The Glassblower’s Last Breath by Toni Mirosevich
Incoming managing editor Esperanza Vargas Macias on today’s bonus story: Toni Mirosevich’s piece drew me in with an innocent but urgent desire to know more. Inspired by the narrator’s gentle curiosity, their attempt to understand the world around them on a big and small scale, I find myself searching for answers to their questions—even when we both come to understand that not all questions have easy answers.
The Glassblower’s Last Breath
A glassblower in a shop on the seacoast of Japan places his lips against a blowpipe. At the other end of the pipe a liquid nubbin of glass. He blows into the pipe, blows and blows, like god’s pursed lips blow the clouds across the heavens. Slowly a round globe forms; a globe that will float on water.
When he’s finished, he taps the float off the pipe, makes a sealing button, and there it is, a perfect sphere with one slight imperfection—an air bubble caught in the glass trapping one last breath.
A local fisherman buys the float to hold up his nets and—if the seas are kind—lift his fortunes. Then he sets out to sea.
*
In third grade, I learn that the world is one big round globe. Seas cover most of the surface. “Over 70 percent,” says the teacher. “And our bodies are made up of 60 percent water.” Outside the classroom window the rain never stops. Every day the skies open up and it pours and pours and pours. I watch puddles become streams become lakes become oceans. The asphalt of the playground turns into one big gray sea.
Aren’t her percentages a little low?
*
Somewhere in the middle of the Pacific, a storm, fraying string of the net or gigantic wave causes the float to break free. Pushed by surface currents, ocean winds, devil winds, it begins its long journey. Months later my father, trolling for salmon in the Bering Sea, thinks he spots a green orb floating in the green waves. But isn’t sure. The waves and globe are the same sea green color. A glint of sunlight hits glass, quick flash, and confirms his hope.
With a net he scoops up the float to bring it home and add to his collection. Glass floats lie all over the house; in the living room, the bedrooms, on end tables. Large and small, sea green and amber. One rare one, deep cobalt blue: The Emperor’s Ball.
If, some day in the future, the heavens continue to rain, if the seas rise and cover the globe as they once did in the beginning of time, everyone he loves in this house will be saved. They will be lifted by the floats and ride on the top of that sea.
*
He has a new idea. He always has ideas. Of how to make it big. How to beat the odds. Once I overhead him say to my mother: Let’s move to South America. There are oceans of shrimp down there. All I need to do is scoop them up. When we get there, we’ll live like kings.
His new plan: When you peer inside a glass float, you can see through, clear through, can see not only what’s inside the glass but whatever lies beyond. Green glass colors the entire world green, the color of money.
What if the top of the sea was see-through? If he could see the fish swimming below the waves he could catch them before the other sons-of-bitches get a chance.
When he returns to port he’ll need to find a glasscutter who can drill a hole in the top of the float, two inches in diameter. An opening. A porthole. Someone who knows how to drill into a ball of glass and not crack the world.
*
He carries the float into the house, places it on the dining room table. With a pitcher of water, he pours water through the hole at the top, fills the float half full. Half sea, half sky, equal parts. I watch an ocean form, a sea without waves or white caps. When I tap the side of the glass a small shiver glides across the water’s surface.
Out of his jacket pocket he pulls a clear plastic bag half full of water. Two small orange fish swim in the clear small sea. “Goldfish,” he says. “When you think about it all fish are golden, aren’t they?”
I watch as he drops the fish through the hole one by one. They begin to circle the sea. Round and round they go. “Where they’ll stop, nobody knows,” he laughs.
*
The first thing I do the next morning when I awaken is to go see. The fish are still there circling, making looping turns as if they never stopped. When do they sleep? Fish flakes, tapped through the hole, float down like falling leaves. The goldfish rise to the top of the sea, their mouths opens and close, open and close, as if they’re surprised, over and over again. One by one the leaves disappear.
I watch the fish for hours. Watch them go round and round. He’s done it. What he said he always wanted to do. He’s captured the sea.
*
Every day I check on their progress. As the week goes by the goldfish move a little slower. Then slower still. By the end of the week they look tired. Worn out. Maybe they’re bored with the same route, the same sea, with nowhere else to go.
One morning I find one of the goldfish floating face up, a silent orange curl. The next day the other, with the same fate.
“Why did they die?” I ask him.
“The hole was too small,” he says. “There wasn’t enough oxygen.”
Or I overfed them. Or they were bum fish. Or the idea failed.
I stare at the empty sea a long time. The green globe is covered with glassy waves, just like the earth. Nothing floats below the water’s surface. If there’s nothing in the sea left to catch all our dreams will die. His dream.
That’s when I spot one clear bubble in the glass.
“How did that get there?” I ask. He tells me it’s a flaw, the glassblower’s mistake. One of his last breaths.
His last breath? I circle the house, examine every float. In every single one I find glass bubbles. They look like the air bubbles that sometimes came out of a goldfish’s mouth. Bubble after bubble. Breath after breath.
*
In school, the teacher is giving a lesson about the earth’s atmosphere. She says that the air we breathe is 21 percent oxygen.
At the bell for recess I stay behind and tell her about the float, the bubble. If the bubble burst would that have been enough oxygen to keep the goldfish alive? She says that we exhale carbon dioxide, not oxygen. And who ever heard of a breath captured in a glass bubble?
She’ll never have the answers to my questions. Like, when will we move to South America? And, if the glassblower, at the end of his life, had one wish would he wish for that one breath back?
Toni Mirosevich is the author of six collections of poetry and prose. Her new story collection is forthcoming from Counterpoint Press in Spring 2022. New works can be found at Catapult.com. She is a professor emeritus in creative writing at San Francisco State University. Visit her at http://www.tonimirosevich.com/.
