Parting Shot.

Carrie fled to her father’s study to escape the archaeologists. By then, most of the artworks in the house had been sold, but the study still had a coveted collection of Near Eastern art. Carrie, twenty years old, lonely and unbeautiful, liked to sit among these magical objects and think of her father, ten years dead. Like all westerners, he’d treated his things with respect. But Carrie felt deep in her heart that these objects, like herself, like her Middle Eastern mother—whose beauty her father had been famous for—were more than decoration. They’d been created with purpose, to accomplish something hidden and wondrous: to induce rain or fertility, to commune with gods and spirits and animals. Carrie, raised in America, didn’t know what their exact purpose was, but she did know that in all this silence, under this museum glass, her father’s horded treasure was lifeless. It’s magic needed human roughness—anguished tears, desperate negotiation, a bloody act of devotion. Only then could it be suddenly and exquisitely animated, and given instruction, and obey.

The archaeologist’s voices followed Carrie into her father’s study and quieted when she closed the door. She removed her shoes and walked to the middle of the carpet with the chevrons edging its border. She released her hair, which her mother had brushed and pinned earlier that day, and it bristled out in every direction. How her mother wanted her to be beautiful! Carrie massaged her scalp. She dropped the hairpins one by one into her purse, and then she lay down on the carpet and looked at the ceiling. She turned her head to the side so that her cheek rubbed against the carpet’s silk.

She listened until she could hear the objects in the room hum. The gilt plates, impressed with hunting scenes from the Shahnameh, hummed  a rich bass. The archaeologists had gasped when they saw she’d set the table with them. They’d put on their gloves so the oil from their hands wouldn’t touch the gold, and rushed them back to her father’s study, and closed the glass over them.