Object

This is my mother's breadboard. Thirteen inches by nine. There's a burn mark on one corner. The surface scuffed with an unintelligible geometry of honest scars, the full alphabet of blademarks in the service of bread. Even the underside is scored.

Towards the centre it's worn down almost half an inch lower than the edges. The rake of the everyday. What can have happened there?

In her last years, the hands at this board were gnarled and knotted. How explain that they once have shared Chopin and Schubert, to satisfy some other hunger? Shaking now they might let fall a slice where not intended, like a choked chord. Her feeble eyes would deceive her to start too thick at the moment of incision then taper to a wretched scatter of crumbs. No reference there to previous expertise, to the effortless grace of home.

It was my past too. I'd come in from the street trailing others, all with the boisterous claim of hunger. The buttered chunks piled on this board, devoured, we'd scram back to some traceless game, occupying only the present.

Beckett wrote somewhere that the role of objects is to restore silence.

Comments

[Hugh]

Quietly powerful stuff Kevin. Thanks