An Accident

On a quiet gray evening in May a family was gathered around a dinner table, laid with a red-checked cloth and the remains of a well-enjoyed dinner; the members desultorily conversed on sundry matters; the mother and her son played a finger game and the object of this miniscule drama was set close at hand: a milk glass, half full and dangerously near the edge of the table. Through some unseen device (it was rumored to be an especially vigorous jab at an opponent in the finger game) the glass was prompted to vacate its given position—it fell backwards into the arms of its owner like a fainting lady; the owner, taken by surprise, fumbled for a brief moment before abandoning the glass to its fate.

The glass, inexorable, toppled to meet the floor as though gravity were, after a harsh spat of conjugal pain, its mistress, and struck the slate with a crash muffled by the splashing of its contents but no less dramatic for the deluging thereof; it shattered spectacularly. The blast radius was nearly five feet, and the poets of the house waxed lyrical about lilies unfolding and summer snowflakes made of silicon and connubial infelicity, as the mother scrubbed the floor.