What the Glass Holds

Black glass remembers what the mountain forgot. Volcanic, glassy, it broke the light differently ten thousand years ago when someone's hands shaped it into a blade sharper than anything steel could manage for centuries afterward. The obsidian edge is a single molecule wide. Surgeons have rediscovered this. They are late. In the Anatolian highlands, Çatalhöyük traders carried obsidian south toward the Levant in bundles wrapped with reed. They walked for weeks. The stone was worth more than food in places where food grew easily and sharp edges didn't. I think about that sometimes — the economy of cutting. What you'll carry across a mountain because it separates one thing from another cleanly. My father was a geologist. Not the interesting kind who climbs volcanoes. The kind who catalogued core samples in a basement office at the university, labeling them with a Dymo gun and filing them in cardboard trays. He kept a piece of obsidian on his desk, the one beautiful thing in a room of dull science. Snowflake obsidian, grey-spotted, polished on one side. When I was bored — and I was often bored, sitting in that office after school — I'd pick it up and tilt it to catch the fluorescent light. The spots looked like weather patterns, tiny clouds suspended in a black sky. He's dead now. I have the rock. It sits on my windowsill next to a coffee mug and a stack of unopened mail. The light through it in the morning is amber. In the afternoon, nothing. Just black. Which is what obsidian is, in the end. Cooled too quickly for crystals to form. Glass without structure. Frozen before it could become anything orderly. I am told this is a metaphor for something. I think it's just a rock my father liked.