Acts of Service

by Lillian Fishman

When I raised my wineglass I felt at the first touch of the glass to my mouth the awareness that this warm, strict body was the reality of glass—this was what glass was, and I was perceiving it—and I felt viscerally around me the sofa and the side table, the cotton of the shirt I had shrugged on, the embossed doors and ceramic lamps and the cabs hustling by in the dark and the new slush beneath their wheels, the glass of the windshields, the grass in the park. I felt that I knew exactly what constituted every material and characterized the life inside it, and I was madly humbled by the vastness and the wonder of my certainty, a blunted version of which I had felt two decades earlier while sitting beside my father in a church pew. I could see it all from above, like a pearly, singing map.