Toronto Craft Alert

Another installment of our new feature — CRAFT FICTION. We’ll be bringing you short stories and serialized pieces of creative writing that weave in crafty themes. Let us know what you think about this new feature, and get in touch if you have your own original work to contribute.

“One Thousand Wax Buddhas” by Toronto writer Sarah Selecky is the second work in the Craft Fiction series. Come see Sarah read from her new book (tonight!!), This Cake Is For the Party: Stories, in conversation with Jeff Warren at Czehoski. (you are all invited and there will be cake!)

One Thousand Wax Buddhas
by Sarah Selecky

When I married Robin, I knew she had a nervous stomach, insomnia. She always watched for numbers and signs. Did I think it was strange? Of course. Was I ever frightened? Of course not. She was the most deliberate thinker I’d ever met. She noticed things that nobody else would notice. We moved into our first apartment together on May 5th. It was on 5 Almer Road. She said, five five five five. When I asked she said, May is the fifth month, it’s May fifth, Almer has five letters, we’re at five five on five five.

I gave her a high five.

I never thought I’d be able to see the world the way she did.

~

Our best-selling product came from the Candle Escentuals Catalogue: Plastic Candle Mould Item # 2383987 – Buddha. The mould was just two sides of plastic, one with a bulging belly and one with a bulging butt. You ran a wick through the centre, taped the sides together to seal it, slid the bottom into a stand to secure it, and poured the wax in. Left it overnight to cool, and then popped it apart: the edges had to be filed and then smoothed with a blowtorch, but there he was, almost perfect every time, smiling at you. We had ten of these moulds, and we tried to make ten Buddhas every day, five days a week, all spring, summer, and fall, preparing for the Christmas rush. We sold at least a thousand Buddhas every November. All of our other candles were hand-carved. Robin did the pouring and all of the administrative work. I did the carving: I did faces, I did abstract, I did shapes like sunbursts and stars. They were pretty things. But they were labour-intensive, especially with the new soy wax, which was crumbly compared to paraffin. Was it worth it to make that switch after all? Beats me. One carved star candle cost twice as much to make as a poured Buddha.

~

The people who really piss me off at shows: the ones who come up to my booth and say in breathy voices, Oh, yes, I love your work. I bought one of your candles five years ago and I love it. I ask them, So? Do you like how it burns? And they say to me, I would never burn it! I keep it in the china cabinet, or on the dresser. It’s insulting.

I spend a lot of time making sure these will burn properly. One of the reasons I work with wax is because it’s a consumable product. Do chocolate-makers have this problem? People are so afraid. They hoard their things. Don’t they know that it’s all going to be gone one day, anyway? None of this is going to last.

~

We were married on February 3, 1983. We lost Julie on September 18, 1987. Candle Escentuals Catalogue: Plastic Candle Mould Item # 2383987 – Buddha. I want to tell Robin: I can read the signs now, too.

~

This is what happened five years ago. I came back to the island after a weekend away. I had been on the mainland picking up beeswax from Queen Bee Wholesale. The car smelled like sweet honey. It was a good drive. No traffic. I was the last car on the early ferry, which meant I got home an hour early. It was Robin’s birthday. I had a salmon in the back of the car and I wanted to smoke it on the grill.

I knew something wasn’t right as soon as I pulled in. The front door was wide open.

At first, I thought someone had broken into our place and destroyed everything. I couldn’t get in because of the rubble. Then I saw it: Robin had arranged shards of broken glass and pottery in a straight line from the front door right along the hallway. The line curled into a spiral that filled the entire living room. The shards were arranged by colour. She’d broken everything that could have been broken. Our plates and bowls, our glasses, the mirrors and picture frames. The Japanese glass fishing float. The face of the clock. The Tiffany rip-off lampshade. The Pyrex cooking dishes. She’d constructed a sculpture from the shards of everything we’d ever collected in our life together. It moved from translucent blues and greens to opaque colours that shifted into a rainbow, with white in the centre of the spiral. It covered most of our house. I didn’t know we owned so much that could be broken.

She was happy to see me. She wasn’t upset. Her eyes were unfocused because she’d been concentrating so hard. For how long? Two days, she told me.

She stood up. Her ankles were cut. Her fingers bloody.

Babe, I said. You’re hurt.

No, she told me. Just scratches. Look!

I looked.

Aren’t you going to say anything?

Everything’s broken, I said.

She eyed me with laser precision. You aren’t looking, she said. It’s Spiral Jetty.

The thing is, Robin runs so close to the line. She’s more brilliant than most people, so it’s a challenge for her. It’s hard enough to be reasonable in this world. Why do you think people live on these little islands? To get away from the insanity of the city. When you’re creative like Robin, it’s even harder. The same rules don’t apply. Robin sees things differently. It’s her gift.

Eventually, I saw that she was right. It was beautiful. Sure, I was frightened when I saw it at first, but that was only because I was attached to all of the things when they were in their unbroken form. When I was able to see what she’d done, when she showed me how to look, I could see it: all the broken things were just things. She’d created something else. It was like one of her signs. It pointed to something much bigger, something far beyond things.

Sarah Selecky studied writing with Natalie Goldberg and Lynda Barry and earned her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. Sarah Selecky’s stories have been published in The Walrus, Geist Magazine, Prairie Fire, The New Quarterly, Event and The Journey Prize Anthology. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia and has been teaching creative writing workshops in her living room for the past ten years. Her short story collection, This Cake is for the Party, was released by Thomas Allen Publishers this spring. Visit Sarah at www.sarahselecky.ca.