1
April
The sound of breaking glass could be as varied in range as a voice. The timbre and volume of even the subtlest crack told me everything about the environment the glass in question existed within. It was never a pretty sound, not to me, though glass itself was capable of making beautiful music. When it broke, it signaled a failure of some sort, and it always caused me pain. Was it too hot? Too cold? Had some violence been done? Some careless lack of attention paid to cause the damage?
This time, I was staring right at the bubble of viscous molten glass spinning at the end of my blowpipe while I shaped it. I’d done nothing wrong; my shop was as hot as ever. Sweat clung to my upper lip, and my hair stuck to my face and neck. The only thing keeping the sweat out of my eyes was the bandana tied around my head. I kept the pipe rolling, and yet I was sure I heard the sound of a crack, even felt it vibrate minutely through the metal of the pipe. It made no sense. In this state, it shouldn’t be able to crack the way it had. Yet I knew in my bones that the piece was done for.
Every time this happened, I grieved. I wasn’t a perfectionist, but I liked to think I gave life to the inanimate through my work, and every time a piece failed to achieve completion through some flaw—in the material or the environment or in myself as the artist—it felt like a death.
“We’re done,” I said, avoiding the perplexed looks of my assistants. Josh still crouched at the end of the pipe, ready to blow when I asked. Renee waited at the ready with the punty to complete the transfer so I could then begin opening up the piece to create an actual vessel. But there wouldn’t be a transfer. This piece wouldn’t make it to the next step because something was just off today. For the third time in a row, the glass didn’t feel right, and it was as if gravity itself worked against me.
“But April, it looks fi—” Renee started to say. Before she could complete the thought, the glass globe formed a tiny crack, and then abruptly shattered as if I’d plunged it into ice-cold water.
“Talk about omens,” Josh said, standing with a shake of his head. “Three for three. Did we get a bad batch?”
He took the blowpipe out of my hand while Renee swept up the mess. “Seriously,” she said, glancing at me from where she crouched with the dustpan. “It’s like the universe hates you today.”
“The batch is fine. There’s just something in the air, I guess.”
The feeling that something was off-kilter had started when I woke up. It was one of those “you should really just stay in bed” moments, when I climbed out of bed realizing I’d overslept, then discovered my coffee pot that I set religiously every night had failed to brew. When I went to make breakfast, my eggs had mysteriously gone bad. Lack of coffee is enough to ruin my day as it was, but I’ve always been pretty good at bouncing back from little inconveniences. We had a killer coffeemaker at the shop and one of the best bakeries in Seattle only half a block down the street. But despite eventually finding the fuel I needed to have a pretty amazing day, it just kept going downhill. When I looked at the calendar and realized it was the first of April, somehow I wasn’t surprised.
“You guys take the afternoon off. I’m going to work up some more sketches for the show. If nothing else, we’ll have concept art.” I waved the couple off, and they gave me understanding hugs before heading out into a misty rain, hand-in-hand.
I passed by the metalworking bench where a scale model of my sculpture sat in the center, and paused to bend down and examine the foot-tall creation. It was a work of art in its own right, but far from a complete concept. I couldn’t create every detail at such a small scale. At the moment, it would have to do for inspiration, along with the sketches. It was a small tree of life, crafted out of copper and iron wire twined together in a tangle to create the trunk and fanning out in a canopy of metal roots that draped over a blown glass globe. The trunk rose up and flared into dozens of draping branches, each one tipped with a tiny bauble of a glass bead in a variety of shades of green.
The full-sized version of the sculpture was nothing more than a skeleton of metal at the moment, and I didn’t trust myself to work on either the glass or metal after the repeated failures today. So colored pencils and paper it would have to be.
But I still couldn’t focus, so I just sat doodling and feeling less and less like an acclaimed artist and more and more like an imposter. What if it was me? What if I’d lost my touch? I’d had one amazing year of achievements when every creative idea I had was effortlessly produced in metal and glass. It had been as if the very elements themselves obeyed my whims.
The success had landed me a solo show at an exclusive Seattle gallery and a residency at their studio. That was where I now sat, within the vast, cavernous space of the Olympic Glass gallery’s resident artist studio. They’d spared no expense outfitting the warehouse-sized workshop behind the gallery with brand new furnaces, annealers, and gloryholes for my glass, with an entirely separate set of furnaces and benches and an anvil for my metalwork. Of course, my residency wasn’t without its expectations. I had one month left to complete the centerpiece for my show, which they’d scheduled for May first.
And I was apparently blocked. Or something. It wasn’t lack of ideas that was my problem. My materials had effectively rebelled. I smacked down the curling edge of my sketch pad and stared at it in dismay. Even my goddamn paper was misbehaving. Flipping the page, I began a fresh sketch, swiping the dark graphite around in a circle to describe the shape of one of the many glass globes that would hang from the branches of the metal tree. Only to have the tip of my pencil snap, leaving a dark blotch at the bottom of the arc.
“I give up!” I yelled up at the ceiling, standing and tossing my pencil down, ignoring when it rolled off the angled drafting table and cracked in half when it hit the floor. It was the first of April, so maybe the universe was playing some cosmic joke on me. After discovering a year ago that humanity was not alone on the planet, I supposed anything was possible, but I hadn’t worked up the courage to approach any of the so-called higher races who might shed light on whether there was a bigger plan.
Turning to head to the door and get a change of scenery, I stopped short with a small yelp of alarm. A tall, bearded man stood halfway in the door as if I’d just caught him coming in, and for some reason, everything suddenly made perfect sense.
“Ah, didn’t mean to scare you, hon.”
I sighed. “Hi, Dad.”
I loved my dad despite his wayward nature and questionable decisions. Today, I was grateful for the excuse to abandon my disaster of a workday and indulge in an extra pastry or two at the bakery down the street. On past visits, he would treat, but when we got to the register, he gave me a sheepish look and a shrug. I just shook my head and handed the cashier my credit card.
“You’re the big success now. Have I told you how proud I am of you, April?” He flashed a wide grin through his graying beard, patting me on the shoulder before picking up his bear claw and coffee and heading to a table.
“So, what’s the occasion?” I asked as I settled into the seat across from him. The prospect of a fresh banana muffin had improved my mood, but I was still wary.