Pair of fiery phoenix wings

The annealer cracked the left wing on Tuesday, two hours before the bishop's man came to see it. I stood in the cold shed with the pieces in a bucket and thought you would have known what to do, because you always worked the sums in your head while I was still reaching for the chalk.

Dad left us the moulds and a drawer of rods, and nothing written down. The glass for the wings runs amber at the root, cadmium red where the feathers begin, and yellow at the tips, where the blower has to work fast before it sets. I tried to remake the left one from memory and got the scrolls wrong every time, the curl turning inward like something frightened. Mrs Adeyemi from the chapel committee sat on an upturned crate and watched me fail four mornings running, and said nothing, which was kinder than I expected.

On the fifth day I stopped looking at my drawings and looked at the right wing still hanging in the window, the one nobody had broken. I held the pipe to it, turned it against the light, and saw that Dad had never shaped the curls with a tool at all. He had pressed each one with his thumb, once, from the outside, the way you close a book. So I did the same, and the scrolls came out matching.

They go up on Sunday, one on each side of the east window, facing in. When the sun reaches the glass at six, the two of them throw a fire across the pews that nobody lit, and I keep thinking you should be here to see it, grumbling about the price of lead.