Porcelain

Beth tossed a porcelain plate. The dish burst into pieces, pulverized on the concrete. Elation raced through her limbs as she looked at the carnage, violence realized upon the would-be Christmas gift which would now never be wrapped, or sent off, or opened by her daughter-in-law. She was watching the shards with morbid satisfaction when the broken porcelain began to bleed.

Crimson leaked from the chalky edges. The flow swelled like dew that beaded into drops and ran over the sidewalk. Beth took a step back as the puddle inched toward her slippers.

She turned and stepped up onto her porch where the rest of the plates were stacked, waiting for her to decide whether she wanted to smash the whole lot or gift the rest away, an incomplete set. The plates were gritty from the dust they had collected in her closet, but none of the pieces had been broken before. Beth had not been aware of this manufacturing defect, the only explanation for the mess strewn behind her, until this fateful morning.

Grit crunched under her fingers as Beth took up the second plate. It was painted with little rosebuds, kitschy, and honestly unappetizing. She clutched the plate in both hands like a steering wheel and strained her fingers. The plate broke down the center.

The blood came quicker this time. Beth felt pieces of porcelain dust and scarlet mist strike her face as she clutched two half circles. The seam between them bled all over her slippers. Droplets of crimson speckled her cheeks.

Enraged, Beth dropped the pieces. She swatted at her face like she’d been swarmed by mosquitoes. She refused to look down. Broken plates don’t bleed. These plates were not bleeding. The fluid was paint or glaze—anything but blood. What infuriated Beth most of all was the fact that such an inconvenience, something she’d have to hose off her porch or scrub away with scouring chemicals, had come from a gift she had intended to give that ungrateful, manipulative, stealing Riley. That woman was not worth this sort of trouble.

Consumed by frustration and certain that things could not get worse, Beth picked up yet another plate. She hurled it out into the street where it exploded. Blood burst from its remains. Beth tossed and destroyed another plate, then another, and another until the entire stack was a broken mess bleeding out just beyond her front door.

The massacre invaded Beth’s nostrils with a smell like oily pennies, but she turned away and stomped back into her house. She slammed the door and swept toward a wall of photographs.

Riley’s photo stared at Beth, her homely face unprotected by any glass. In the photograph, she was being embraced. Beth’s eyes moved from Riley’s hateful visage to the beloved face of her only daughter.

Beth leaned close to the photograph. She clenched her fists, feeling tackiness between her fingers. Alone, she unleashed a tirade of hateful words, those she’d once shouted on the schoolyard toward other, short-haired and similarly unpleasant girls. Beth spouted off all the hateful things she longed to say—but had the good sense not to. The house echoed the words back into her ringing ears as if mocking her.

Furiously, Beth seized the photograph, wrenching it out of its frame. She tore the photo down the center, ripping Riley away from her daughter with shaking fingers. Riley’s picture fluttered to the floor.

Beth lifted the image of her daughter tenderly before nearly dropping it in horror. Droplets of blood beaded from the torn edge of the photo. Panicked, she tried to wipe the blood away, but her daughter’s face began to bubble and darken. Blood forced itself up through the photo like the paper was a bandage pressed over a wound. Beth watched her child turn to blood.

Something deep in her chest shuddered like she’d been struck. Beth gasped. The photo plopped to the floor in a small pool of scarlet.

Frantically, Beth whirled on her foyer. She felt her chest burning, her breath strangled down to a hoarse croak. She closed a fist and smashed it against a wooden clock.

The clock slipped off the wall and broke. Beth stared at the pieces, daring them to misbehave.

Slowly, the broken clock began to bleed.

Beth screamed. She turned her fury upon her parlor, reeling past an antique sofa to raze a shelf of knickknacks. Glass animals and ceramic dolls tumbled off their shelves. Candlesticks smashed on her hearth. A photo album was ripped apart with frantic, desperate fingers. Beth searched for normalcy and found none. The parlor’s Persian carpet soaked up a sea of blood from a host of broken objects.

Beth felt her sanity snap. Her slippers were soaked in blood that squished between her toes. She took up the poker and smashed holes in her walls, wounds that bled back at her, betraying Beth’s understanding of her world, of her home and the objects she cared for. She tore through the kitchen, then hurtled into her bedroom, smashing, snapping, and shredding without discretion, desperate to find something that wouldn’t turn to blood—but everything did. A coppery tang forced its way past her lips into her nostrils, congealing inside her lungs as the burning in her chest became agony.

Driven to her knees, Beth choked, tasting blood. She wondered if she’d swallowed some flying piece of porcelain, if there were a shard inside her ripping up her lungs. Beth vomited blood of her own all over her bedspread.

Blood streamed from her nostrils, her eyes, her ears. She could no longer survey the horrific puddles painted all over her home. She could see nothing at all. Beth tried to cough up the congealing clots in her throat and found she could not. Her breath narrowed to a rusty splutter. Her eyes clouded. Her strength failed.

Alone in the gore-soaked home she’d torn apart with her fists and fingernails, Beth slumped over her bedspread and drowned in blood.