers in its looked almost made of plastic, their petals as sharp as blades

The Angry Vase There was a story which the

inventive vase had made up to be ready to tell

It focused on a flower that had been admired so long, by so many guests, that its senses had blurred The flower had tilted the vase to reach a decoration down on the carpet to speak to it

The vase had hardly stayed upright, but the flower had fallen off and been stepped on by the head of the family, who was notable for his weight and heavy pace

The Angry Vase

The vase did not really care if its glued pieces would be seen, it was afraid that the head of the family would dump it the moment he had to confess to having broken it

The pieces of the vase could be seen as beautiful too, but a piece of glass is a piece of glass if it used to belong to a complete article

The Angry Vase

The vase had another story that was about a flower letting down roots into its heart which broke, then the vase pulled together its pieces to keep on living

There was no such flower but the family had a young daughter whose date had married her friend

The Angry Vase

The vase would never say it had been knocked down by the head of the family whose shoulders carried the weights of making a living, buying the duster to erase from under the vase, changing the colour of the wall behind the vase, changing the colour of the wall to which the fastidious vase, who kept his secret, had a view

The Angry Vase

There was a story in reserve, and it said that a flower had turned into a lovely girl and had fled away, leaving the vase shattered in feelings, which story was kept as the most hushed whisper in the thoughts of the vase, probably left until the time when the glue on the pieces would be found by a vigilant eye

The Angry Vase

Once a whisper is started by the very subject of production of stories, the winds and the heat take it in all the possible directions,

If one listens to all the whispered stories about one and the same vase, one may find the vase surrounded by lots of its own images as if coming out of the ring of mirrors that surround the original

The Angry Vase All vases like to whisper a story

about themselves, in this way they control their own image, and no pot can pretend to take their position

A whispered story said that the vase had been in a perfect balance of shape and form, complete in itself, and that a lovely flower had been growing in it like in the egg of a swan

The Angry Vase

But the heat of the season had spoilt the environment in that swan egg, and the chick had chosen to leave earlier

The picture of an imaginary, but quite possible ancestor of a flower swan, hovered in the inventive mind of the vase as permanently as the picture of the past in a frame hung on the wall to stay there until the new residents dumped it in a bag and into the bin with the rubble from reconstruction

The Angry Vase

There was a real sawn, but it was outside, on the small river that ran through the town

Most often the people could see it under the bridge that crossed the river because it was there that the most charitable brought bread to throw down to feed the swan

The small river prided itself on no fish, not even frogs, because the sewage of the town was so clearly chlorinated that no living thing but the swan’s legs could survive in the water

The Angry Vase

The swan was also whispering a story which began like this:There was once upon a time a vase which had once got broken, but someone secretly glued the pieces together to make it back whole

That was a secret from the past of the vase which coincided with the past of a member of the family, but the vase had no hearing for swan stories

The Angry Vase

The story of the swan went on like this:

It happened then, once upon a time, that the vase cared more about the colour of the wall at which it had a permanent place than about the flowers that came and went

The Angry Vase

The swan story, though swans are beautiful creatures, went on a bit cruel to the image of the vase:

That vase didn’t care about whether there was water in it for the flowers, nor if there was no water

The Angry Vase

All the vase cared about was the colours of the walls behind it and in front of it, its own background colour and the colour of the wall looking at which the vase spent day after day

The Angry Vase

The swan sometimes went too far in his story line:

The vase looked at the world in front of it with goggle eyes but said nothing

The Angry Vase

The vase had all the different fits of emotion, and the household passed round it with reverence

Sometimes the vase looked like a hawk ready to attack

The Angry Vase

The river also joined when the swan was telling the story about the vase, but the two whispered story lines were so entangled that the people preferred to throw the swan some crumbs to make it engage itself in a more material integration:

Sometimes the vase took on the stature of a woodpecker proud to be doing the trees an undeserved by them favour

The Angry Vase

Sometimes the vase would converse with itself and argue its dignity out against an inner feeling that it was playing presumptuously proud

But it was always the one with the last word against its own opposition and stamped its bottom so hard on its stand that it bounced up and slid towards the edge every time it found its own self in the midst of all its rights deriving from its past to be exploited in the present

The Angry Vase

The vase was an important item in the household, maybe because the head of the family said it had belonged to an ancestor who had brought it from a trip

This is why the walls were being re-painted all the time for the vase threatened to fall off in self-destruction out of spite for its tastes being ignored

The vase was sure that sooner or later the head of the house would get rid of it to get rid of the necessity to hide that he had broken and glued it

The Angry Vase

It did happen, and one day, the wall behind the vase was painted in all the colours of the flowers that had bloomed and faded in the vase, the vase was dethroned and got a new home in the garden outside, some plants were put in it and watered when the lawn was watered, and the roots of the plants got so deep into the glue that the glue gave way and broke

The Angry Vase

The vase could finally sigh deep and start telling its imaginary stories to the grass blades that were so young after the latest mowing that they would believe anything the old vase told them, especially as they had just one colour, green, and the pieces of the vase had all the colours of the rainbow

The Angry Vase

The grass blades started repeating the stories of the vase, but as grass blades have no imagination to invent stories, nor do they have good memory to remember what they have been told in whisper, they spread stories similar like grass blades are similar to one another, about the empty vase

The Angry Vase

The story was about an empty vase, maybe because the family had gone on holiday and there being no one to water the lawn, the plants in the dilapidated vase died, or maybe they went to sleep to whisper their own stories to the sunlight

The Angry Vase

And when the rain came down in all the colours that were hidden in the rain drops, and bloomed in the flowers which had kept their roots in expectation and hope, the pieces of the angry vase were washed clean and shone in as many colours, as if they were the raindrops of eternal happiness finally found their home on earth

The Angry Vase

When the family came back from holiday and saw the lawn and the flowers outside their garden, they did not notice among the blooms the pieces of the vase glowing happily and finally integrated in life and beauty in a much more natural environment than against a wall painted in the appropriate colour