THEY KEEP COMING BACK ALMOST RIGHT

THEY KEEP COMING BACK ALMOST RIGHT

By Akiko Amora

I didn't set out to collect them. The first one appeared at a market — the teal one, with the wide flat wings and the open mouth and the legs that are slightly too confident for the body they're carrying. Someone had thrown it, glazed it that particular blue-green that sits between sea and sky, given it eyes that were not an afterthought. I picked it up and put it down and picked it up again. I bought it.

The others arrived by various means. A gift. A find. One I tracked down specifically after seeing a photograph. They are not by the same maker — I don't think they are — but they share a sensibility. Cheerful without being naive. Formally considered without being serious. Each one is technically a vessel, which means someone made a decision about where the opening goes, how large, how it relates to the body of the thing. On the red crab the opening is the whole top of it, a wide bowl-mouth that you could put things into if you wanted to, though it has never held anything. On the orange one the opening is smaller, more like a door left slightly ajar.

They have eyes. This matters more than it might seem. A vessel with eyes is not simply receiving — it has a point of view. It looks back. I find I arrange them with this in mind, thinking about sightlines, about what each one is facing, about the conversation the composition makes when you walk into the room.

I arranged them once, carefully — with attention to the intervals between forms, the way the teal reads against the orange at that particular distance, the red low in the composition anchoring what would otherwise drift. When it was right I knew it was right and I left it.

The next morning it was almost right.

Not wrong enough to be certain. The teal one had rotated perhaps fifteen degrees. The red crab had moved forward slightly, or the others had moved back. The orange one was in the correct position but angled differently, its eye pointing somewhere it hadn't been pointing before. The overall composition read as mine. The details did not quite match.

I rearranged them. More precisely this time, noting exactly where each leg met the surface.

The morning after that, almost right again.

I have been watching for three weeks now. They return to approximately the arrangement I made, which suggests either memory or instinct or something I don't have a word for yet. They are not random about it. They are trying. They simply cannot always get it exactly right, which I find, if I am honest, somewhat relatable.

Twice there has been an outlier. Once the orange one was on the windowsill, which it could not have reached by any route I can account for. Once the red crab was behind a book on the lower shelf, facing the wall, which seemed less like wandering and more like a decision.

I have not moved them back when I find them out of place. I document the position and wait. They return.

What I find most interesting is not that they move. It is that they bother to come back. They were made from earth, shaped by hands, survived fire. Something in that process apparently produces an attachment to the arrangement. Or to me. Or to being seen in a particular way.

I am not going to tell anyone about this yet. I don't know what I would say. I am a person who pays close attention to how things sit in space, and these things are not sitting the way I left them, and they are not not sitting the way I left them either.

I rearranged them this morning. Tomorrow I will see how close they get.