Author's note: Written for the writing contest. My other story Deepest Midnight Box was too long, so I had to whip this one up. Wrote it in about three days, 1/3 of that time spent researching Raku pottery. One day spent writing, and the remaining day was for revision. It's small and doesn't have much of a story due to the constraints of the contest, but I believe it holds a fairly impressive philosophical message for its size. Do enjoy.

Potter's Metaphysics

Jones Fernwright stands holding his metal tongs, occasionally stoking, looking down at the coke-glow of the smith's forge kiln. Underneath the spiny brickwork of the outer envelope, copper slated roof and sheet-metal pan-piped chimneys there is a blue and white Imari style ceramic hibachi, circa 1900, burning sawdust and bluestone at the bubbling center of the brick pile's guts.

In the long grass, at dusk. The sun is setting through a sloped thicket of pine and ash, slowly, rose red matte glaze burning Jones' eyes. There was a cool evening wind now, rustling the leaves to an applause and blowing browning leaves around his feet.

Checking his Jaeger chronometer, set flush with his tanned wrist skin. And by the light of the device, almost done.

The smell of the thing is fantastic; a rich amalgam of ferric chloride computer etchant and vaporized salt, the unpredictable smoke patterns and metalic crackle of cone six clay playing themselves out like musical notes across his tongue.

Inside the domed hibachi, the wires and the elements. Potter's metaphysics.

Stoking the fire.

It's a symphony, really. It has its crescendos and decrescendos, dramatic moments and billowing heat, an almost rythmatical enterprise Jones conducts and participates in. Orchestral mystique, at once brutal, artificial, and polite.

It's time.

He pulls away some ornate burnished bronze grill, display of hellfire mouth revealed, and plunges the metal tongs inside, temperature red hot 1800 F and copper glaze melted. The waiting can only just admits the bowl, the red cedar bedding and litter inside instantaneously catching fire. He quickly closes it, letting the molecules sort themselves out.

He thinks of Piet Mondrian, atomic diagram broadway boogie-woogie parallel lines rushing to metamorphose molecular bond colorants. Deep crescendo.

Raku in the can, Jones sits down on a rocking wooden bench, its red paint peeling, kicking at dirty fragments of Italian terracotta at his feat. Broken bonbonniére of a few years back, and running his hands along the rough texture of the chair he thinks a good micro-abrasive sanding and a buff of shellac is in order. Later.

He blankly surveys the grounds, head craning ponderously in limbic fashion. The grass is yellowed; the honeysuckle overgrown and sagging. The fresh glaze lingers- long-chain monomers shot through burnt toast. He sucks it in, high on what he's done. High on the glaze, both literally and in a meditative sort of way.

I guess I'm in love with the pots, he thinks, wiping away the cool sweat in the mat of his hair. The delicate oxidization, the metalic luster and pockmarked, semi-molten sheen. The way they patina in the sunlight, warted monochrome filiment and always for decoration. Never for practical use. That's it, he thought, that's why I love them so much. It's the activity, the act of doing what we don't really have to do, shaping things into ideals and equal meshes of a curved frame. Appliqued, carbonizing horse hair. To get those purples.

Leaf and lichen, twigs. Weed-grown brambles and plywood shanties, the red brick house and tracks of wrought angle iron covered in flowering vine. Stray pieces of driftwood and tools; abstract, unfinished projects litter the grounds surrounded by chainlink, also overgrown and teeming with honeybees. A broken business end of a dissembled rake, a dry bag of hydrated lime. A milky plastic container a quarter full with some thick black liquid.

He knows now, absolutely, watching a muted tactical ultralight punch through bloodied fleece strato above, that it's just that. It's making something, something utterly superfluous and wasteful, that makes the culture of man. The moxie to deadhead until you've got something you can touch and feel, something with a somatic quality, dug up and hammered, picked apart with Japanese pliars and diamond drills, polishing cloth and vises.

And even if it was formless, amorphous, it would never be deprived of spirit. It'd be a part of man, a branch in the megaform of culture....

Darkness is setting in, the infinite clouds growing dark on one of the benighted corners of the world. The bowl is cooling, cooled, and so Jones removes it with an abestos silver oven mit, difficult to see, and sets it down on a long hard slab of rosewood amid the high grass.

Appraising new pots was tough, being used to doing odd-jobs up north, fearsome excavations and deep sea recce operations. He pulls out a little vile of liquid, removing the recyc plastic stopper and sniffing deep. The smell is too strong so close.

He glances over its rough, unpolished surface, whorls of smoky-toned copper glaze and wavy lilac, erratic light chroma. Its shade was its complexion, deep chaparral warted glaze revealed copper armature. Holding it to his ear to it, still extremely hot, he thinks he hears conch-shell static, waves of heat lapping against ceramic shores.

It's beautiful.

Jones places it in a box lined with a faded fabric that did not burn and fitted each bowl, a kind of shrink-wrap velvet. He carries the box by its handle, walking carefully around a chicken-wire fence and a rocky small garden. His house lay behind a little shroud of green, ovular leafed trees, its unkempt traditional Japanese tile slated roof stark brown in the dark canopy bespeaks a rustic simplicity within the tangled branches.

Reaching the door, the black parentheses dividing, he shuts the plain timber door behind him and hears the loose window frame shake. Old rugs and the smell of clean cotton. Sitting down on a couch sheathed in a dark red woolen comforter, the floor below him covered in rice-straw mat imported from somewhere offshore years before.

The only sound is that of the ultralight above, sweeping its hexagonal grid displayed in atomic green tiers, its polycarbon frame gliding effortless over the geofront and the surrounding woodland.

From the couch he strikes a Primus latern, a burning white light that illuminates everything. Rows and rows of Raku on around-the-room perf board shelving, countertops bristling with once chromed East-German appliances and leaky instruments. Warm autumnal palette.

They've got a name for something like this, Jones says to himself, looking at nothing in particular. I just know they do. Vague regrets? Is this the feeling of culture? Of art? To go home at the end of the day and admire a lifetime of surplus and luxury? Dimly aware of the effect one has on the immediate world.

He bends over, flicks a few clamps and an almost inaudible woosh escapes the case. The Raku pot was lying snuggly on its side and cooled by internal systems. The Raku is also polished, not perfectly, merely coated with resin bond, allowing Jones' mortality and artistic expression to shape the pot and create art. Or at least approximate it.

No two Raku are the same, the smoke-patterns impossible to duplicate. So it wasn't the same as all his other pots, but....

No, this, this needs something more. He stands, grasping the pot, slips on his shoes and heads back outside into the flat minute between golden-ray abendlied and twilight. The sky looks like fried steel wool, and the wind is back, the trees applauding Jones, accelerado.

Along the sloping field there is a cluster of wildflowers, interlocking under yellowed grass and growing from dry-cracked loam. He smells them as he approaches, a patch of garden variety white pansies and scarlet lilac just shades of brown in the dark. He bends down, crouched and settling on his haunches. Jones selects and picks a small bouquet, then trudges back to his house, the Primus lantern's white hiss looking supremely warm.

Inside now, wrapping himself with rough wool tartan, setting the vase down on the seat next to him and tossing the handfull of flowers down beside it. Jones shivers, warming himself. And then, shaking a little, the potter takes the flowers up in one hand and the Raku in the other. He carefully places the flowers into it, the skinny opening just only admitting them in. Limp bulge of whites and reds.

Deep decrescendo.