HOW TO MAKE A VASE by Yah Yah Scholfield / 3.7k words / a commission piece that now belongs to the people ! / Midsommar ( 2019, dir. ari aster )
Um! Anyways, this story was so weird to write! It’s about grief! It’s about a cult! It has mentions of death and gore and a car crash, and it’s honestly very sad, but also sort of cathartic in a weird way…?
How to Make a Vase is about Valerie, a young woman who loses everything after a horrible car accident. In her loss, she reconnects with an old friend who brings her to a ceramics club with a charismatic leader who convinces her to do the unthinkable. I’ve decided to tell it in a sort of step-by-step, instructional manner which I hope reads well!
TRIGGER WARNINGS; mentions of child death, graphic car accident, some gore, mentions / slight inner workings of a cult
STEP ONE: Don’t die. You come upon the stretch of black ice too quickly to avoid it, and your steering wheel spins wildly in your hands. It’s out of your control now; brace yourself for impact. Feel as the car compresses around you, the metal frame of your trusty Buick crumpling in and down on you like so much tissue paper. The windows shatter. See the glass flying, the shards embedding themselves into your skin. Hear the screech of your tires, the wind whipping through your ears, the sound of the fire roaring with you inside of it. You can’t scream— not yet. There’s not enough air in your lungs for it, so all you can do as your car twists and burns and flips is sink down deep. Sink into the sensation of burning alive, of skin going crisp, of flesh and blood boiling. If you have no hellfire at hand, the feel of hot steel slicing through your oh-so-delicate internal organs is a good substitute.
When your car finally comes to a stop off the shoulder of the highway, you might be tempted to fall back into your seat—still buckled, you’ve always been such a cautious driver—and die. The pain you feel is unimaginable, insurmountable. It hurts, from your torso to your extremities to your pounding, pulsating head. The last time you felt like this you were just a little girl, and you were lying prone on the ground after a long, breathless fall out of your treehouse. Your body was smaller back then and hardier; you’re an older woman now, and the pain is not so easy to shake off as it was when you were young. You lay in your seat, nauseous, scraped clean, every inch of you prickling and raw, like the epidermis had been grated away to reveal the fleshy, pink dermis.
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