Claudia Monpere
Aria bought a stunning kintsugi bowl for her younger sister’s wedding, handmade with red clay, 24 K gold lacquer filling the cracks. But she fell in love with it, and a few days before her sister’s wedding, she tore off the silver wedding wrap and removed the bowl, displaying it in her home office. “Huh,” her husband said. “Wasn’t that your sister’s gift?” Aria told him he was confused, which he often was when it came to objects instead of ideas. The substitute wedding gift, a small bronze sculpture of an embracing couple, was perfectly lovely, but when her sister went on and on about it, guilt swelled in Aria. When she saw the sculpture prominently displayed in her sister’s living room she felt even worse; it looked mass manufactured—although it wasn’t. But her sister cherished it.
Aria often thought of confessing to her sister and giving her the kintsugi bowl, but it never happened. However, when her sister had babies—twins!—Aria bought the cutest, softest baby clothes she could find for her new nieces. Organic cotton. Bamboo fabric. She babysat often. Aria and her husband had been trying for years to have a baby, had consulted all sorts of specialists. Their sex life was a lab experiment: needles and microscopes and petri dishes instead of flesh and pleasure.
When her sister got pregnant a second time, Aria stole the sculpture of the embracing couple, hiding it under her bed, feeling like she’d betrayed the kintsugi bowl. But damn if she didn’t get pregnant within a few months. Her sister was terribly upset about the missing sculpture but so busy with a newborn and the toddler twins and a husband who worked too hard that she soon forgot about it. Aria cradled her new niece, Rosie, awed by her tiny toes and fingers. Blossoming in her pregnancy, Aria couldn’t help herself from feeling glee that her sister, who had always been the pretty one, looked haggard and overweight. She felt guilty with these thoughts and in her third trimester, stealthily returned the sculpture.
Aria should have known. She’d always loved fairy tales. Less than a week later, her baby was stillborn at twenty-six weeks. Placental abruption. The nurse wrapped Grace in a blanket and Aria held her. She caressed the tiny, soft face. She studied Grace’s little feet that had kicked so vigorously once.
For a long time, Aria couldn’t get out of bed. Her husband cried with her, offered tender words and hugs, but her only comfort came from the kinsugi bowl that once had been shattered. How? Flung in anger? An accident? She storied her bowl, stroking the gold-filled cracks. Something broken turned beautiful.
After months of grief for her stillborn child; after more months for everyone to see her eating again, exercising again, laughing and making pillow forts with the twins, making glorious music with eleven-month-old Rosie as they banged pots and pans; after Aria’s husband felt confident he could leave on a business trip, Aria left her house at 2:00 am. Her car was packed, her sister’s key in her purse. The house slept. Aria lifted Rosie from her crib. The drowsy child barely woke, but Aria put a pacifier in her mouth just in case. In the crib, she placed the kintsugi bowl. She imagined the gold lacquer glistening, spinning a story to her sister who would cry, of course, but who would heal and maybe, even, be grateful someday that she had given Aria the greatest gift a sister could give.
#
Claudia Monpere lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and teaches at Santa Clara University. Her flash appears or is forthcoming in Split Lip, Craft, Milk Candy Review, Smokelong Quarterly, The Forge, Atlas and Alice, and elsewhere. She received the 2023 Smokelong Workshop Award and has been nominated multiple times for a Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. Find her on Twitter @ClaudiaMonpere.