two-tone stoneware, cream-glazed at the shoulder and brown-glazed at the foot, with the maker's faint impression in the clay where the kiln-mark of a long firing went on. the cork is held down by a single tarred string still tied in the bow the apprentice never bothered to undo. inside: pearls of dried glue, the colour of pale honey, the size of small teeth.
the paper label is foxed, glued on with the same glue the jug contains. animal glue · pearl in mono small-caps; the firm's name in a slow italic; below, the grade and the bloom strength in micro-print no carpenter ever read more than once. one corner of the paper has lifted and curls outward like a slow shaving.
used by the cabinet-maker in the back room — a handful into the glue-pot on the stove, water just below a simmer, brushed hot onto a mortise that no clamp will hold for an hour. the workshop smells of it for three days afterward. on cold mornings the jug itself smells faintly of soup.
leave the cork off overnight and the pearls weep a single drop. a kind of patience, says the old man, slower than ours.
on the same bench: the quink, a jar of matches, and a long slow ritual of fitting two pieces of wood together so the seam vanishes.