I’d been saving up to have a cabinet custom-made. When I went to retrieve them from the linen closet, I found the empty box. There were twenty-seven weights. Viv must have stowed them away in her coat and in her enormous handbag, accustomed to toting large quantities of glass. Did she pawn them or did she launch them over a bridge? Did she sell them to buy more, full bottles, or did she find a body of water and wade into it, pulled down by the frozen landscapes? I preferred to think she traded them in to an antiques dealer and used the few thousand dollars to move to Mexico, maybe to one of those inland artist communities where living was still cheap. All I had left was the millefiori—“a thousand flowers” in Italian—that I kept on my office desk. Within its crystalline dome there were cross-sections of moulded glass rods, stretched and sliced like hard candy to form a multicoloured carpet. The rod faces had flowers on them. There was a silhouette of a dancing devil inside the largest, middle rod, which had fascinated me as a child.
What do You think about The Gallery Of Lost Species?
