A Portrait of a Vase Seller

I was only a boy when my grandmother first told me that the house was haunted by demons. They were like rats breeding in the cistern of our flooded cellar and at night you could hear them creaking the foundations and rattling the floorboards from below until it finally roused my grandfather from his sleep and he got up, grabbed a belt, cane, whatever he could find, unlocked the door at the end of the hall, and descended down into the darkness to silence them. He always returned battle-worn and carrying a sack of something horribly pungent over his shoulder. He wasn't the kind to talk about it.

I never would have imagined it was a vase.

They didn't keep any in the house but my grandmother had a collection at her flower shop. She told me that every time he managed to catch one of the demons he would seal it within the clay of a hand-crafted vase so that it would no longer be able to terrorize the cellar. She'd take me to the market sometimes to look at vases and would point out which ones held demons and which ones didn't, saying that the chaos of its soul gave the vase a unique kind of luster. But to her, my grandfather's vases were particularly special. "I didn't mean to live in that sty," she once said, "but your grandfather's the type of man who's stubborn about parting with what's his and I had never met anyone whose vases so matched the flowers I grow."

She complained about the house all the time, the parts that were falling off, the fixtures that ceased to work, the many needed repairs that my grandfather was too busy working to keep up with, but somehow she put up with it. She even became less bothered by the possessions that were lost whenever the cellar flooded--"People lose things," she'd say. I remember how she hid her tears when I first left for college. She thought I wasn't watching.

I was working on my thesis when my grandfather passed away, failing to return from his venture into the cellar. My grandmother eventually moved out but she didn't live to see the place condemned. I was there when the wrecking ball came and smashed it down. A large crowd of people--people who had never stopped by during my grandparents' lifetimes--had showed up to watch the demolition. But the thing I'll never forget was when the foreman in charge walked through the wreckage to where the cellar had once been and remarked, "How could anyone have possibly lived here?"