Sunday Stories: Broken

I was at the Sci-Fi on the Rock Convention yesterday and didn’t have my laptop so I had to hand-write my V entry. I’ll post that once I have some time to type it up. In the meantime, here’s my Sunday Story.

 

The plate had belonged to her grandmother.

It was foolish to have so much invested in a piece of ceramic, but things have meaning and this one did and now it was gone. And it wasn’t even gone for good reason. It wasn’t like there was a fit of fury or a sweeping of the counter for a grand passion. The plate was just cracked down the middle in some sort of inherent fault line. It had been fine, and then it was gone.

Serena remembered sitting at her grandmother’s table, eating a tea bun from that plate. The fading roses on the china, the shine gone off of the gold trim. The bun was warm and the butter melted and it seemed like the moment was going to last forever. Nan was sitting with her tea, too much milk for any modern person to actually drink it. Carnation poured in like the cup was empty to start. Her Dad used to say that Nan liked milk, not tea, but couldn’t bring herself to just heat the milk like she was a child.

She got the call from her Dad the next morning. A stroke, Dad was there in minutes but it was too late, she was gone. Some people are just inherently vulnerable to these things, so one minute she was there and the next she was gone.

No one else’s tea buns tasted like Nan’s, even if Serena ate them off the roses plate. And now she didn’t even have the plate to hold on to.