ON THE SECOND FRIDAY of each month, Glass Blowers end their workday as directors of finance at Sound Transit in Seattle and grab the Number 17 bus to Belltown, where they step into the glassblowing studio to watch free demonstrations. All week, they have been managing financial operations and developing policies and strategically planning, and now they need to clear their pummeled minds and cleanse their sad hearts and witness the emergence of molten colored glass, pulled from a burning furnace, stuck to the end of a long metal blowpipe.
Glass Blowers have visited the studio thrice. They have stepped into the storefront and admired glass artifacts for sale on shelves and attached to walls, swirls and dips and bends of vases and bowls and sculptures, once liquid and manipulated in time and space with tools and gravity and centrifugal force as the artisan twirled the long rod like a baton and rolled it on a steel table. They were reminded of Chagall’s stained glass in a little old church made of stone three thousand miles away, which they had gazed on in the past. Chagall’s colored glass held moonglow and despair and a head tilted down. Glass Blowers had reached into the recess of the window and traced the artist’s sadness with their fingers.
This day, on this fourth visit, Glass Blowers find their favorite seat, in front, on the left, and watch the dance of the glass globule: From expert to expert, from furnace to table to oven to table, as quick as can be before the glass hardens into something one does not want. One has a vision. One needs to plan. Each member of the team must be at the ready, blowing air through a tube to make a dream.
Glass Blowers are solitary creatures when it comes to art and dreams, so they have reached a conundrum: One needs a team to blow glass. What to do? They wish to roll a pipe in the fire to melt glass. They wish to soften and join and wind and harden blues and purples and yellows and greens and blacks. On this fourth Friday, when the demonstration is over, after they crane their necks from their chair to see the glass globule rolled and cut and spun and widened, they find a moment, without making a scene, and tiptoe toward the roped-off hot shop, where they reach out and tap one of the black-T-shirted expert shoulders and whisper, hi there. may i sign up for a class?
It is Saturday. Glass Blowers take the ferry in the late morning and hop on the C RapidRide to Blanchard and Sixth Avenue and walk one block back to Fifth Avenue and step inside the studio, into the entryway filled with happy-colored glass pieces—sculptures and lamps and sea creatures and dragons.
Hi, Glass Blowers say, forcing out their voice (because they feel quite small) to a woman in a gray T-shirt at the counter. I’m here for a private lesson?
Name? the woman says.
Glass Blowers, they say.
You’re going to meet with Jess, she says. She’ll be right out.
The woman in gray heads into the studio. In her stead appears Jess.
Welcome, says Jess, rubbing down her ropy arm with a white towel. I’ll be working with you today. Let’s first look at your options. Together they leave the storeroom and enter the studio, heading to a counter against the wall that displays basic sample creations for beginners to imagine their goals. Choose two items from these: a vase, a plate, or a bowl. Jess points to each.
Can I use any of those colors? Glass Blowers point to the middle of the room, where rectangular containers hold pieces of coarse glass, like two rows of supersized sugar crystals.
Sure.
Can I make one item only but more complicated?
What were you thinking?
I would like to make a large square plate. With black lines cut through. And there is a person, holding himself, eyes closed.
That would require techniques we’re not doing here.
I see. Glass Blowers close their lips and squeeze their fingers. They have made a mistake. What were they thinking?
Jess crosses her arms. How about a round plate with no image but using colors you like? The skin that meets the armhole hem of Jess’s black T-shirt appears moist. She smells like honeysuckle and leather, and Glass Blowers wonder how.
Okay, Glass Blowers say. They are here, and they might as well go through with it. The colors are important, though. Glass Blowers step to the bins of glass crystals and peer inside. Their fingers alight on the edges like hummingbirds, as if the crystals contain life. Blue. They whisper. Purple. Yellow. Green. Black. Their eyes search the bins, then the room, and they speak up. I need another green, like a sea green. What should I do?
Jess stands nearby. We’ve got some special colors in the back. I’ve got just the thing. Jess leaves and returns with a small container of crystals like Mediterranean waters and holds them out for approval.
Glass Blowers nod with gravity and gratitude.
Jess walks Glass Blowers further into the studio, into the hot shop. She instructs as they go on their rolling journey. They withdraw a long, hot blowpipe from the oven and push it into the furnace, gathering clear molten glass on the tip. They walk the pipe to a steel table and roll the glass. They do not stop rolling. Even as they walk the pipe to the oven to heat it up again, they roll the pipe in their hands; even as they walk it to the colored glass, the radiant blue frit, they roll it, into the blue of Jeremiah’s sadness, then back to the oven to heat it again, still rolling, then back to the table to roll the coarse blue sadness into the softened glass, then a puff into the pipe to start a bubble, then back to the furnace to grab more clear molt, then back to the table to roll, then roll while walking to the yellow frit, to remember the light of his robe, which is really his hope, despite everything, all that has been taken away and inflicted upon, his robe that he holds, his arms that he grasps, and the yellow rolled in and heated again in the oven, then purple because we mustn’t forget his calling, his royal specialness, because when all is said and done, he did feel special, didn’t he? Chosen even? And so it is said. Then to the table for a puff and to roll in the specialness, then back to the furnace for some clear molt, then a roll on the table, then to the seaweed green, heavy, for the burden of it all, and rolling and heating, then dipped in the drenched seafoam green frit for the face, steeped in grief yet still glowing, then rolled, then back to the oven, then rolled in black rods that tie life together, then rolled on the table, then heated in the oven, then rolled on the table, and then a little air, a little bubble, then rolled into a wet wooden cup for shaping, then thick wet newspaper too, and this is elemental and absorbing, this wood and this glass and this paper and this heat, and tears gather in their head, but they refuse to free them from their lacrimal sacs because then their vision would blur and this is not the place, not in Seattle, and not while holding burning hot glass, and not in front of fearless and skilled Jess who stands by them and guides and assists every step of the way, and they don’t remember experiencing that before, someone being with them from beginning to end, from start to finish, right by their side, through the heat and the constant necessity of movement and doing and tending lest everything fall apart, the object resulting in deformity, say, if one were to walk away, were to say, I’m outta here, were to screw up, to sabotage everything they’ve built together, to leave them in the dark, but that won’t happen here, they can count on Jess, clearly, so they take a deep breath through their nose, and back to the oven, and Jess cuts off a small tip from the end of the beautiful cylindrical shape, and they begin to flare out a hole with large tweezers of sorts, widening and rolling and heating and spinning and lowering the pipe for the weight of the world to use its gravity on the softened glass, then into the oven then spin and spin and pull it out and spin it in the air and flare out the soft glass while they have the chance, and they let it spread wide into a flat circled plane as Jess’s hands and their hands hold the pipe together, and they slow the spinning and Jess lets go and another expert joins the team, wearing heavy gloves, then Jess returns with a flat tool and knocks the plate free from the pipe into the gloved hands, which carry away the created wonder like a newborn, placing it into a special oven so that it will live through the night.
What shall I do? Glass Blowers say, empty pipe in hand, breathing and breathing and breathing.
It needs to rest. Come back on Monday.
Glass Blowers nod, give thanks, and head out into the world, arms aching, hands as still as a church.
Thea Swanson holds an MFA from Pacific University and is the author of a flash-fiction collection, Mars (Ravenna). Her work can be found in Cutbank, Fugue, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere.
