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The piece did not shatter. Gerald sat at the practice bench with the pipe across the arms and the shape on the gathering end cooling through the stages he had learned to read. Bright orange to dark orange to cherry to the dull red that meant the glass was setting. He watched it. The shape

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Gerald’s legs were tired before supper. His arms he understood. The pipe’s weight lived in his forearms now, a dull ache that started at the elbow and ran to the wrist, and the ache had been there since the first morning at the practice furnace. His arms were tired the way arms were supposed to

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The blister had come up overnight. Gerald found it dressing in the grey before the rooster called. A raised circle on his right palm, at the base of his fingers where the pipe’s weight had pressed hardest. The skin was tight and shining. When he closed his hand the blister pulled against the fold and

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The pipe was longer than Gerald had expected. Da carried it from behind the tool rack — not from the warmer where the working pipes rested in the furnace’s ambient heat, but from a lower hook at the back, where the smaller equipment hung. The pipe was thinner than the ones Tomis and Edric used,

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The furnace had a colour for every temperature. Gerald had not known this. He had looked at the furnace mouth from the doorway, from the stool, from the bench beside his bins, and every time the colour had been the same — orange. Bright, steady, too bright to stare at, the orange of heat itself.

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Da set four bins on the bench beside Gerald’s stool. They were wooden boxes, shallow, each the size of a bread loaf, with low sides and no lids. Gerald knew them. Not from the demonstration bucket Tomis had used during the frit lesson, and not from the supply bins on the back shelf where Tomis

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Gerald saw him from the workshop step. The day’s work was finished. Da had banked the furnace an hour ago, and Tomis had completed his evening circuit — thermocouple, glory hole, annealing oven, the rune channels dimmed to their overnight glow. Aaron had racked the last of the punty rods and gone. The workshop door

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The workshop moved in cycles. Gerald had not heard them from the doorway. He had heard the furnace hum, the marver hiss, the ring of finished glass, and from outside those sounds had been a single texture — a wall of noise with no seams. From the stool in the corner, the seams showed. The

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Gerald did not go to the workshop the next morning. He woke when the light through the curtain was still grey. He lay for a moment with Da’s words from the afternoon sitting where they sat — for today — and then he dressed and pulled on his boots and went downstairs and out the

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Da said it between the porridge and the tea. “Come to the workshop after your morning chores.” Gerald’s spoon stopped. Not dropped — stopped, level, the porridge halfway to his mouth, his hand exactly where his hand had been when the words arrived. The table continued. Tom poured the tea. Mam reached for the bread.

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