Ceramics By Silence's Siren

It wasn't about the cat, not really. After all, I'd broken the thing enough times that I could piece it back together by heart. It was an ugly thing anyway, a relic of some distant relative, someone else's grandmother.

In the beginning there had been a nice, new glaze to it, a bright earthen shine. But that had disappeared the first time I knocked it over. The floral patterns didn't quite match anymore as the patching I'd done to it had become more haphazard and shoddy with each new reworking. Small chips had gradually been lost along the way so that the eyes appeared too close together, the beady black of its gaze now a focused glare. I'd lost an ear in the carpet somewhere the third time I broke it, but that merely gave the figure the appearance of a battle-hardened tomcat, an endearing image.
Matt didn't blame me those first few times. I've always been rather clumsy, but he knew that before we got married. I'm determined too though, so after I'd broken it the first time, I'd glued it back together, a painstaking job, but well worth it. The pieces had been big enough the first time, but with each new crack I'd given it, it got a bit harder to fix perfectly. Fine lines ran their jagged races along the ceramic, the glaze chipped off around their edges so that the cat's skin had dozens upon dozens of long, shallow pockmarks lining its surface.
I know it was an accident, really I do, but I got angry anyway. Matt should have known better. I know I've told him not to encourage Jim, but "Boys will be boys," as he said. And "Boys will not be playing soccer in my living room," I'd told him, but he heard me just as well as I'd heard him.
Its tail was the most recent thing we'd lost. A soft, baby blue ribbon had been painted along the base so that now only a blue line remained around the hole. Matt said we should plug it up, but Jim thought it was funny and said that now the cat could finally go to the bathroom, so the cat kept the hole in its rump.
It yellowed over the years. Of course it wasn't new to begin with when we got it as a wedding gift, but I'm sure I remember it being at least a brighter off-white. It had been whole then, but really what can you do, boys have a way of scuffing things up and dirtier the edges, or so Matt said.
The soccer ball was the final straw for the cat though, I think. Shattered it almost completely. Not even the right ear was there anymore. Its left eye had been split in two, and the floral patterns were too splintered to ever fit into the same perfect order they used to have. But one good thing came of Matt finally breaking that cat. It certainly made it easier to decide who got to keep it. At least it was one less thing to figure out. I thought that it was one of those things that I had to take with me; one of those things that I couldn't leave behind, Jim would like to have something familiar after all. I'd forgotten until I saw those pieces scattered throughout the carpet though, that it was a hollow figurine. I suddenly didn't want that empty ceramic cat anymore, patched or no. I'd scooped it up after that, every single last fragment, and dropped it into the trash can. I'd run out of glue anyway, or at least that's what I'd told myself, and I didn't want to say it, not really, but I thought it. That perhaps, just maybe, she is to blame after all.