Gedda Foss's Arc

Chapter 6 of 6

Gedda woke before dawn and lit the lamp by his bedroll. He'd slept in the workshop again, too tired to walk back to the room he rented in the village. The shelves with his mother's work caught the lamplight—her bowls, her cups, the vase he'd changed. His new pot sat on the drying rack, waiting. He stood and walked to the back corner where his mother kept her unfinished pieces. He'd avoided this shelf since she died—the works she'd left incomplete felt too private to touch. But now he pulled down a round vase with bands of color waiting for detail work. The base coat was perfect, smooth gradients from purple to cream to blue. His mother had sketched the pattern she wanted in charcoal on paper beside it—waves and flowers and stars, flowing together like water. Gedda set the vase on his work table and tried to trace one of the flowers with his brush. The line came out shaky, nothing like the confident curves in her sketch. He tried again. Worse. He set the brush down and looked at the vase, at the charcoal sketch, at his own clumsy marks. His mother had made this kind of work look easy, her hand moving across clay like she was simply revealing what was already there. But when Gedda tried to follow her path, the clay fought him. He picked up the vase and carried it back to the shelf in the corner. Some things she'd started, he realized, were meant to stay hers. He couldn't finish her work by copying her lines. He could only keep making his own, clumsy and honest, until his hands learned their own way forward. He turned toward the small table by the door—the one piece of furniture his mother had brought from her own childhood. On it sat a pot Gedda had made when he was eight years old, decorated with symbols he'd copied from a book about magic. His mother had fired it for him and set it there herself, even though the walls were uneven and the glaze had cracked in a dozen places. She'd called it his best work and left it where anyone entering the workshop would see it first. Gedda walked over and picked it up carefully. The weight felt familiar in his hands, the rough texture where his small fingers had pressed too hard. He remembered the day after she'd fired it—a man from the village had come to commission work and seen the pot. He'd laughed and asked if this was the kind of quality he could expect. His mother had gone quiet, and Gedda had felt the shame burn through him. The man left without ordering anything. After that, Gedda stopped showing anyone what he made. He only worked when no one could see, only tried when failure would be private. Gedda set the pot back on the table and looked at it in the lamplight. The cracks caught the glow, turning the broken glaze into a map of branching lines. His mother had kept it there for sixteen years, even after he'd stopped making things, even after he'd learned to hide. She'd never moved it. Never put something better in its place. He'd thought she kept it out of kindness, but standing here now, he understood different. She'd kept it there because it was his—clumsy and cracked and honest. The same reason his new pot would go on her shelf tomorrow, once it was fired. Not because it was perfect, but because he'd made it, and that was enough.