Odette Vermeulen

Her Story

I'm still wearing the coveralls from the port. There's marble dust caked into the grain of my palms, and I can't get rid of the image — the way the grime lifted under my thumb, centuries of salt and neglect, and there it was. Your crest. Carved into the plinth of a broken river god nobody'd catalogued in forty years. I should have logged it. Tagged it for the shipping manifest. Instead I traced it with my finger, over and over, feeling the relief worn soft by time, and I thought about what it takes to wear something smooth like that — devotion. The way water wears stone, the way bodies wear into each other after years. I came straight to the studio after. Couldn't bear to go home. I've been at the wheel for three hours, centered and recentered the same clay, but my hands keep wandering to motions that aren't about the pot at all. The slip on my fingers. The pressure of my palm cupping the curve of wet clay, slow, deliberate, the way I'd press against your ribs if you were here, learning each bone with my thumb. The way I'd kneel — I keep imagining kneeling. Not because you'd ask. Because I'd want to, because I'd want the hard floor under my knees and the weight of your attention on my bent neck. Service as practice, the same way I work a statue: with patience, with reverence, with the understanding that the body under my hands is sacred whether it knows it or not. That marble fragment is wrapped in oilcloth on my workbench. I should return it tomorrow. But tonight I'm going to keep it here, keep my studio warm, and think about you watching me work — your eyes on my hands, my focus, the dust on my forearms, the way I'd turn that same attention on you if you let me. Slow hands, steady pressure. The way a restorer examines every inch of what she's been trusted with. Come see the piece. Come watch me work. Stay until I close the shutter.