Coincidence

When her grandmother died, Nina inherited a 16-piece set of fine china, which the family had long speculated might be worth something. 

It happened that between her immediate family, aunts, uncles, cousins, and her boyfriend Matt, there were 16 people to invite to Christmas that year. No one had to use the chipped and fading everyday-china.

But in a moment of revelry, her mother dropped a plate. It expanded into a jagged star across the floor.

That night her uncle crossed a median and met the snowplow that killed him.

“Fifteen of each now!” she thought, cross-legged in a pew at the funeral. 

After her parents’ anniversary dinner the following year, Matt scrubbed a plate with too much angry vigor after they’d argued, and it halved itself in the sink. 

“I’m not saying you killed my cousin,” Nina told him, at the next funeral. “I’m just saying you have exactly as much respect for my things as you have for my family, and it shows.”

When she came home, months later, from the tryst she’d lied and told Matt was a girls’ night, she found him on the roof. He was tossing her china into the street piece by piece, with a righteous smirk. 

“All day,” he said, “his messages have been coming up on the computer.”

Nina sat on the curb and winced every time something shattered. A pile of rubble grew. 

She imagined the heart attacks, falls, accidents, and illnesses heaped on the heads of her family.

Years later, when no one else had died and Matt was someone she never thought about, her mother confessed it was Sears china, bought on clearance in 1982—a desperate, thoughtless gift on a Christmas Eve when nothing else was left.