What Are You Gonna Do With All That Glassware?

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The old man stood in the middle of the laboratory the way a lighthouse stands in the middle of a storm, except the storm was made entirely of glass. Towers of flasks, retorts, coils, bulbs, and globes rose around him like a crystalline forest that had given up on nature and built itself instead. Everything gleamed with that strange metallic gold that looks like sunlight turned into plumbing.

He brushed a hand over a huge onion-shaped vessel, and it chimed like a tired bell.

“What are you gonna do with all that glassware?” I asked.

He sighed, as if the question had been chasing him for twenty years. He looked at me over half-moon glasses that made him seem like a disappointed librarian.

“It’s not glassware,” he said. “It’s possibility in the wrong shape.”

Behind him, a flask flickered blue, like a memory struggling to stay alive. Another released a bubble of silver mist that drifted upward and changed its mind halfway to the ceiling.

He moved through the maze the way a man walks through a crowded bar where he knows everyone but wishes he didn’t.

He pointed at a cluster of linked spheres. “The Dream Condenser. Tried turning nightmares into something useful, like shoe polish. It kept producing oily remorse. Nobody wanted it.”

A tall column of spiraling tubes hissed softly. “Memory Still,” he said. “Brews childhood into nostalgia liquor. Too strong. People drank it and sat on the curb for days crying about lost bicycles.”

He tapped the giant globe glowing faintly like a trapped moon. “This one was supposed to fix everything. Can’t remember what everything was.”

The lab made a soft chorus of clinks, hisses, and drips—the sound of time practicing for a performance it didn’t want to give.

“So,” I said, “you’re an alchemist?”

“No,” he said, almost offended. “I just never learned when to stop making things.”

He dusted a brass valve shaped like a sunflower. “Most folks make machines for their problems. I made machines for problems I thought I might have someday.”

“And?”

“Turns out most of them never happened.”

He picked up a violet orb, frowned, set it down again. The place felt like the universe’s attic—full of ideas that never learned what they were for.

“So what are you gonna do with all this glassware?” I asked again.

He smiled—crooked, tired, sincere.

“I suppose I’ll do what everyone does eventually,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“Figure out which parts of my life were experiments… and which ones actually worked.”

He turned a valve. Something glowed, something hissed, but nothing exploded.

Outside, the day went on quietly, unaware that inside his workshop, a chandelier-shaped universe was still deciding what it wanted to become.