Schrödinger's Kiln

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When her finger caught in the smooth wall of red clay and the nearly finished stoneware mug ripped apart like a house under a tornado, Mary simply lifted her hands from the wreckage and watched it spin around and around atop the wheel’s muddy disk. She didn’t get angry. She was way past angry. This was the fifth mug she’d ruined today, and she’d used up all her mad after the second. All the same, it was more than simple fatigue that made her hands shake now. That was her livelihood spinning around on display before her.

She fumbled with her left foot for the power switch, finally kicking it with her big toe. The lump of clay coasted to a stop, and now that the electric motor’s whine and rumble had quit, the only sound in the studio was the classical music coming from the radio on the drying table beside the wheel.

The table with only two mugs on it, where there should have been eight.

And of those two, only one was new today. The other had already been glazed and fired. Mary picked it up without bothering to clean the mud off her hands and tilted it to her lips.

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