Salt Furnace

The glassblower's lips crack in the updraft, a comma of sweat tracing the jaw before it falls into the kiln mouth and becomes nothing useful, nothing at all.

She turns the pipe like a spindle of light, coaxing from the gather a molten bell that breathes when she breathes, its skin thinning toward impossible amber.

All day the salt wind off the harbor threads through the open doors, and the furnace answers with its own weather— shimmer lines rising like prayers no one taught her to say.

By evening the shelves hold a dozen vessels, each one a caught breath she will never get back. She rinses her hands in cold water and watches the light drain from the bay.

Tomorrow she will crack the rejects against the stone wall out back, listen to them shatter like small bells, and begin again with sand.