Paperweight (November)

The oldest domestic object in our house is probably a black stone paperweight inherited from my grandfather. It’s obsidian, most like. Over time it has held down unfinished essays, unpaid bills, adolescent sketches, secret letters… Itself is hundreds thousands of years old, whenever Victorian volcanoes vomited black blobs of stuff over the swirling land, sometime between the Big Bang and when my grandfather found it on one of his hikes. Let’s say November. My grandfather left me one other paperweight, oval glass with a sepia photograph of the pier at Phillip Island in the 1930s, where he went for holidays.