Solid Liquid Glass by Linh Preston
Linh Preston’s “Solid Liquid Glass” is one of three editors’ choice selections for the CRAFT 2025 Flash Prose Prize, guest judged by Grant Faulkner. Our editors chose these pieces with particular focus on the power of style, form, and voice within the constraints of flash prose.
When boundaries become permeable, relationships often change, but they don’t always survive. In “Solid Liquid Glass,” Linh Preston employs tangible, physical states as a metaphor for the intangible connection between an employee and her boss. Through a series of text messages, emails, and other interactions, the solid lines of their professional relationship blur into the liquidity of a personal bond. These interactions bring both characters closer to each other and to an inevitable break. Their relationship is threatened by its own organic nature—a human connection that defies roles and titles. But in the end, the merging of these two conflicting states creates a brittle, inorganic compound, as easy to shatter as glass. How do we navigate relationships that defy social structure? “Solid Liquid Glass” suggests that chemistry may not be enough. —CRAFT
Two thousand, four hundred, twenty-nine texts. Over the course of 625 days, I exchange 2,429 texts with my boss, Will.
For the first 149 days, 88 percent of our texts are work-related. Like the twenty texts between us about a document that is needed in twelve hours. Twenty texts during a two-hour layover on a Sunday evening while I eat dinner in the Atlanta airport with my husband and our teenager as we return home from a weekend getaway.
On the 150th day, when Will and I exchange the sixty-fifth and sixty-sixth texts, we disclose shared vulnerabilities, and we’re no longer just coworkers. We become each other’s secret-keeper.
For the next 476 days, 67 percent of our texts become personal. Like the thirty-seven texts between us about exhaustion, contentedness, resignation. Thirty-seven texts during a two-hour layover on a Sunday after midnight before he boards a red-eye from the San Francisco airport, alone, as he returns home from a four-day work trip.
Our professional relationship began as two empty, borosilicate glasses. Interactions between us range from boiling water to sleet in the other’s glass. Interactions that burn, interactions that sting. Each email a drop. Each text yet another. These early, fluctuating drops of water waver between thermal shock and tempered possibility. Every drop melding into the previous ones, starting a sip, creating a taste, becoming a gulp. Each ounce building precarious trust.
He overlooks me in meetings. Dismissive drops.
He asks me to find him a doctor when his best friend has a fatal heart attack. Desperate, grieving drops of water.
I give him my therapist’s phone number. Risky, intentional drops of water.
Uncertain drops. Testing drops. Conceded drops.
As each subsequent drop falls faster and more often, I wonder what will happen when those once empty glasses become full. Each additional interaction stretches the surface tension above the rim, daring it to break. How many more drops until the surface tension collapses? Where will that water go?
The texts between me and Will read like the lyrics from a genre-blending band. Volume One: 149 Days featuring work-related issues; Volume Two: 476 Days bringing the personal background vocals to the forefront. The Best of Deluxe Edition vinyl includes the same songs, the same lyrics, with varying versions—extended, frenzied, acoustic, frantic.
“Being manic feels so freaking good. It’s
worth the deepest lows.”
“Do you tend to hide when you’re
struggling? I struggle with how much
to share.”
“Crushing depression hitting
me today. Just fucking empty right
now.”
“Focusing on what I have makes it
worse, like, who do I think I am feeling
miserable when I have so much?”
“Fuck.”
“Guilt and fear make me think I have
to do more.”
“How can we tell ourselves we’re not our
negative thoughts and still believe the
positive ones?”
“Not sure what my trigger was,
but the big D hit me like a ton
of bricks.”
“Is feeling numb better than
feeling all the feels?”
“We need to numb in order to
function. I don’t think we have
a choice.”
“Trying so hard is exhausting.”
“I’m afraid to try so as not to fail.”
“We’re a mess.”
“I’m just tired of everything.”
“Living is overrated.”
“I was fine then the negative internal
dialogue turned really dark.”
“You know I go to the dark places, too.”
“I’m fine.”
“I am an absolute clusterfuck.”
“I’m in a shitty mood. You?”
“I don’t know why I try.”
“I feel like I’m not here.”
“I drank.”
“I have to make the decision to stay
almost every fucking day.”
“I know how shitty it feels to hate
yourself.”
“I know you’re trying to help.”
“I really hate everyone right now.”
“I’m worried about you.”
“You know you are the best, right?”
“I care about you.”
“I appreciate you.”
“I know.”
“Are you safe?”
“Are you safe?”
“Are you safe?”
One more text. One more drop. Another and another.
When the surface tension breaks, it is not because the water overflowed. It breaks because the glasses shatter. The glasses that once held us crack and implode with the reverberation and force of a glacier calving. The darkness spills around the shards, indiscernible between glass and ice. It looks like black obsidian.
Black obsidian is said to provide insight, protection, and grounding. It is hard and brittle and easily fractures into sharp edges. If life is a mosaic, tesserae of smooth, cool river rock, tumbled sea glass, faceted gemstones, raw crystals, mirror shards, broken borosilicate glass, and black obsidian fill mine with both meticulous, intricate precision and erratic, frantic chaos. These discordant tesserae cut me and congeal my not-yet-dried blood on their edges before settling permanently in the grout, that space between that softens the outlines and smooths the patterns, making a whole, fractured life look lovely and stunning when seen only from a distance.
Will is made of the jagged black obsidian fragments, a paradox of protecting and piercing. His dark, hard, sharp-edged exterior hides the blood left on him from cutting me slowly and deeply; his hands covered in his own blood from clenching the shards. I wonder how such small pieces of volcanic glass leave me with keloid scars so thick, so expansive, so enduring.
I crave prying the brittle, black tesserae out of the mosaic, though not to remove or forget those broken pieces Will left behind. I long to feel them—to feel him—cut me again.
LINH PRESTON is overeducated and underemployed, sometimes by choice. She is an orphaned, Vietnamese immigrant who forgets she is one, and a city girl living in the suburbs with her family. Her memoir-in-progress is a reckoning of and between obsession and love. Preston’s creative nonfiction may be found in The Sun’s “Readers Write” column, under the declined labels in her Submittable profile, and in sporadic posts on Instagram, where you can find her @thelinhpreston.
Featured image by Stephen Irwin, courtesy of Unsplash.
