Phoenix and cherry blossoms on a upper back

You asked why I never sold the blackened vase from the Hallam Street fire, so here is the answer, written down because I'd rather you had it in ink than from your mother's version. The night the works caught, the glaze shed off every piece on the top shelf in grey flakes. I went in for the tallies and found one thing standing: a tall jar I'd thrown the month before your grandmother's anniversary, with a bird on it, wings flung wide, painted in slip the colour of old pewter. Cherry branches ran up the neck. The petals had gone to ash at the edges, but the bird was whole.

The thing is, I never meant it to be a phoenix. I'd been drawing swallows all winter. Then a woman came in off the train with a photograph of a bird she'd seen on a temple wall in Kyoto and asked whether I could make it fly backwards, tail first, as if it were coming out of smoke. I said I'd try. Half the jars cracked in the glost firing. The one that didn't was the one I'd given up on.

When the fire brigade let us back in, I stood there with it in my arms, still faintly warm, and thought about the rest of the stock lying in the dust. Your grandmother said I was soft. Maybe I was. I wrapped the jar in my coat and carried it home across the bridge, and it sits on the windowsill now, where the morning light reaches it first.

Love, Grandad