Everyday Canvas

Figurines

Prompt: It all started when

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Goody, goodie! I think we have another free-flow prompt. So, without much ado, here it goes:




It all started when I set down my mug of coffee and reached for her hand. She was falling apart, and I wanted to console her. Letting me hold her hand, she told me why. Two hours earlier, her cat had jumped up and had broken a few figurines. Something in her voice gave me a chill. But I felt for the cat, not the figurines.

For all I know, after I left, she is still mourning the breakage of a family heirloom, a crystal bird and those figurines. Yet, those broken thingamagics are not victims. She is the gullible, innocent victim. Her cat is even more of a victim.

I bet that cat, due to her constant scolding, is still trembling and hiding inside the large carton box from Amazon. While I was there, that poor, furry, alive animal kept shifting its weight, probably debating--inside his mind with fear--whether it is still okay to use his litterbox. I bet, now, he can only move about when she isn’t around.

Yes, I think the culprit is not the cat but those objects. All those figurines assigned to people’s lives and their backgrounds…They could not be separated from their purposes, as they continued accomplishing missions decades after decades. Missions of causing her and people like her to brag about lifeless stuff. Lifeless though they were, those things were an army of objects and their inheritors were their unsuspecting victims. They got under the skins of the elderly who put a lot of stake in material possessions, especially if they were from their once-hated-now-beloved families.

Do you see why the core premise of valuing material things over live things is so flawed? It means having nothing but memories and guilt. An overwhelming guilt of loss, love, and grief. As it has to be in her case.

Those figurines may just be the guiltiest things since they symbolized such feelings of hers, however hidden from her consciousness. Those figurines and the crystal bird that plunged to their doom, letting her ancestral alarm go off inside her cellular level, ripping the map of her life that she created through her faulty map-drawing skills.

Long ago, I had promised myself that I would be wary of people that held material things more dearly than alive things. Yet, I still befriend such people. When did I stop trusting my own perceptions or are they the ones that are flawed? I am still gritting my teeth when I think of that cat. But then, together with the cat, she is the one to feel sorry for. She is the one betrayed by her figurines.