AMONG THE DENIZENS of Frangea chipped crockery found its way by natural erosion from the parlours of the grand to the lesser parlours of those not too proud of cracks and hard usage.
Yet there came a time when enough was enough and a favourite bowl lost its will to live and shattered into curious fragments like a parting of the ways. Some pieces, usually the larger, were gathered together and thrown away whereas the smaller were ground down to become part of the landscape and were forever lost, detached for all eternity from what they once were, though still linked by some tenuous phenomenon some called entanglement.
The shards that remained however took on a new life. It was not simply enough to be landfill or decorative surprises in concrete walling. Some awaited rediscovery as historical artefacts, or puzzles of the past.
Some became symbols of broken lives in need of mending, a wrong put right, an outrage avenged. Tears that should never have been shed.
Wackie Mandrake had an eye for colour, especially the bloodshot left one, and a taste for patternwork. He could see a rough triangular shape glazed on one side with chrome yellow and passionfruit pink and somehow it would blossom into a great vase of extraordinary beauty. In a frenzy of searching every single piece of this masterpiece might be recovered, glued and displayed as something of meaning. It would be like, he hoped, the bringing back of departed ghosts.
That summer was a time when biscuitware and toned clays in a kaleidoscope of bits rained down upon Wackie in his rummaging among other people's leavings. His rucksack bulged with findings and in his eagerness to return to the work table of his dusty shack in a cleft of the bay he tripped and added a few more puzzle pieces to his horde.
'You've been busy,' his friend and non-silent partner in the game of fragments said as Wackie disburdened himself of his pickings. Pieces were rough-sorted there and then as Mold Ampit watched on, a beer can in one hand and the other on a hip in a pose of casual watchfulness. Around them in the shack were the prizes of a decade of searchings. The glory of the collection was a dinner plate, four fifths complete, wired and netted together in a patchwork of endeavour. A foot across it was with the most vivid blood red patterning that looked like murder among the glazes. Except where there were missing bits. A bullet hole shape ominously told its own story. Vases there were too on shelves, things that seemed to start with the base and then give up less than halfway up as if the maker had become tired of their creation and moved on to other more rewarding projects.
'I got another bit of the chrome yellow,' Wackie said.
'Lemme see,' Mold replied, sliding onto the workbench by his friend. The wooden top was covered in dried glue and curious stains and now glinted with pieces of ceramic puzzles that enthralled these men for the stories they might unfold.
Mold Ampit reached up and took down off a shelf a tired vase base that glowed with colour, most especially an intense yellow.
It looked for all the five pieces stuck together more like an ashtray to him than a glorious receptacle for precious liquids Wackie insisted it was meant to be. Mold placed it carefully next the fragments that had been scooped out of his friend's rucksack.
There was the precious piece Wackie crowed over. A curved, edged thing, glowing that familiar yellow. With trembling fingers he drew it to the piece to see how they matched. Mold could see the new piece had a lip to it, a rounded edge that showed a significant detail of its true shape. Wackie, admitting this, held the lipped piece above the serrated base edges and imagined the rise and swell of the body of this most glorious vase, picturing sinuous curves and a graceful outline that once might have adorned a gilded mansion of the Faceless Ones. It was an inspiring dream and lifted his spirits with the ambitious imaginings.
Mold Ampit was not so optimistic.
'Let me try,' he said and tenderly prised the curving shape from his friend's trembling fingers.
Turning the base round and round thoughtfully, a familiar flaw presented itself. The shadow of the piece he held cast a knowing silhouette upon the table beside a life's work, for how long had his dedicated friend taken to gather those five other fragments?
Mold tilted the new piece so the smooth edge was uppermost, twisted his wrist so it hovered above the base and then slowly, knowingly, let the lipped fragment descend upon the other. There was a clink and a coming together and a transformation, for the new piece fitted perfectly on one of the jagged edges.
The two men stared at this revelation for it fitted so snugly it held itself in place.
'It's an ashtray,' Mold said quietly, reverently.
'A dainty little thing, ain't it?' Wackie responded and there was vivid sarcasm seeping into his voice. Then he swept the pieces onto the floor, visions of a glorious vase shattering in his mind's eye and he walked out of the shack, shattered in soul too. The ghosts of the past remained hidden from his sight, broken and scattered and lost.
'There is something amiss among the powers that be when a good man like that is suffered to have his dreams tossed aside so cruelly,' Mold muttered to himself, resuming his beer. 'A sure sign this world's running out of time.'