**1.** The first thing was pressure. Then spinning, and the hands wet against me, and a thumb that pushed down through my center until I opened. Those hands knew something. They were patient in a way I would not feel again from hands for a long time — they wanted nothing from me except the shape I was becoming. Then the heat. The heat went past warmth into a place that had no name, and when it let me go I was hard, and I was a sound: when something touched me I rang, low, like a held breath. I did not know I was a bowl. I knew I was heavier than I looked, and that I was not quite round. I sat on a board with others for a season. A window nearby went bright and dim, bright and dim. Hands lifted me, turned me, set me down — appraising hands, quick, not interested in keeping me. Then two hands that were. They were young. I could tell youth by the way they shook, slightly, holding me up — not weakness, the opposite, a kind of overflow. A voice above me said a number, another voice laughed, and coins went down on wood. Cloth went around me, then dark, then a long rocking — a suitcase, I would learn, a thing that travels. Something gritted against my glaze in the dark and stayed in the folds of the cloth for weeks. Salt, or sand. I was carried a long way by people who kept stopping to set their luggage down and, I think, to hold each other, because the suitcase would go still and tilt and I would hear two sets of breathing very close. **2.** Then: the cupboard, and the Sundays. I want to be accurate about the Sundays, because they were most of my life and they were nearly all the same — which is not the same as saying they were nothing. Saturday night the cupboard door would open and her hand — I knew it by a ring that clicked against me, and later by the swelling of the knuckle that made the ring stop clicking — would bring me down to the counter. Flour first, a soft collapsing weight. Then the cold cubes of butter, then the milk, and her fingers working it all against my walls, fast, not gentle; gentle would have ruined it. A wooden spoon, never metal. She scraped me clean with two fingers and the dough came away in a single turning mass and I was light again, dusted, set in the sink under water that went from cold to warm. Forty years is a number I was given much later. I did not count them. I felt them in her hands. The ring stopped clicking. The pressure of her grip spread out and softened, as if the hand were slowly becoming cloth. There was a stretch — a long one, I think — when smaller hands came on Sundays too, and she stood close giving instructions I felt as vibration through the counter, and the small hands pressed too hard and apologized and pressed again. Then the small hands went away and it was just hers, slower each year. One Sunday she did not scrape me clean. She set me down with dough still in me and her hands went away, and the dough hardened into a grey continent against my wall and stayed three days. When it finally came off it took nothing of me with it, but I understood something in the house had changed. After that I was used less, and held longer when I was held — set down and picked up again for no task, just turned in the two hands, the thumb finding the place near the rim, over and over, the way a thumb finds a tooth that aches. **3.** New hands. The same blood — I think the same blood, the grip had a familiar impatience — but younger, and unhappy in a way the first hands had never been. This household was louder. I spent most of it in a cupboard, learning the house through the door. There was a man whose steps I knew because they went uneven after a certain hour, and the tall cabinet beside mine held things that knocked together when he opened it: a glass family, ranked, emptied and refilled and rearranged so the front row always looked untouched. I knew the sound of those bottles the way I knew the wooden spoon. The woman moved them sometimes when he was out — I felt it through the shared wall, a quiet careful clinking, the sound of someone counting. I was brought out maybe twice a year. Her biscuits were not the first hands' biscuits; she rushed the butter. But there was a boy in this house, tall already, who once took me down himself on an ordinary day — not Sunday, no flour — and put nothing in me at all. He carried me up to a room and set me on a desk and dropped things into me: coins, a folded paper, a guitar pick, a key that did not say what it opened. The small hard rain of his secrets. I held them for a season. He would lift the paper out, read it, put it back. Then one day he took everything out of me except a film of dust and carried me back down, and not long after, the house came apart — I felt it as a sudden increase in the number of strangers' hands, everything lifted and turned and assigned a number. It was in this house that I was chipped. Not by the man, which would have made a better story. It was the boy, on an ordinary morning, setting me into the sink too fast beside something iron. A small bright sound, a flake of me gone. He stopped. He picked me up and looked — I felt the looking as a stillness, a held breath, his or mine — and ran his thumb once over the new roughness, and set me down again much more carefully, too late. The careful was the apology. I have been slightly less than myself ever since, and I have never minded. The chip is where I am most easily recognized. **4.** A table outside, in weather. This had never happened to me — sun directly on my glaze, wind moving the cloth in me, a whole day of strangers' hands picking me up, pricing me with a thumb, setting me down. A grease-pencil number on a sticker on my side. I sat between a lamp and a stack of plates that were not my family, and felt the particular loneliness of being one of many. The hands that kept me were not young and not old. They were dry, and they were alone — I say alone because there was only ever the one set, no second breathing, in the place she took me. A small place. I could tell by the sound: in the first hands' house, dropped sounds had traveled and come back; here they stopped at a wall a few feet off. She unwrapped me on a counter and stood there a while. Then she filled me with water and put cut flowers in me, which was not what I was for, and I held them until they bent over the rim and dropped, and she did not seem to mind that I was bad at it. She did not bake. But she ate over me, standing up, most nights — I caught the warmth of the bowl-of-the-evening she actually used, set down beside me — and sometimes she would reach over and move me an inch to the left for no reason I could feel, just to move something, just to have rearranged her small kitchen by the width of one bowl. I was, I think, the oldest thing she owned. She kept me in the open. After the cupboard years, that was its own kind of loud. **5.** Then a shelf under a light that hummed, among objects that had all outlived their houses. The smell there was every kitchen at once and none of them. Hands all day, fast hands, flipping me for a number — the quick look that prices a thing by the life gone out of it. I cooled. I gathered the fine grey that means not-held. The hands that stopped were young the way the very first hands were young — that overflow, that slight shake — and I will not pretend I knew them. I did not. Blood does not carry through glaze. But the thumb. The thumb went to the rim and found the chip without looking, the way a tongue goes to the gap of a pulled tooth, and then it stopped. The whole hand stopped. I was lifted close to a face — I felt the warmth of held breath — and turned, slowly, all the way around, the crackle read like a page. A number was paid. There was no cloth this time; I was carried out openly against a coat, the heartbeat coming through the wool, quick. Now there is a counter under me, and a window going bright and dim, and her two hands have set me in the center of it and not let go. The thumb is on the chip. She has picked up the small flat glass these new hands all carry and set it down again, twice, without using it. She is very still. The dough is not made. The flour is in the cupboard and the cupboard is closed. She is holding me the way the first hands held me at the end — for no task, just turning — and she is looking at the door, or at the glass, deciding whether to lift one or the other: whether to ask, across whatever distance is out there, the woman who would know for certain what I am. She has not decided. Her thumb keeps the rim. The light goes dim, and bright.