Shattered Read Free

his voice one could hear undertones of an intention to change to a different trainer.
    My own glass business lay a few yards away from the Wychwood Dragon on the opposite side of the road. If one looked across from outside the hotel, the gallery’s windows seemed to glitter with ultra-bright light, which they did from breakfast to midnight every day of the year.
    I walked across the road wishing that time could be reversed to yesterday: wishing that bright-eyed Martin would march through my door suggesting improbable glass sculptures that in fact, when I made them, won both commissions and kudos. He had become fascinated by the actual composition of glass and never seemed to tire of watching whenever I mixed the basic ingredients myself, instead of always buying it the easy way—off the shelf.
    The ready-made stuff, which came in two-hundred-kilo drums, looked like small opaque marbles, or large gray peas, half the size of the polished clear-glass toys. I used the simple option regularly, as it came pure and clean, and melted without flaws.
    When he first watched me load the tank of the furnace with a week’s supply of the round gray pebbles, he repeated aloud the listed ingredients, “Eighty percent of the mix is white silica sand from the Dead Sea. Ten percent is soda ash. Then add small specific amounts of antimony, barium, calcium and arsenic per fifty pounds of weight. If you want to color the glass blue, use ground lapis lazuli or cobalt. If you want yellow, use cadmium, which changes with heat to orange and red and I don’t believe it.”
    â€œThat’s soda crystal glass.” I nodded, smiling. “I use it all the time as it’s safe in every way for eating or drinking from. Babies can lick it.”
    He gazed at me in surprise. “Isn’t all glass safe to suck?”
    â€œWell ... no. You have to be exceedingly careful making things with lead. Lead crystal. Lovely stuff. But lead is mega mega poisonous. Lead silicate, that is, that’s used for glass. It’s a rusty red powder and in its raw state you have to keep it strictly separate from everything else and be terribly meticulous about locking it up.”
    â€œWhat about cut lead crystal wineglasses?” he asked. “I mean, Bon-Bon’s mother gave us some.”
    â€œDon’t worry,” I told him with humor. “If they haven’t made you ill yet, they probably won’t.”
    â€œThanks a bunch.”
    I went in through my heavy gallery door of beveled glass panes already feeling an emptiness where Martin had been. And it wasn’t as if I had no other friends, I had a pack of beer and wine cronies for whom fizzy water and sauna sweats were on their anathema lists. Two of those, Hickory and Irish, worked for me as assistants and apprentices, though Hickory was approximately my own age and Irish a good deal older. The desire to work with glass quite often struck late in life, as with Irish, who was forty, but sometimes, as with me, the fascination arrived like talking, too early to remember.
    I had an uncle, eminent in the glassblowing trade, who was also a brilliant flameworker. He could heat solid glass rods in the flame of a gas burner until among other things he could twiddle them into a semblance of lace, and make angels and crinolines and steady flat round bases for almost anything needing precision in a science laboratory.
    He was amused at first that an inquisitive kid should shadow him, but was then interested, and finally took it seriously. He taught me whenever I could dodge school, and he died about the time that my inventiveness grew to match his. I was sixteen. In his will he left me plans and instructions for the building of a basic workshop, and also, much more valuably, his priceless notebooks into which he’d detailed years of unique skill. I’d built a locked safelike bookcase to keep them in, and ever since had added my own notes on method and materials