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.”
My hands stilled in the murky water. A pressure crack. Not a flaw from throwing, but from being handled improperly before it was fired. From being moved without care. My cracked mug flashed in my mind. The clean, straight line of the fracture. It hadn’t looked like a bubble burst. It had looked like a stress fracture.
I kept my back to them, pretending to be absorbed in cleaning a sponge that was already clean. The women’s voices dropped even lower. They talked about oversized pieces jumping the queue, about the unwritten rules that seemed to bend and warp around one person. Every word was a quiet confirmation of the uneasy feeling I’d been trying to ignore. It wasn’t just me. It wasn’t my rustiness. There was a system here, and I was beginning to understand I was at the bottom of it. The Kiln Commander’s reign, it seemed, had casualties.
The Unwritten Rules
Armed with the whispers from the slop sink, I approached the kiln schedule with a new sense of purpose. I had a dozen pieces ready for a bisque fire—a collection of small bowls I was rather proud of. The current firing was cooling, and the next sheet was a blank slate. I picked up the pen, my moment had arrived.
“Looking for a spot?”
Brenda’s voice cut through the low hum of the studio. It wasn’t a question so much as a challenge. She was wiping her hands on a towel, a smudge of white porcelain on her cheek like war paint.
“Yes,” I said, trying to keep my tone light. “Just need a shelf for these bowls.”
She peered over my shoulder at my cart. Her eyes, a pale, washed-out blue, flickered over my carefully crafted bowls with a dismissive glance. “Those are small. You can probably fit on a shared shelf later in the week.” She plucked the pen from my fingers, uncapped it, and in her heavy, dark script, wrote BRENDA – Planters (3 shelves) across the next two days.
I stared at her, then at the board. “I was here first,” I said, the words feeling small and flimsy in the air.
Brenda gave a thin, patronizing smile. “The unwritten rule, dear, is that large-scale work gets priority. It takes longer to dry, and it’s a waste of energy to fire a half-empty kiln. Gary agrees.” She gestured vaguely towards the manager’s office. “We have to think of the studio’s efficiency.”
We? I hadn’t realized she was on the management team. The sheer audacity of it left me speechless. She spoke as if her personal projects were a community service. My bowls, my mugs, my re-found joy—they were an inefficiency. An annoyance to be slotted in whenever it was convenient for her.
I looked around. A few people were pointedly staring at their wheels, refusing to make eye contact. They’d all heard. They all knew. And no one said a word. The silence was its own kind of violence. I pushed my cart of delicate, unfired bowls back to my workspace, the wheels squeaking in protest. The problem wasn’t just Brenda; it was the silence that let her thrive.
The Weight of Clay and Contempt: The Second Casualty
I finally got my bowls bisqued a week later, tucked onto a half-shelf at the very bottom of the kiln. I spent the next few days glazing them, experimenting with layered combinations, feeling the hope bubble up again. I was particularly excited about one—a wide, shallow bowl I’d glazed in a deep cerulean blue with a touch of sandy brown at the rim. I could already picture it on our dining table, filled with fruit. A piece of my new life, integrated into the old. A gift for Mark.
This time, when I placed them on the “To Be Glaze Fired” shelf, I was meticulous. I found a corner, arranged them with plenty of space around each piece, and made a mental map of their position. They were at the back, on the left, behind a row of stout, unremarkable vases made by another member. Safe.
The call that my pieces were ready came on a Friday afternoon. I left work early, a nervous energy buzzing under my skin. I tried to temper my expectations, but the image of that blue bowl, shimmering and perfect, was burned into my mind. I walked to the unloading area, my heart thumping a little faster.
The other bowls were fine, beautiful even. But the one for Mark was ruined. It wasn’t just a hairline fracture this time. A huge, crescent-shaped chunk had broken off the rim and fallen into the center of the bowl, where it had been fused into a glassy, ugly scar by the molten glaze. It looked like something heavy had been dropped on it, or it had been slammed against the shelf post. It was a violent, undeniable wound.
I picked it up, the weight of it all wrong. It was garbage. Unsalvageable. My breath hitched. This wasn’t an accident. This wasn’t a flaw in my making. This was negligence. This was malice. I stood there for a long moment, holding the shattered remains of my work, the heat from the kiln feeling like a fever on my skin. The joy I’d felt, the sense of returning to a part of myself, was curdling into something hot and acidic in my chest. It was anger. Pure, undiluted, and very, very real.
A Hypothesis Forms
I didn’t throw the bowl away. I took it home. I set it on the kitchen counter like a piece of evidence. When Mark came home, he saw it immediately. He looked at my face, then at the broken pottery. “Oh, Tam,” he said, wrapping his arms around me. “I’m so sorry.”
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