I.

Her thumb falls into her cereal.

She hears it first—a small crack like ice splitting—then watches it drop. It lands in the milk with a soft plunk, bobbing next to a cluster of soggy flakes.

He doesn't look up from his phone.

"Jesus Christ," he says. "Again?"

She fishes the thumb out. Milk drips from the glaze. There's a hairline fracture running through the knuckle, and when she presses it back into place, she feels the grind of ceramic on ceramic, a sensation like chewing aluminum foil.

"I'm sorry," she says. She feels shame for the physics of her shattering.

He scrolls. Up and down.

"You're always sorry.”

The milk curdles in sympathy.

⸻

II.

He keeps a jar of tiny shards on the mantle.
They whisper every time she walks by.

“I’ll quit,” they hiss.
“You invest in me, and at a minimum, you’ll get your money back.”
“I won’t talk to him anymore, he hurt you.”

He shakes the jar sometimes, like a snow globe of self-delusion.

Her sternum cracks every time the sound hits her.

⸻

III.

They met on her couch.
Grey hat, wide shoulders, the kind of size that made the cushions dip.
His voice came out lower than she expected. With a slower cadence and rounded vowels.

They talked.
He told her pieces of his past.
Fast, clipped, too many lives for one person.

He looked at her as if studying the terrain for weakness.
Eyes dragging across her like recon over broken earth.


⸻

IV.

There's a shoebox in the back room, lined with faded red tissue paper saved from a mandatory secret Santa exchange. The pieces that won't stay on anymore live there.

Right hip – stairs, dragged, each step its own fracture. It still doesn't sit right.

Left hip – asphalt, thrown out of his car. Pieces of gravel, desperation, abandonment all mixed into a single, unrecognizable grit.

A piece of her skull – car window, his palm sudden against her head, driving home from bailing him out.

Three vertebrae – ankles grabbed, pulled, spine arching backward over the threshold. The snap of pottery being dragged back to the kiln.

Left kneecap, a chunk of her lower rib, a piece of shoulder blade, most of her left ankle —who really knows.

The tip of her right index finger—he used it in the night to unlock her computer. Access her photos, her accounts, her shame.

A catalog for one. As personal evidence of reality archived.

He doesn't remember. He said she put them all in the box by herself.

He’s angry she won’t clean the room out. Says he needs space that’s all his and that he doesn’t have one. He complains that it smells weird.

Who knew grief had a smell.

⸻

IV.

The overdoses blur together after a while.

The first one, she shook him. Hard. His mouth hung open, frostbitten-looking, a dripping trail coming out that looked like it had once been warm.

She counted breaths that weren’t there. She waited. They came. They gave an antidote she said wouldn’t work. He gasped—this wet, rattling sound. She cracked straight down the middle of her sternum.

The second time, she knew what to do. Narcan. Get the Narcan. Tiny stress fractures spiraled up both forearms like branches.

The third time, he woke up with a primal scream. He stumbled into the cold, pounding his arms and posing like some thawed-out animal, wild on the sheer intensity of having almost died.

"Why the fuck did you do that?”

She held the pieces of her chest together.

“You don’t ever think do you.”

⸻

V.

She buys the industrial ceramic adhesive at a hardware across town. The clerk is a kid, maybe nineteen, with a name tag that says BRETT.

"What're you fixing?" he asks.

"A vase," she says.

Her throat cracks when she lies.

"Cool," he says, and scans the tube.

⸻

VI.

The glue burns.

She sits on the bathroom floor at 2 AM, applying it to the new crack that runs from her chin to the bottom of her sternum. He had been talking about his plans, hike the Appalachian mountains, travel, do everything he couldn’t do when he was tied down to her.

The glue smells chemical, medical. It stings when it touches the raw edges of the break.

He bangs on the door.

"How long are you gonna be in there?"

She holds the crack closed with both hands, waiting for the adhesive to set. Sixty seconds for the adhesive to set.

"I'm dramatic," she says to herself. Practicing. Getting the cadence right.

"You're so fucking dramatic," he says through the door.

⸻

X.

She sits with a white blank page and swelling rage.

She writes:

"He did not think when he sent her to the brink."

Crosses it out.

Tries again:

"Ceramic women crack in predictable patterns."

No. She crosses it out.

She tries again. Nothing. The pen won't move.

⸻

His thumb knew exactly where to press. 
A single trained, precise touch.
Like testing the fragility of a teacup.
She felt years of weight and anger in that thumb.

When he let go, she lay with her favorite mug. The one with a pink rim and little sweaters and pumpkins, now in sharp little pieces all over the tile.

The next morning she noticed a new pattern. Purple bluish, in the shape of a butterfly covering her lower back.

His signature in purple.
He doesn't remember.

⸻

Her son asks if she's made of glass.

"Ceramic," she says.

"What's the difference?"

“Glass begins as sand—melted at brutal heat until it becomes liquid and cools into form.
It can always be remelted, reshaped, returned to what it was.

Ceramic starts as clay. It’s shaped, with time, with intention.
And then it’s fired.
The fire transforms it into something that is unchangeable.
Something fragile but eternal.
You can shatter ceramic into dust, but you cannot make it clay again.”