Somewhere

Cora Enterline

Somewhere, in a studio that echoes with the patter of rain on a steel roof, a potter is hunched over a spinning wheel of clay. A kiln in the back corner radiates heat and the windows let in no light. It has rained like this for eight days straight. His foot taps a rhythm on the pedal: one, two, three even pumps. This time next week, the gray disc, now centered on the wheel, will be a pasta bowl or a flower vase or a seder plate. The man’s hands are slick with wet clay. His back is a soft, curved thing in the low light. 

It is Sunday morning and his wife will be leaving the cathedral, now. She may already be in her car. She will not make it home. But the man does not know this, now, sitting in the serenity that spins out from the wheel like creation. He pulls his hands back, bringing the clay spinning up in a tight column toward his nose. His phone will still be on the other side of the room when he misses the policeman’s call. 

Somewhere on a slick road in the rain, a woman is going home in a car for the last time. Soon she will sail out of her seat, through the glossy window and down towards a shallow river in a shower of bitter rain and shards of glass. She does not know this, either. She has just placed the last dollar in her wallet in a wicker basket, has just sung a final psalm and confessed her freshest sins. Church bells ring out the time behind her: eleven o’clock. She feels clean and raw, like a baby emerged from a chlorine pool, like the windshield of her car scraped dry, again, by the squeak of her wipers. 

In this, her last hour on earth, the woman is listening to public radio, a segment about rising sea levels. The world is ending, she remembers a street preacher yelling. The Messiah is coming. The scientist on the radio has the same message: the world is ending. New York City will be underwater in 50 years. He does not warn (promise?) of a messiah. She wonders where she will be then. She wonders how she will tell her husband she is leaving. Maybe when she gets home, she thinks. Maybe tomorrow. She cannot promise him a messianic return, either. 

The potter pushes at the lip of his spinning column, fanning the edge out like a spreading wing. Like some muddy tropical bird taking flight. He thinks about the colors he will paint this bowl. He imagines revealing it to his wife when it emerges from the kiln in a week. Imagines buying her flowers for the first time in years. Imagines her return home in the cold rain. The clay slips and folds in his hands like the soft, crepe paper of a prayer book. 

The woman’s car approaches a bridge in the dim light. Headlights glisten like little beacons in neat rows of red and white. Too quickly, a car with glaring headlights turns towards her. White light fills the car. Blindly, she veers off and her car crashes through the bridge’s barrier. She flies forward out of her seat before she can trace what has happened. As she’s falling through the wet air, down towards the shallow river, she’s thinking about all of this: the rising sea levels, the return of some messiah, the streaky glare of lights through the rain on her windshield, the last 50 years of New York City. She does not know what is up or down in the fast, gray wetness of the rain. She does not think about her husband. She does not register the pain. She does not scream.

The potter fingers the bowl flimsily, and the edge catches and folds in on itself. He exhales as the vase plate bowl cracks and collapses. He does not know yet, that he will replay this morning a million times as if he is a deity outside of time. As if he can be the god of this day, watching the car and the vase come apart at the same time. His foot lets up on the pedal, and the formless mound of clay slows to a stop. He brings a fist down on top of it. A second fist. With another heavy exhale he stands and walks to the other side of the studio. Picks up his phone. Sees he has five missed calls. Realizes his wife should have been home 30 minutes ago. Still shaken, now for a reason he doesn’t yet understand, he touches the number and brings the phone slowly to his face. He has wondered, before, if this would feel like relief. Rain pats down on the trees through the window. The church bell, somewhere, tolls out one o’clock. Somewhere a woman is lying, already stiff and pale, in a morgue. A mortician is busy at work and in another hour he will advise a man that she is not in a condition to be viewed. A horrible furnace burns in another kind of studio. Tomorrow the Sabbath will end.