The Dragon's Breath

There are three reasons I am standing in a drafty pottery studio in Kyoto at 2:00 a.m., sweating through my linen shirt while a stranger feeds a dragon.

One: The third stoker, Kenji, burned his palm on the firebrick an hour ago and is currently nursing it in the kitchen, which means the twelve-hour shift gap has collapsed into a single, continuous twelve-hour block for the two of us.

Two: The kiln is a Shigaraki noborigama, a climbing kiln that looks like a sleeping dragon coiled up the side of the hill. It does not care about my three-year wait for this firing slot. It does not care that my shelves are packed with sixty pieces of stoneware, each one a specific shade of grey I have been trying to achieve since I was twenty-nine. If the temperature drops below one thousand and twenty degrees for more than twenty minutes, the clay reverts. It softens. It slumps. Three years of waiting turns into a pile of expensive mud.