Stacking dishes

So, you know how sometimes I stack my dirty dishes on the counter? Plates and bowls and plates and bowls, large and small, layer after layer right up to the cupboards? Like you see sometimes in cartoons. They look like they’re about to come crashing down, but they never quite do. I actually have been using it as a guide for when to do the dishes; if one of the stacks actually does reach the bottom of the cupboards above, it’s time to do the dishes. So tonight after I baked a batch of muffins, I was about to set the empty moffin pan on the stack of dishes that was basically up to the cupboards on its own.

But that was one too many.

And they all came crashing down.

Four ceramic cereal bowls, two small glass dessert plates, two small glass bowls, four large glass dinner plates, and that metal muffin pan. All came crashing down.

Down.

Down.

Crash, smash, crunch, and broken bits and pieces scatter across the kitchen floor from end to end in a visual and auditory cacophony.

I react as quickly as I can. I keep some of the dishes on the counter, but it’s just not enough. And almost everything is clear glass. I’m thinking of the next few days picking tiny shards of nearly invisible glass from holes in my feet only visible by the gushing floods of bright red sap leaking out where the bits of has-been-plates went in. Except as I pick up the pieces, as I stack the dishes more sensibly, plates on plates and bowls in like bowls, I notice something.

There is no broken glass on the floor.

Every plate and every bowl made of glass is checked and all are intact. Not cracked or chipped and certainly not smashed into a thousand pieces. The only thing broken is one of the ceramic bowls. One. Ceramic. Bowl. That’s it. I pick up the clearly visible pieces, sweep the rest away, and … that’s it. No more stacked dishes.

Published by

Teel

Author, artist, romantic, insomniac, exorcist, creative visionary, lover, and all-around-crazy-person.