630. Stella’s favourite mug

© Bruce Goodman 2 July 2015

Stella had a favourite coffee mug. In fact, she had found the coffee mug in a white elephant stall fifteen years earlier. She had paid 10 cents for it.

The mug wasn’t much to look at. It was blue with white trimmings. It had the message on the side: KEEP CALM YOU GRUMPY OLD GIT!

Stella had grown mildly tired of the message, but four or five cups of coffee a day for well on fifteen years was an indication of 10 cents well spent. Once at work, a few years back, a fellow worker had inadvertently used her mug. Stella pretended not to mind, but, really, she was quite affronted and thoroughly washed the mug when next she used it. She took her mug back home where it stayed in the kitchen throughout her remaining working years and current retirement.

It wasn’t the colour or the message that attracted Stella to the mug. It was the shape, the feel of it. The thickness of the rim was just right for her lips. The amount of coffee it could hold was perfect. She could get exactly four cups from her coffee machine in the kitchen without having to brew another brew.

She liked her coffee black with just a touch of sweetener. She used to have a spoon of sugar, but now had changed to artificial sweetener as a way of keeping the weight down. Her bottom was beginning to sag over the edges of the kitchen stool.

Of course, all this is just an introduction to what I really wanted to say.

Yesterday Stella dropped the mug on the kitchen floor and it broke; smashed into a hundred pieces; shattered.

You’d think, after fifteen years of living with that mug, that Stella would have been upset. She wasn’t. There wasn’t a quiver of regret. Not an ounce of shock. Not a loud ejaculation. Not even the most genteel of curses.

You see, the mug smashed when she dropped dead on the kitchen floor.