The Glassmaker

by Tracy Chevalier

she found herself treating her body as if it were a vase made of the thinnest glass, likely to break if jarred.

“Isn’t comfort a kind of cure?” Orsola still hesitated. “It is taking advantage of fear.”

It was strange to think of peaches still growing and ripening when they were stuck inside, fearing death.

They stood there like that, hands in each other’s hair, and it was the most painful and pleasurable moment of her life. Orsola had not understood before then that those two feelings could be so intertwined.

Perhaps that was the best way to navigate Venice: let the city unroll itself around you and guide you rather than trying to master it with a map in your head.

Sometimes you can feel like a slave even with coins in your pocket.”

To stand on ground that connected in some way—through millions of footsteps and rocks and fields and snow and mountains—to where he was,

Time might race and freeze, expand and contract, but the continuity of Antonio’s dolphins, the knowledge that she was still remembered after so long, was the solid foundation upon which her life was built, like one of the millions of trees pounded into the bed of the lagoon to create the base that held up Venice. She didn’t understand it, but she was not sure she could remain standing and steady without it.

A pearl needs grit to be beautiful; beauty comes from the scar on the lip, the gap in the teeth, the crooked eyebrow.

If glass dolphins have come to me all these years, Orsola thinks, and real dolphins have come back to Venice, why not him, come back to me?