Broken

Your shaking hands can't hold on any longer and the vase tumbles to the floor, where it shatters into hundreds of sharp, beautiful shards. "Only a Ming," you reassure him, "I'm sure I can fix that right up," but he can't hide his worried look from you. You know it isn't because your age-borne clumsiness has broken a priceless work of art he couldn't care less about, but because you're clumsy in the first place. He's already hired a cleaning service to clean the rest of the Manor, but no matter how worried he is about you, no matter how much he wishes you would recognize your own limitations (perhaps he understands, a little, what it is like to be you now), he won't allow them into the study. And you refuse to allow any room in the Manor to fall below your standards of cleanliness. You go and get a brush and a dustpan.

As you sweep up the glittering shards, your mind wanders as it so often does these days. The vase reminds you of him, a little. Possibly a lot. It had been so beautiful on the shelf, like many other vases, but then it had fallen and broken into equally beautiful, but many times more dangerous, shards of porcelain. You had to be so careful when gathering up the shards, to make certain they didn't cut you through no fault of their own. And, like the porcelain, Bruce's psyche would never be whole and healed again. The other members of their little family made at least some little effort to repair their psyches, to glue the shards back together in some approximation of a vase like most people did, but he didn't. You had tried so hard, when he was young and over the years, to help him, but all you could do was put the broken shards in a box (you couldn't use bags for this sort of thing, they broke too easily) and hope that someday he would set to work repairing it on his own. You had known it was futile almost from the beginning.

You cut your finger on one of the shards, and you know it's your fault, as it has always been when you were wounded by him, for not wearing gloves, for not having a thicker skin. The shard can't help that it's so sharp. You bandage your finger and finish picking up the porcelain. For a moment you consider not throwing it away, but that idea is ridiculous. It's just a broken vase. You throw it away.