On Silk, a Passage -- by Alex Ranieri

I bought a scrap of a kimono off the internet. Hand-painted, handwoven, and from hand-reeled silk, it clothed some fashionable lady seventy years ago; she put it on, with care or indolence, a complete thing; and little thought that I, a posthumous admirer, would pay for a scrap of what she once put on. I imagine her dissatisfied, peering out onto a dirty Tokyo street, chafing against the little window of her life—does she know now of her immortality? Perhaps our objects, after all, do cling onto some residue of soul; if so, is she displeased to see her robe thus torn apart? Or does she revel in a power disseminated across time and space, expansive in a manner to which no mortal could aspire?