The glass artist raises the blow pipe and exhales with slow, measured breaths. I am mesmerized by his lips and the lines that bracket his mouth. For a moment, I am the glass, his lips soft and full like a girl’s. His mouth tugs on my left nipple; I cross my arms.

I could step forward from this crowd that watches him shapeshift molten chemicals into hard, cool glass, curved and smooth, the unearthly science of transformation with air. I could rest my hand on his shoulder, unbutton my blouse. He’d meet my eyes, then set down his blowpipe and press his warm mouth to my scar.

After the glassblowing demonstration, I buy a set of life-sized glass pears from the artist, one spring-grass green, the other robin’s egg blue. Perhaps I’ll come back later, maybe at midnight under a full, bright moon, and tap lightly on his door. He’ll remember me and the sad way I watched his rounded lips suck and pull. We’ll fall in love. He’ll leave his wife—she never understood his talent anyway—and I’ll become his muse. Naked, I’ll stretch on a stainless-steel table, and, in the glow of the white-hot glory hole, the furnace over two thousand degrees, he’ll breathe a multicolored globe with his powerful lungs, a custom-made breast to pin to my chest.

Sometimes, I forget the empty space on my left side or mistake the drainage tube for that sad breast and its rogue cells. I imagine my soft flesh with the small freckle by the nipple on a tray somewhere, the fleshy mound slumped in a metal dish, alone without its twin.

I set the artist’s pears on my windowsill. Sunlight sparkles through the glass. I wander through my house, a table set for one, and check the locks, the oven settings, the box in the safe with my mother’s diamond earrings. I check and double-check I took out the trash, the recycling, the compost in its weighted plastic bags taut like skin. I do everything twice; the world is a world of pairs.

After a while, I stop checking for what’s missing and begin to collect other pairs: shakers ordered from Amazon with ashes to ashes on the salt, dust to dust on the pepper; goblets for the wine I no longer drink; and a set of teardrop-shaped vases I’ll fill with dahlias, lilies, dinner-plate hibiscus from my yet-to-be-grown garden.

At night, before I leave to wander past the glassblower’s house, I’ll slip the robin’s egg pear into the puckered left side of my bra, the smooth glass a balm to the nearly healed line of stitches. The weight of the glass makes me even-chested in my oversized T-shirt, as if I am whole. I’ll arrive at his studio that glows with fireworks of yellow and orange flames, a welcoming, and knock. My scar is a zipper, I’ll say, and together, we’ll unzip it, peer inside, and watch my still-beating heart.