The Broom

The poorest object in the house, stood up as sculpture: a whole branch kept in its natural curve, ending on one side in a knot of raw wood, on the other in a dark bundle of fibres bound with jute, close to two metres in all. The broom trails a long history of images, the witch's instrument, a tool of threshold rites; nothing here decides between those readings. The object keeps its legible function, and it is that retained usefulness that makes it unsettling once out of the kitchen. It is a broom; displacement alone makes it strange.