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Baby blue and shark shino. She was glazed, his favorite piece melted against an old metal shelf. The blue and honey brown swirled and molded against her, charred and cracking with age and fire that to this day, they say, burns within her hollow shell.

She'd loved him well, he'd recall over a cup of earl gray tea. They'd make trips together to the lab, put on some Pink Floyd and end up entwined on the floor covered in clay.

He loved it more.

The wheel, the easily molding piece between his calloused hands. Control. It was his flavor, his vice. He needed control, over something. Somebody.

That's why she was so young. At first glance, she was another angry adolescent with short hair and a loud mouth, but no sense of direction. A pretty face and a blank canvas all the same, open for him to destroy or create as he pleased.

They met in the dark months of winter, when frost still kissed the cheap windows of the mall. It was in a computer shop; a cyber cafe where she bumped into him by mistake while he was designing his latest piece. It would be his scholarship, his ticket to college in the south.

An apology was uttered, and in return he would scowl at her careless behavior. Nothing more came of it until the fifth of March, where the two would be chosen by a mutual group of friends to run a late-night errand.

She complained, he was far too arrogant. The drive was tedious, an eternal twenty minutes of bitter ping-pong argument until finally, she impressed him.

A poem she recited, a sonnet to be exact. 130 by William Shakespeare, followed by a short analysis that was not expected from a rebellious teenager. They left the untidy cyber cafe that night to explore the town, run about and visit each end of the cracking pavement.

Their courtship was interesting and in little more than a week, they melted into each other as quickly as the snow faded to piles of dust and debris. It was mating season in the animal kingdom, they would joke.

But he was lost, and she was too. She knew who she was, but needed a spine. He had a spine, and no time to discover any important aspect of his personality. She'd often say he was too afraid to look in the mirror.

He was a potter, his outlet was his artwork. Nothing else mattered when he carved, sculpted, painted, and sigh. No piece was good enough, and so he worked and worked until at last! Satisfactory in a single jug. When he finished, though, he simply started over.

Negligence. He reeked of it, and the girl's eyes dimmed to a dull resentment.

Abuse. Anger. It built inside the naive lovers as five months passed quickly, a moment fading into an hour, a day, a week. Sex, raised voices, a darkness tore them.

He left her behind.

After drinks and drinks, attempts at rekindling a lost love and a few more tears; she made a decision.

Into the lab she stole, with a bucket of paint brushes and glaze. She painted herself up and down, the chemicals burned her skin. His pottery was his love, and never once did he express true adoration for one of her complexion.

The kiln had been heating since she'd arrived, and was now hot enough for her to accomplish what she came for. Pushing the platinum waves from her painted, salt-stained cheeks, the love-struck teenager's melancholy eyes drifted to the flames licking at an open brick space.

The glaze was hardening against her nude body, she could scarcely move. Pushing herself toward the door, she swung open the gates of inferno and cast herself inside, uttering no more than a silent apology and a whimper of agony as the glaze fused to glass and seared her flawed body.

The flames towered over her and gripped every limb, binding her to the smoldering bottoms of the hellfire oven. Pots shattered about her, and though she'd died in a mess of noise and hissing flesh, she was content.

Nobody could control the fires that consumed first the broken heart and the lab. When the police and fire-rescue left, the boy arrived to the site and saw her form stuck against the metal of the kiln's rack. She was lifeless and beautiful, shark shino and baby blue. Even the valley of her bosom was immortalized perfectly. Those sad eyes were closed tightly, half-melted but stunning all the same.

His favorite piece, but he was a potter, and loved nothing more.