It came to me as a secret, the way certain things come to us only once, wrapped in the quiet understanding that it would return to someone else’s hands transformed. I did not choose it. It was given to me, as objects sometimes are, with a purpose already attached, and I have learned that the purpose we are handed is rarely the one we end up fulfilling.

Its surface ripples the way a held breath ripples, by intention, by some decision made long before it reached me. This is simply the shape it was always going to take. But somewhere inside the heat that made it, a small disagreement occurred, between what the clay wanted and what the fire allowed, and from that disagreement came two fractures, one long and one short, tracing themselves across a body that otherwise gives nothing away. You would have to know to look for them. Most people would walk past this piece and see only its intended ripples, never guessing that beneath the surface something had once come apart.

There is a particular kind of patience required to mend a thing that already knew what it wanted to be before it broke. I was not correcting it. I was only listening to where the pieces still remembered each other, and waiting, fragment by fragment, for them to agree to be whole again.

By the time it was finished, the story had already changed direction, the way stories do when no one is watching closely enough. What was meant to return to its first home found a second one instead, with me, and I have kept it since, though I could not always tell you why. It seemed to want staying. I named it Gojira, for its size, for the way it seems to rise rather than simply stand, the way certain things in a room insist on being noticed without asking permission to be.