We were hunting for radioactive dinnerware, the kind made with those old uranium glazes—the reds as flashy as winter persimmons, the greens as rich as cardamom pods. We’d open a box and gasp at the yellows, at their creamy undertones and turmeric highlights, colors that dazzled on even the humblest plate. And the fancier pieces—the teacups, the juice pitchers, the elevated fruit bowls? They were like fantastic birds, slipping from their dull newsprint wrappings in bursts of fiery plumage.
My mother’s Geiger counter guided us from room to room, box to box. The elderly woman who’d owned the house had been planning a move to Phoenix, but now everything needed to be unpacked instead for an estate sale. “Anything you want first dibs on, just give me a fair price,” her son told us. “I need the house empty before it’s listed.”
We were looking for boxes that caused the Geiger counter’s probe to chirp, but my mother dutifully unpacked and priced everything in the deceased woman’s collection. Fine bone china. Depression glass. Porcelain figurines. My mother had been in the business for years and knew everything’s value, but I was just a kid who got bored quickly. I’d brought a book on mythological creatures with me, and settled into an empty corner to read.
Then the counter went crazy. Chirp! Chirp! Chirp!
“42,000 counts per minute,” said my mother. “Damn!”
I put down my book and watched her move three big boxes to get at a fourth. She was thin and fit, but her hair was gray and her
hands worn from years of cleaning antique ceramics with caustic chemicals. “Come help me,” she said, and I reached inside the box she’d opened, fumbling through Styrofoam peanuts until I felt something and pulled.
It was a hand-thrown wine decanter, shaped like a lily and glazed in the most brilliant blue I’d ever seen, rich as a slice of summer sky, if the sky were a cake you could slice.
“Lovely,” said my mother. “But 42,000 CPM? You definitely wouldn’t want to drink from it.”
“Are we gonna keep it?”
She nodded. “It’s worth a couple hundred bucks at a weekend estate sale. But at auction next spring? This is exactly what the big collectors are looking for.”
I looked at the decanter, its blue surface changing in the late afternoon light, morphing into something akin to a stormy ocean—a perfect hiding place for sirens or kraken. “No,” I said, “are we gonna keep it?”
“Oh, my goodness, no!” My mother laughed. “That’s how it starts. You find something small and beautiful, and the next thing you know, you got a house full of boxes that’ll never make it to Phoenix.” She shook her head, knowing better about these things than most.
But I was unconvinced. I was thinking about all the colors we’d seen that day—the blues, of course, but also the greens and yellows. The oranges and reds.
And hadn’t my book said the phoenix was reborn in fire?
Yes, the answer was yes. In feathers of every hue. In bright, unquenchable flames.