Movement

There was a woman who was surrounded by beautiful, beautiful things.

She was in the kitchen, sitting on her customary wooden stool that was beautiful because it was hand-made and the wood used was recovered tropical wood that was otherwise illegal to own. It was gorgeous. The seat of the stool had the most burnished finish and it glowed with tropical-wood red and black and brown, a better finish than the rest of the stool: this was because of her ass. The sitting had buffed the seat of the thing to this almost impossible glow, and she was not unaware that her ass making something more beautiful was a metaphor for how she lived.

Her ass represented her money in that sense. It was a strange metaphor, but an apt one; everything in her highrise apartment was caressed with money to the point where it gained more depth and color, like the stool. She had enough money to surround herself with whatever she wished, and she wished to be enveloped with beauty. Once she retired from the custom furniture trade where she'd brokered the uncomfortable and unusable dining "chairs" or copper-and-titanium "sinks" to the decorators of the super-rich, and after the death of her beloved, wealthy husband, she toured the world slowly so that she could pick every item for her beautiful apartment with the utmost care and deadly patience. She knew enough to look and leave, not standing and fussing with some gallery owner or impoverished artisan; she looked at things that were clearly lovely enough for anyone and then leave. This was frustrating to the gallery owners and infuriating to the artisans. They each would think of her as lonely or stupid or tasteless over their respective bowls of noodles-the gallery owner's bowl overpriced and rife with ridiculous ingredients and the artisan's reconstituted from a noodle-brick- but the woman would usually come back within twelve months and pay for the item. To the gallery owner she paid the haggled-down price, and to the artisan she paid four times more than what they'd asked for. She had a sense of justice.

So the coffee she drank- supermarket coffee, since she'd lost her ability to taste things years before- was from a coffee mug that had been commissioned from a Master in South Korea who made tea cups for coffee and then glazed them a green-blue that had been mixed from rare and site-specific minerals. The living room was floored in old barn-beams that had been split and re-assembled, then gently polished. The couch in that room was a contrasting leather. Every window was floor-to-ceiling, and had a swaying piece of modernist stained glass hanging in front of it so that the apartment was filled with various colors that changed slowly during the sun's progression. The kitchen appliances were from Nordic countries and built for eternity in whimsical shapes, and they were so heavy that they were hard to clean beneath. This was not a problem, since those that visited her did not ask for espresso or fresh pasta- the whole place was for looking, not touching.

Later that day, the woman's friend Angel came over. She brought deli sandwiches and they ritualistically ate over the wax paper they'd been wrapped in, being very careful about dribbling thousand-island dressing since it was quick to stain. There was no way anything would ever stain the triple-sealed Italian marble countertop in the kitchen, but since it was ice-white with gentle ribbons of cobalt and completely crackless they took no chances.

"I love this place," Angel said. She really did. "It makes me feel so calm. Or really it makes me feel kind of awed, in a good way. It's church here."

The woman smiled- Angel was such a charmer. "I know. I feel that way too. It makes me move slower."

"You never told me that. I thought you were just a slow mover. Someone who moves slowly out of neccessity."

"I could move faster if I needed to" said the woman. She remembered her basketball days from college fondly- she'd had less money and less ass then.

"But you have to be slow here. It's so beautiful. You have exceptional taste." Angel sighed, since she envied this in her friend. Angel thought she would do the same as the woman if she had the money, and search out that which was exquisite to bring to her home. When she was being honest with herself she thought that she'd buy theater tickets.

After Angel left, the woman washed her coffee mug very carefully, and dried it with her hand-embroidered raw silk dish towel. She was not in the present: she was thinking again about moving faster, and how that felt, and how it made you so focused that you knew in your cells that the ball would come to you just now, and the shot you just took would score, and your hand would still be up pointing toward the hoop when it went in and you would strain to hear the whoosh right before the silence broke. Her hand slipped. The mug crashed on the kitchen floor, so that there were only three left. The woman looked at the shards of the beautiful coffee mug and knew she should have been bereft, but in the shock she just kept picturing a basketball.