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Bull in a China Shop

Destruction incarnate.

By Hannah BPublished 3 years ago Updated 3 years ago 5 min read
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Bull in a China Shop
Photo by Irina Babina on Unsplash

The way someone leaves is entirely more compelling than the way you meet them: the relationship burning to ash is far more interesting than one spark of intrigue, in my opinion. Everyone always asks to hear the idyllic tale of how you met, but no one asks quite so eagerly for the story of the day they left. Of course, in her case, she came and left in the same way, just like she promised.

My new shop hadn’t been open two hours when I heard my first customer enter, followed by something shattering near the front door. “Please don’t be something expensive…” echoed in my head as I jogged to the display. I found her perched on the floor with an awkward and impeccable balance, picking broken glass from the rough edges of the grout. I scanned her palm to assess what she had broken: emerald and turquoise fragments shone in the fluorescent light, and I let out a sigh of relief as I halted in front of her. She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and nervously darted her gaze from floor, to my forehead, to floor again.

“Not that you give a shit I’m sure,” she whined, “but I do this literally all the time and it never gets less embarrassing.”

I smirked. “You destroy art pieces all the time and decided to enter my interior design store on my first day of opening?”

She stood, her hands full of glass, with the guilty expression a three year old covered in lipstick might wear. The clumsy girl with the glasses too big for her face— a bit of a walking cliché but I wasn’t complaining. She was incredibly cute, which was more than I could say for anyone else since moving here.

“It was a filler piece I snagged from a garage sale when I was panicking about today. I should probably get more of them just in case more of your type come strolling through here.”

She perked up a little.

“You know that’s not a bad idea with how popular those stress buster rooms are— you know where people pay to go smash shit with a baseball bat or whatever— you’d make a killing selling dollar ceramics that people could smash on the floor. You know, for fun, not accidentally like me.”

“You expect me to believe that was an accident?” I teased.

She pulled up her sleeve to reveal bold strokes of black and grey ink. A realism portrait of a longhorn bull perfectly flowed over her bicep and traced all the way to her elbow. She scanned her own arm with a smile as if it were her first time experiencing the tattoo for herself.

“You don’t get an entire half sleeve of a bull in a China shop if you’re coordinated. I can promise you it was an accident— one of about a million.”

I nodded, laughing at her need to provide evidence. “Touché.”

“Although,” she spoke in a much lower tone, “had I known the shop owner was an extremely attractive woman, I may have done it on purpose anyway.”

A hot flash filled my cheeks and then drained from my neck to my stomach. Not so clumsy when it comes to flirting, I see. She knew she was dangerous: a bull in a china shop was not just meant to be a symbol of her slapstick comedy movement through the world, but of the way she handles hearts and souls. She peered at me over her glasses with a smirk, daring me to respond. I didn’t care that she would break me. I wished I knew a way to look cool while blushing like an idiot, but all I could do in the moment was lock eyes with her and muster enough confidence to barely choke out the words, “oh, is that so?”

•••

I had only been home two hours when the apartment was rattled by a sharp noise, followed by something shattering by the front door. This time, I knew it was something valuable, so there was no use in chanting my hopes in my head. I crept toward the entryway. A hot flash filled my cheeks, only this time it was accompanied by the sting of salty tears. She did not perch over the mess she made; I found only a large pile of shattered porcelain. I slid down the wall in defeat, finally landing on the concrete below, the broken pieces of the vase now directly parallel with my knees. The glimmering evidence that this was the last time flirted with me in her absence. I pulled her key from the thousands of dollars of broken porcelain.

I’d won the bid on the prized piece at an auction, on the day we were to celebrate the anniversary of the day she blew through my shop door. I walked straight from the auction into the apartment and presented her with the hand-painted vase flaunting a fierce bull, wild as she was. I looked in her eyes past the glasses that had fallen down her nose and told her that I loved the bull in the china shop, and that I trusted her to be gentle and kind. She pushed her glasses up her nose and smiled at me.

“It’s really stupid to trust a bull in a china shop.” She pressed the vase against me, holding it steady with her own body pressing on the other side, and kissed me deeply. She guided the vase through the house to the new home she chose for it on the entryway table.

“I hope this is another garage sale find?”

“Not exactly. Auction.” I was doing my best to keep the details to a minimum. She hated gifts, but it was too perfect. She would make me sell it in my store if I told her how much it was truly worth.

“It’s sort of ugly and tacky… I love it.” Her words were as blunt and hard-hitting as her physical presence. They always were, right until the end.

She told me that she would come tearing through me, leaving nothing but destruction behind her. She warned me, and I didn’t care. I watched the bull destroy all things delicate and lovely around it, and still, I handed it the most breakable, fragile parts of me.

She came and left in the exact same way, just as she promised.

Short Story
1

About the Creator

Hannah B

Mom, self proclaimed funny girl, and publicly proclaimed "piece of work".

Lover and writer of fiction and non-fiction alike and hoping you enjoy my attempts at writing either.

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