A glassblower named Renn kept a shop at the end of a quiet lane, famous for windows so clear that birds occasionally mistook them for open air. Renn took great pride in this clarity. Every morning before opening, he polished each pane until it disappeared entirely, until customers had to knock to make sure there was glass there at all.
One rainy afternoon, a traveler named Oslo came in out of the wet, and before even greeting Renn, pressed both palms flat against the largest front window, just to feel that it was real, that there was something solid keeping the rain off his face. He left two perfect handprints, fogged at the edges, fading slowly as the glass warmed back up.
Renn watched him do it and said nothing, though every instinct in his trained hands wanted to reach for the cloth he kept on his belt at all times for exactly this purpose.
Oslo bought nothing, said very little, and left within the hour, probably never thinking of the shop again.
Renn did not wipe the window that evening. He told himself he'd get to it. He did not wipe it the next morning either. He found himself, instead, standing near that particular pane more than the others, watching the two prints fade by degrees, a little duller every day, the way breath fades off a mirror, except slower, except somehow worse to watch.
His sister visited on the third week and asked why one window was filthy while the rest of the shop gleamed like always.
"I'm checking it for moisture damage," Renn said, which was not true, and which his sister did not believe for a single second, though she was kind enough not to say so.
By the following month the prints were nearly gone — just a faint warp in the clarity if you tilted your head exactly right in exactly the right light. Renn finally took up his cloth on a Sunday with no customers expected, and stood in front of the window for a long while before he used it, the way you might stand at a door before knocking on it for the last time.
He wiped the glass clean. It took him four times longer than it should have.
The window went back to its famous clarity, disappearing entirely under his careful hands. But Renn kept the cloth he'd used that day in a drawer by itself, separate from the others, and never once washed it, as if some part of those two fading prints had transferred into the fabric and he wasn't yet ready to let that part go too.
