Salt Kiln

The kiln breathes all night without me, its orange throat swallowing what my hands pressed wet that morning— bowls warped slightly left the way my mother's were.

I have loaded the shelves with patience and a kind of recklessness, each glaze a guess at what the fire will decide to keep. Salt thrown through the spy-hole blooms on the shoulders of jars like frost on a window no one looks through.

By dawn the cones have bent their slow, glowing bow. I crack the door to a world remade in amber and ash, surfaces I could not have planned— river-dark, cloud-mottled, carrying the memory of heat the way stone carries the memory of water.

Some pieces emerge with a flaw so precise it looks intentional: a crawl of glaze, a blister where the flame licked longest. I keep those.

The others I set on the table and wait to see who will hold them to the light, turn them over, and recognize something they cannot name.