The Glassblower’s Son

Illustrated by Tula Wild.

James had always known that he wasn’t allowed in his father’s studio. The worn-down shed with the peeling walls appeared to him as a forbidden palace. Occasionally he would creep up to the frosted windows and catch glimpses of glowing orange dancing behind the glass. He would stand there as long as he could, watching his father mould new shapes from formless molten lumps. Eventually, his father would notice him, and rap sharply on the window, sending him flying back to the house. 

Still, the night his mother left there wasn’t anywhere else for him to go. He crept out to the back of the garden through the overgrown grass and weeds, gently pushed the door open and slammed it quickly behind him. Closing his eyes for a second, and leaning against the door, he heard the sound of plates shattering, his father’s booming shouts clashing with his mother’s strangled sobs. He pulled on a frayed piece of string by the door and the dim light flickered on. Looking up, he saw a bare lightbulb swinging limply from the ceiling. Vibrant glass butterflies were spread haphazardly across the floor, their wings mottled with greens and blues. Five twisted vases were laid out on the desk, next to a crumpled, coffee-stained photo of the family. With Emma. Taking care to tread between the butterflies, he tip-toed over to the desk and picked up the photo. There weren’t any photos of her in the house anymore. She was smiling in the photo, peering down at baby James who was swaddled in a thick white blanket. She looked so much happier than his parents had described her. 

Suddenly, he felt a cool breeze on the back of his neck. His breath caught in his throat and he turned around, slowly, to find himself face to face with two, clear, pupilless eyes. They belonged to a girl, he thought. She was made entirely of glass. He’d always loved his father’s sculptures – the flowers, the swans, the windchimes, but this was something else entirely. His fingers clutched tightly around the photo. She was taller than him, but only just, her skin polished and clear and still, smooth and shining like water. Her features were small and delicate, and as James watched her unblinking eyes, flickering up and down over him, she pushed her lips into a fragile smile.

Something about the way she was looking at him was comforting, and his parents' shouts faded to white noise behind him. He released his grip on the photo, letting it flutter to the floor. 

“James,” he said, pointing at himself. She nodded enthusiastically. 

James bent down, tugging on the desk drawer next to him marked “Emma”. It was a little stuck, but he managed to wiggle it open. It smelt of faded washing powder and musty fabric. He picked up the baby-blue dress that lay on top of a pile of folded clothes and the glass girl moved closer to him; leaning in to look at the dress. James held it out to her and she tentatively reached out her hand. Her finger brushed his as she took the dress from him and all at once he felt a sharp pain in his left hand as something shattered on the floor. The girl jumped back, staring at her hand. James looked over to see half her index finger was missing and glass shards were sticking out wonkily from the stump. A deep red began to bloom from his own finger and dropped down onto the dress that lay abandoned on the floor. The glass girl crept forwards and crouched down next to it.

“No - no, it’s fine, that one’s dirty,” said James, sucking on his stinging finger and rifling through the drawer with the other hand. He found a faded grey pinafore, shook it out and placed it on the floor in front of him. The girl leant down to pick it up and slipped it on over her blue-tinged shoulders. Her face suddenly broke out into a grin, and she brushed down the skirt with her unbroken hand.

He took a few of Emma’s old clothes and laid them down on the floor. Then, he picked up a couple of scarves, rolled them up and pushed them into a barrier. 

“We can sleep here,” he said, “I won’t break you again, I promise.”

The glass girl nodded, and they lay down together, the scarves between them. He slept soundly that night. He didn’t hear his mother leave at all. 

From then on, he came to see her every night, slowly pushing open the studio door and watching her come alive. The studio was still out of bounds during the day, so he would sit and wait until his father stumbled back into the house at midnight. He crept down, careful to miss the third step on the staircase, because it always creaked. He tiptoed out to the studio and pushed gently on the door. The glass girl would always be sitting, cross legged in one of Emma’s old dresses, stroking the newest sculpture his father had made that day. To begin with, James had wanted to run with her into the garden and play tag, and then catch, and then hide and seek, but he worried that every game would lead to another little chip, another shattered fingertip. So, they decided to sit instead. He started to bring her art supplies, and Emma’s old boxes of books, stacking them in piles behind the desk so his father wouldn’t notice them when he came down to work. He’d leaf through the pages, sounding the different letters out to the girl.

“This is an ‘ah’ sound,” he explained, pointing, “but you see here, you see how there’s this ‘e’ on the end of the word? Now it’s an ‘ay’ sound, that make sense?”

She nodded, tilting her head.

“Cr-aaa-dle,” she said slowly, looking up at James for reassurance. He nodded, and her face broke out into a grin. 

He brought her bigger and longer books, and she turned each page delicately, sounding out the harder words. At first, he read to her. She’d lie next to him, a mangy blanket rolled up and placed between them. Sometimes they’d both point out a word together, a “then” or a “because” bridging the distance between their fingertips. She hung onto his every word and when they were done, he would mark their place with one of his father’s old design sketches and hide the book behind the desk.

Eventually, he crept down to find her engrossed in the pages herself, slowly sounding out the words under her breath. He sat quietly down next to her, listening to her stuttering.

At school, he slipped extra books from the library under his coat. No one paid much attention to him, not if they could help it. He stopped needing to hide them behind the studio desk, too. His father didn’t make many sculptures anymore, or drive down to the craft fair on Sunday morning. The crystal butterflies lay forgotten, gathering dust on the studio floor until the girl decided to place them between the weeds in the garden, bursts of colour amongst the overgrown bracken. 

They didn’t just read, they also talked. James had never had a friend he could talk this much to before. Everyone in town knew about what had happened with Emma, and the kids looked at him strangely in the hallways, their expressions somewhere between pity and disgust. It got even worse once his mother left, the whispers got louder, the shunning more obvious. On Mondays, groups of kids would gather round tables and talk about the birthdays that the class had gone to that weekend: the football ones, the pizza ones, the fairy ones. James used to fight back tears thinking about all the fun he’d missed out on, but now he spent his break times scanning through the book shelves, wondering which stories he was going to take home to the glass girl in the studio.

“James,” she said one day, looking up from the copy of Little Women they were reading together, “are we best friends?”

“Would you like us to be?”

“Yes. I’d like that a lot, I think.”

“Then yeah, I guess we are. We’re best friends.”

“Like Jo and Laurie?”

“Yeah. Just like them.”

His father never came to the studio anymore. In the evenings he fell asleep in front of the TV, surrounded by empty bottles and across from a full ashtray. He slept so soundly James didn’t need to tiptoe anymore, but every time he passed the living room, he’d slip a blanket over his father’s sweat-soaked body and place a full glass of water on the coffee table. 

They kept this routine for a long time - James, would run home from school with a backpack full of new books to keep the girl company whilst he was away. 

His fifteenth spring rolled around, a bright and vibrant one. The flowers bloomed in technicolour and the dew sparkled softly on the early morning grass. After school, one April afternoon, he rushed to the studio, his bag bouncing up and down on his back. Beaming, he flung open the door. He opened his mouth, about to announce something, but instead he stopped and let out a small gasp. It was empty. He ducked behind the desk, but there was nothing there but rows upon rows of school books. The silence was eerie, gone was the comfortable rustles of book pages or the windchime-like noise of the girl tapping on old glass sculptures. James looked around frantically, his heartbeat increasing rapidly. Where was she? He dashed out, scanning through the garden. The tall bracken that crept up to the house was empty. Behind the studio was a patch of grass, which backed onto a forest that stretched for miles. James hadn’t gone inside since his mother left. He climbed cautiously over the fence, then started to run, looking up and down, searching behind every tree. His mind reeled with possibilities; worst possible scenarios imagined. His father had gone back to the studio and melted her down. She’d gone somewhere, fallen, smashed into a million tiny pieces. She’d never existed at all. He stopped, spinning around, rubbing his eyes with sweaty palms, his throat constricting. He couldn’t even call for her. He’d never given her a name. 

He caught sight of her then, all of a sudden, and let out a shout of relief. The relief was short-lived, however. She was crumpled in on herself, clutching her stomach next to a tree root. 

“What - oh, god, what are you doing?” he shouted, rushing over and crouching next to her. 

“I...” she gasped, trailing off. She pushed herself slowly up from the grass, looking down. He followed her gaze down to her arm, which was scattered with tiny chips and cracks.

“Your arm -” he said, leaning over, but she pulled it away. 

“It’s - it’s okay. I... I just...the branches....” her words were strained and breathless, “I just... I don’t think I was made... to run, I don’t think I’m supposed...” She gasped.

“What did you do?” he asked, regaining his breath and lowering his voice. She shook her head.

“I just – I couldn’t stay in there – anymore... I, I – I just... there had to be more? I thought there had to be more. In the books, in all the stories, there’s always more. And I thought, there had to be more, for – for me.”

“I...” he sighed, his pulse still thrumming aggressively, “it’s not safe, you know that.”

“I know, I just wanted... just once...” shaking, she stumbled to her feet. 

“Don’t ever do that again. Please.” 

She nodded, looking down at her feet. He held his palm out in front of him, fingers spread, like a father and son had once done in a book they’d read together. The girl looked up, then did the same, holding her hand a short distance from his. James imagined how the coolness of her palm would feel on his skin, imagined their hands gently colliding. The negative space felt like it was burning. They stayed there for a while, then the girl dropped her hand and took a few tentative steps forward, slipping into a slow walk. Letting out a deep exhale, James ran up behind her. They walked back to the studio in silence. 

After that, they compromised. They would sit and read on the grass behind the studio when the weather was clear and the wind was low. It still made James nervous, but it kept the girl happier. She didn’t run back into the woods again after that. 

A few wildflowers persevered through the thorny weeds behind the house. He picked four, periwinkle blue, then walked back to the girl and held them by the stems out to her. She grinned and plucked them out of his hands gently by the petals, taking care not to touch his fingers. James stared down at the space between their fingers, longing to close it. 

“It’s like in The Secret Garden,” she said, her fingers wrapping tightly around the bunch of flowers in her hand. James sat down and the girl lay her head on the grass just in front of him. 

James wasn’t sure how he got older, but he did. The girl stayed the same, of course, her smooth shining skin never breaking out in spots like his did all through his teenage years. They moved on to harder books, she wore Emma’s teenage dresses, they spoke about bigger things. They poured over everything together, except for, when he was seventeen, the red-headed girl at school who he thought was pretty. He wasn’t sure why, but it made him squirm to think about telling her. She didn’t need to know, he decided. He longed to take her further, show her off at school, drive her down to the beach and take her swimming. They both agreed it was too dangerous though, too far. Besides, he was scared of what people would think of her.

University offers eventually came flooding in, and James could feel the end of his childhood looming ever closer. He didn’t like to think of it. He’d considered not going a few times, until the girl told him he was being silly, that she would be fine. She would still be there when he got back. He worried about making friends who weren’t her, who didn’t know him like she did, who couldn’t predict his every move like she could. He thought about taking her with him, but he knew he would never be able to explain her, that no one would understand. And it would be too dangerous as well.

His final summer was long and rainless. He’d been invited to a few parties (out of pity, he assumed), and he’d gone to one, but he’d spent the entire time wishing the girl was there with him. He’d stumbled home to find her reading under the flickering shed lightbulb. She’d looked up at him and smiled, but they hadn’t said anything to each other, she’d just kept reading and he’d sat across from her until he sobered up. The space between them felt so heavy. 

“If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be,”” she had read aloud under her breath, just as he was about to fall asleep, “and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger.”

He didn’t go to any more parties after that. 

The last morning came sooner than he would have liked. James lay on the small patch of grass behind the studio, feeling the dew soak into his t-shirt. He closed his eyes for as long as he could, trying to take a snapshot of the moment and to live in it forever. 

He looked over at the girl, whose eyes were closed, and watched her chest steadily moving up and down. She was wearing a deep blue maxi dress with small daisies dotted about on the fabric and a book lay face-down on her chest. The sun was streaming through her body - she was shimmering like water and tiny pearls of light were flecked across the grass around her. She looked like an angel, he thought. James leaned onto his elbows, tilting his head. The girl looked over at him. 

“I’ll miss you,” she said, smiling over at him. James got up and walked over, lying down next to her. She passed him her book by the back cover, and he took it from her from the front. He turned it over in his hands, flicking through the pages and basking in the old, oaky smell.

“You’re getting your sweaty hands all over it!” she cried, laughing and trying to grab it back from him, as he held it out of her reach. She leaned her arm over in the air over his body but he pulled the book further away and her limb flailed in the air. They were so close. He turned his head. There was barely a centimetre between them, and James could see his breath fogging up her cheeks as her empty eyes bore into his. She wasn’t looking at the book anymore. Without thinking, he pressed his lips against hers, and felt her skin, cold, hard and smooth, beneath his. Only for a brief moment, then all at once he felt the sharp crack beneath him and a sudden sting in his lips. She grabbed his arm, trying to push him backwards, but he leaned into her more forcefully. There was another crack, and he felt a deep slice in his forearm, his skin burning. She pushed back harder, and he felt the cut in his lip splitting open further, until she finally managed to shove him off with a cry.

She jumped up and turned away as James felt a warm trickle of blood dripping down his chin. He spat out a small splinter of glass lodged behind his lip. He stood up after her, dropping her book onto the grass, blood dripping down and seeping into the pages.

“I -” he began, the slit in his lip gaping wider as he opened his mouth. Pain spread through his face and the taste of iron filled his mouth. A dark, angry red dropped from his arm onto the grass below him.

“I, I’m sorry – I didn’t - I thought -”

She wasn’t saying anything, just standing there. She turned back around slowly, and James took a sudden step back as soon as he saw her face. Where her lips had been, there was a deep crater in her face, with hundreds of jagged shards of glass sticking out. She reached up to touch the space where her lips had been and there was an awful scraping sound as rough glass met smooth. 

“I would have done anything for you, James,” she said very quietly. Her voice was throaty and strained, and she spoke slowly, as though every word were a struggle. As she spoke, more shards fell from her mouth. Her book lay forgotten on the floor. 

“Please, stop speaking, it’ll just... it’ll....” He rushed forwards, trying to catch the tiny pieces that were falling from her mouth. There was a deep crack running from the crater to the top of her forehead.

“Just not that,” she continued, each word quieter, more forced. The crack grew deeper, spreading out to reach each corner of her face.

“I just – I love you,” he said, “And I – I thought you might have loved me too.”

She let out a choked sob.

“Of course, I love you James,” she said, through shallow breaths, “I didn’t have a choice.” 

The crack grew a little wider.

*

His train was early the next morning. He said goodbye to his father solemnly, directing his words to the floor.

“I’m - I’m proud of you, Jim,” he said quietly.

“I know, Dad. I know.”

He stepped outside, staring at the studio. Several times, he walked up to it, placing his hand on the rusted doorknob and peeking through the window. The light was off. His train was soon. He’d be late if he didn’t leave now.

As the train pulled out of the station, he leant his head against the window, feeling the low, steady shudder. His cuts ached, but it was a constant ache, and he soon became numb to it. After a while, he felt a sharp sting in the palm of his hand. He looked down. There was a cut there he hadn’t noticed before. Curious, he pushed down on it. There was something small and jagged underneath his skin. Wincing, he scooped into the cut with his fingernails, choking back a yelp as a stab of pain shot up his arm. Slowly, he pulled the tiny object out and turned it over in his hand. It was a small shard of glass. He closed his hand tightly around it, feeling it dig into his palm and the warm blood seeping into his fist.