Her only response, after I confronted her for breaking my work, was a short bark of laughter and a sneering whisper to “learn to throw.”
It was a calculated attack on my skill, an insult meant to shatter what was left of my confidence.
But the silence from the rest of the studio was somehow worse. Every potter suddenly found a deep fascination with their own splash pan, refusing to meet my eyes.
She thought this was a fight about pottery, but the Kiln Commander was about to discover what happens when a petty tyrant goes up against an architect’s mind for meticulous, documented, and life-ruining process improvement.
The First Crack: Dust and Dreams
The air in the community studio smelled of damp earth and potential. It was a scent I hadn’t realized I’d missed so desperately until it hit me, a wave of nostalgia that almost buckled my knees. For twenty years, my hands had known the precise language of architectural drafting, the cold companionship of a mouse and keyboard, the clean, sterile lines of a blueprint. Now, at fifty-two, with our son Leo off finding himself in Colorado, my hands craved the mess again. The glorious, unpredictable chaos of clay.
My husband, Mark, had gifted me the membership for my birthday. “Go get your hands dirty again,” he’d said, kissing the top of my head. “The house can handle a little dust.”
The studio was a sprawling warehouse space, partitioned by shelves laden with greenware—the fragile, unfired pottery in its pale, chalky state. Wheels hummed in a meditative chorus, and a few members, mostly younger than me, were hunched over their work, lost in concentration. It felt like coming home. I found an empty wheel in the corner, slapped a fresh cone of stoneware onto the bat, and took a deep breath. The familiar spin, the cool slip of the clay rising between my fingers—it was a language my body hadn’t forgotten.
That’s when I first saw her. She wasn’t throwing, but surveying. A woman my age, maybe a little older, with a severe grey bob and the kind of posture that suggested she owned the very ground she stood on. She moved from the kiln area to the drying racks, her eyes scanning everything with a critical, proprietary air. On a set of shelves reserved for large projects, a collection of enormous, almost brutalist-style planters sat drying. They were technically impressive but consumed an absurd amount of real estate.
Later, I heard someone refer to her as Brenda, the Kiln Commander. It wasn’t a compliment. The kiln schedule, I soon discovered, was a single, dog-eared sheet of paper tacked to a corkboard, governed by a vague, first-come, first-served policy that seemed to serve Brenda first and foremost. Her name, in a bold, aggressive script, dominated the next three firing slots. A knot of unease tightened in my stomach. This wasn’t the collaborative, earthy utopia I remembered. Something felt… sharp.
A Spiderweb in the Glaze
Two weeks later, my first batch was ready. A set of six simple, clean-lined mugs. I’d spent hours trimming the feet, pulling the handles until they felt like a natural extension of the form. They were my re-entry into this world, a quiet declaration that I was back. I’d managed to snag a spot on a bisque firing, sandwiched between Brenda’s monolithic planters and someone’s collection of tiny, intricate sculptures.
Opening the kiln after a glaze firing is a specific kind of Christmas morning for a potter. The heat still radiates in shimmering waves, and you hold your breath, praying the kiln gods were kind. I carefully lifted my mugs from the shelf, their new, glossy coats of midnight blue gleaming under the fluorescent lights. One, two, three, four, five… perfect. They were smooth, solid, and held the promise of a thousand morning coffees.
Then I picked up the sixth. A hairline fracture, fine as a spider’s thread, ran from the lip down the side, bisecting the handle I’d so carefully attached. It was a clean, brutal crack. My heart sank. A flaw in the clay? An air bubble I’d missed? It was possible. I was rusty, after all. I ran my thumb over the fracture, the sharp edge a tiny betrayal.
I set it on my worktable, separate from the others. Mark would tell me it was just one, that the other five were beautiful. And they were. But my eye kept being drawn to the broken one. It felt less like a mistake and more like a warning. A small, dark omen in an otherwise bright studio. I wrapped it in newspaper and threw it in the reclaim bucket, trying to shake the feeling that its demise hadn’t been entirely my fault. The sound it made hitting the slurry of discarded clay was a dull, final thud.
Whispers by the Slop Sink
The studio’s social hub wasn’t the coffee machine; it was the series of deep, clay-caked slop sinks where we washed our tools and hands. It was the place for gossip, for commiseration, for the quiet airing of grievances. I was rinsing my throwing bucket when two younger women, Chloe and Maya, started talking in low voices a few feet away.
“Did you see the new kiln list?” Chloe whispered, scrubbing furiously at a trimming tool. “Brenda’s got the next two glaze firings. Her ‘sculptural vessels’ are taking up three full shelves.”
“Of course,” Maya sighed, her voice heavy with resignation. “My order for the craft fair is never going to get fired in time. I swear, my stuff gets moved on the greenware shelf, too. I found a chip on one of my bowls yesterday. Right on the rim.”
“Mine, too!” Chloe’s head snapped up. “A whole set of plates. I had them stacked perfectly. Came in the next morning and they were shoved to the back, and one had a pressure crack right down the middle. Gary just shrugged when I told him.”
About the Author
