Through the looking glass

My name is Bartolome de las Casas. In 1484 I was born. More I do not know. I do not know if this place is hell or hallucination or the future.

The stub of candle gutters low – the stone walls closing in. I tap the barometric weatherglass – I know the pressure. But Goethe devised it in 1822 – not long after Lord Nelson raised the glass to his blind eye and announced he did not see the order to retreat. Some people never do.

There are two glasses – one contains ayahuasca: Mama Ayahuasca, brewed from the vine of death, gift of the jungle, who shows us horrors before she shows us: oneness; the sense of life; the feathered mosaic of weeping flowers; the singing, bird-headed women; energy-essence; numinous face of God raging through my electric, crystalline body.

When Cristobal Colon sailed to those forested islands dripping with life and rain, he wrote in his awful log –  ‘made eight miles an hour during eight glasses and three before the watch began …’ Some poor sailor turned the damned glass over every hour for the ten weeks it took.

It was another Italian invented spectacles – in 1286. Google Glass came later I think. The stub of candle gutters low.

Mama Ayahuasca cannot show me horrors. Have you seen a person burnt alive, have you seen three thousand people raped and mutilated and beheaded in a day? When we cut the hands off the children and tied the hands around their necks – you would be surprised how much blood there is, how long the children live … but not by how they scream.

There is always the other glass – the one commander Colon on his damned caravel put his hand out to. That is horrors.

I hear arpeggios – is it Einstein on the Beach?

Barnaby McBryde

The honest truth

Howard Tish was a profiteer, which doesn't mean what I did was right.  The ‘son’ of Tish & Son, Rare Glass Dealers, Howard had inherited his father’s honorable and respected business, and turned it into a buy low/sell high emporium. He was a shark, who preyed on the desperate and the vulnerable. 

“A Daum Cameo and Enamel vase for one fifty,” he once boasted after a ‘home consultation’.  Or “A complete Depression glass tea set, they practically gave it away.” 

   

Despite his cupidity, I adored working there. Each morning, the moment when I illuminated the cabinets was, quite simply, joyful. Crystal goblets sparkled. Jewel coloured bowls in fluid shapes and hand painted vases were displayed like works of art. I dusted and replaced each delicate object, lingering in that final week over six rare Medici wine goblets, palest pastels rimmed in gold. 

Final week? Oh, yes. I was to be ‘let go’, Howard declared one Thursday afternoon, hovering anxiously while six American cruise ship passengers passed a rainy half hour in the shop. Online retail, he said, was the future. No more exorbitant rental, or sticky-fingered customers. No more time wasting tyre kickers.  He would pay a fortnight’s wages, but I would pack the stock and finish tomorrow.

I’m an honest person – perhaps every thief believes that. Was it vengeance, you may ask? Possibly. Compensation for seventeen years of faithful service?  A valid justification, some would say. In the gloom of that final June morning, I wrapped the eggshell blue Medici goblet and stowed the package in the recycling bin outside the back door for collection later that night.

One simple act of deceit continues to give me twofold delight, for my gain and Howard’s loss in equal measure.  He was a mean bastard, and that’s the honest truth.

Rosemary McBryde