Words Written on a Thrown Vase. fiction by Rachel J Fenton

Words Written on a Thrown Vase 

Teen was a word still used to describe her when you met her at the university library,  your place of work. Teen is the word that describes the number of years you are older than her. I called you a predator when I worked that out, but you disagreed because you said she’d already fucked a man who was older than you were at the time. You didn’t say if he had children too. You didn’t agree with my assertion that being fucked by a man who was older than you when she was younger than she was when she met you only made her a victim of two predators. At the very least there was a power imbalance, I said. No. You were adamant. You didn’t say she was on a school trip, when you met her, visiting the university library as a prospective future student, or that you gave a talk to her class, singled her out in front of her teacher, but perhaps she wasn’t the only one you made eyes at on that occasion. Your skill for making eyes at people is remarkable, I suspect you of having compound vision. What do you think of that? You like science fiction. You like to write about the future. Did you see this coming? I could write a book about what you liked. You liked to mark my work even though I wasn’t one of your students. Once, in bed, after reading Keats to me but before you almost dislocated my hip, you told me I still looked like a teenager. We have a similar age difference but you looked just ten years older than me when I was forty. You never liked my inability to lie. You lied to make people refuse to listen to me because you couldn’t stop the truth from spilling out of me. Even so, I will not repeat what you said, about her to me in your attempt to distract me from asking her what you had told her about me, unless she asks me to tell her, what specifically you found so ugly that even you who would fuck anyone could not bring yourself to put it there, to her face. I was not the only one you spoke of her to. You discussed her with your special friend in the mail that you sent the morning after you met me. We broke up briefly when I discovered that. But you always found a way to draw me back in, by making me think I was losing parts of myself that only you could fix. Like kintsugi, I could be remade beautiful in your hands. But Keats understood more about beauty in his young life than you and your special friend have gathered from your century in university libraries, all the books you’ve quoted: ‘Truth is beauty, beauty truth.’ A vase can be formed in three pulls, is made of earth. You can’t break this. 

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Rachel J Fenton won the New Zealand Society of Authors Laura Solomon Cuba Press Prize with her first novel, Between the Flags. She lives in Te Waipounamu where she is Curator of Janet Frame House and works in an Op-shop. 

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