The Cup

“Noooooooooo! Not the llama cup!” Ally cried out as the cup shattered on the floor. She froze, looking at the broken pieces with terror, her mouth half open. I looked at her, a little startled. We had lived together in our tiny house in the far suburb of the capital for the last two years. I always thought I knew my soon to be wife, but in small moments like these, I discovered I really didn’t. We both worked at the university. She was an associate professor and I was the head of the IT department. Ally had short brown hair, black rim glasses, a tiny frame and a sweet smile, which is why people sometimes mistook her for a student. Sometimes she acted like a little girl too. The llama cup. I didn’t even know it was her favorite.

“That’s too bad,” I said, “but it’s just a cup.”

 “It’s my llama cup! It’s the only thing I have left,” she said, going down on her knees to pick up the pieces. She wore leggings and a beige, Scottish tartan poncho, that swept the floor as she searched for the pieces.

“Um… no?” I said gesturing at all the clutter stuffed in every nook and cranny of our tiny home.

“You don’t understand,” she said, carefully picking up the bigger chunks of broken pottery from the floor.

“Yes, I don’t. I mean, no, I don’t,” I said, kneeling down to help her.

“It’s the only thing I have left from the good times,” Ally explained.

“Oh. When was that?” I asked, examining the handle I had just picked up from the floor.

“Exactly four years ago,” Ally gasped, lifting herself off up with the broken pieces softly pressed against her chest. She went to the kitchen to fetch the broom. 

“And our times are not the good times?” I taunted her.

“No,” she answered flatly. I sighed. Sometimes her candidness was a bit too much, even for me, a fact oriented intellectual. And I had to admit that the facts were on her side. We definitely weren’t living in the good times. But we had each other, and it bothered me that Ally didn’t see that. 

“Well, you’ve met me,” I said. I followed her to the kitchen and put parts of the broken cup on the counter.

“Harry, look at everything that has happened in the past three years. And now, there’s a war! No matter what goes on in our personal lives, we don’t live in the good times. You know, the good times, when everything was simple, cheap, peaceful and people had nothing to worry about. 

“You sound like my dad,” I joked. But in his heart he agreed with her, “People still did worry about a lot of things. Everyone thought that life was hard back then.”

“Hah! Fools!” Ally said in the voice of a medieval wizard. I chuckled. This is why I loved Ally. Her goofiness and her wacky sense of humor always made me laugh.

Ally spent the Sunday afternoon hunched over her desk like a mad scientist, trying to put the cup back together. 

“I can’t find all the pieces,” she sighed, defeated.

“How is that possible?” I asked, looking around. I had carefully searched and vacuumed the whole area, not necessarily for the sake of the cup. I wanted to avoid stepping on a shard in the middle of the night.

“I don’t know, I’ve looked everywhere,” she sighed. 

“I guess it’s one of those things that just happen. You know. Like missing socks,” I said. 

“The ones I have are too small to make sense of them,” she said. I looked at the pieces strewn on the desk. She was right. All that was left was the handle, a couple big chunks with the blue, smiling llama and a pile of unidentifiable tiny pieces. She carefully wrapped the pieces in bubble wrap and put them inside a plastic box. 

“Look. I’ll get you another cup. Just like this one,” I said.

“They don’t sell them anymore,” she said in a hollow voice. Her big brown eyes became even larger.

“Then I’ll get a different cup, a llama cup. Hey I can even get you one of those animal shaped cups,” I said. Ally frowned. I actually just then remembered how she said animal shaped cups were tacky.  

“No! I need this one,” she said. I sat down beside her and slouched a little. I looked at her.

“Because it’s all you have left? From the good times?” I repeated her words from earlier.

“Yes,” she smiled and looked at me, not with desire, but almost. I hugged her.

“Is it really that important?” I asked.

“Yes. Once this cup is gone, it will mean that the good times are never coming back,” she said, with her nose burrowed into my jumper. 

“Oh come on. That’s a little too catastrophic,” I said. Ally stood up suddenly.

“The alien forces are storming the capital. Do you not read the news?” she said exasperated. 

“I think that has nothing to do with the cup,” I said, trying to sound like reason.

“I know,” she said, irritated, ”do you really think that I actually believe a cup could change the outcome of this war?”

“I mean it theoretically could. If it were made of antimatter…” I shrugged.

“Look. I want this cup. It’s not about the war or anything else. It’s about… faith,” she sighed.

“Faith in the cup?’

“Faith in the good times.”

“Alright,” I said amicably. In the back of my head, I think I knew what she meant. Why was I even arguing? We all cling to things that remind us of something good. It’s human. 

We visited a 3D printing lab on Monday afternoon to see if there was anything they could do. The shop owner was a young, messy man with curly hair, dressed in baggy pants and a t-shirt with a funny hemp leaf smoking a joint. He wasn’t exactly excited.

“We don’t really do repairs,” he said, “but it’s technically possible. We’d need to scan all the pieces, then create a computer model of the original cup. Then we’d have to print all the missing parts. That’s a lot of work for a six dollar cup,” he concluded bitterly.

“Twelve ninety-nine,” Ally murmured through her teeth. 

“It has… sentimental value,” I said. 

“Well, we can make you a new one, just like this one,” the shop owner said. 

“Really? Just like this one? Like identical?” I asked with suspicion.

“Well it won’t be identical, that’s not possible, but it will look the same. You won’t know the difference.”

“I don’t want a new cup. I want to have this one repaired,” Ally said. 

“Let’s go,” I said. 

Ally was in a sour mood all week. On Sunday afternoon she seemed to have had made up her mind about something. We had just finished making some fresh basil pesto pasta and sat down to eat. Ally took some pickled beets out of the refrigerator and set them on the table. She sat down and plunged her fork into the green pile of pasta.

“I want you to know that I have contacted someone,” she said mysteriously.

“Who?” I asked a little too loud, baffled. My mouth was full of pasta, I had been starving all day.

“Elzvet Graintree,” she said.

“Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“She’s an artist. She lives in the woods up the mountain,”

“Alright,” I said and shrugged. 

“I’m going to go see her,” she said. 

“OK. Do you want me to come with you?” I asked.

“If you want,” she said. I couldn’t make out if she really wanted me to go, but I decided to go with her anyway. I had always marveled at the invincibility hidden in Ally. One might think she was weak, looking at her tiny body and round glasses and nothing foreshadowed the inert force which appeared, the unstoppable willpower hidden inside her. She needed whimsy in her life, that was true. But once she set her mind on something, there was no stopping her. She clinged to her dreams with the tenacity of a pitbull. 

The house was hidden from sight, overgrown with vines and ridiculously small. The great room had been turned into a studio. The other part of the house consisted of a bedroom with a kitchenette in the corner. Elzvet greeted us in front of the house. She was a muscular woman in her fifties, with long, silver hair. She had bright eyes with a hint of insanity lurking in them. A wide strong smile that showed all her teeth and a myriad of wrinkles which didn’t make her look old at all. She wore a gray, linen shirt and baggy overalls stained with paint and clay. Her sleeves were rolled up almost to her armpits. We sat down in the studio. She set the table, giving each of us a different cup. She then poured us some coffee from a battered, tin coffee pot. I held my weird, flower cup, by the snail shaped handle, trying to look as serious as I possibly could. I tried not to stare at the collection of forest curiosities stacked on the shelves along with plates, bowls, pots and huge bulbous vases with tiny necks. Tiny bird skulls, mouse skeletons, dried flowers and huge polypores were stuck into every available space in between the pottery. Ally explained why she wanted the cup repaired and Elzvet nodded. Ally opened the plastic box and carefully took out the pieces. Elzvet reached out, revealing a map of veins on the inside of her stringy forearms. She held the broken pieces in her rough, knotty hands. She had strong, long fingers that looked, as if they themselves had been chiseled out of old oakwood. As she gently received the pieces, I felt as if some old magic happened in the room. 

“I understand,” she said. And then something unexpected happened. Ally burst into tears. Her sobs were so violent, I could almost hear the tiny hut creak. Elzvet wasn’t even a tiny bit surprised. She patiently waited for Ally to cry her fill as I awkwardly put my arm around her, trying to calm her down. 

“Let’s take a walk,” Elzvet said. Ally blew her nose and off we went. We took a tiny path into the woods. As we walked, Ally calmed down, becoming her usual level headed, optimistic self. 

“You know, it’s not that you miss the good times. You miss… you,” Elzvet said. Ally nodded silently as if the truth just hit her. 

“You miss who you were before everything happened. Before fear took over,” Elzvet continued. I looked at Ally and saw a calmness in her. I had never seen her that calm before. Up to now I didn’t understand what the heck was going on. But as we walked deeper into the forest, everything started to make perfect sense. The walk imposed a rhythm on our thinking. 

It was as if the road that unraveled before us mimicked the train of our thoughts. Every step we took became a thought and every next step on the path was a logical conclusion of the latter. We walked back as the sun started to set. Ally hugged Elzvet and we started on our journey home. As we drove off, Elzvet waved to us with her beautiful, wide smile.

“I think it’s in good hands,” Ally said. 

On Monday I came home to find that Ally wasn’t there. She’d left a note in the kitchen. 

“I’ll be home later,” it said. She’d left her phone next to the note.I warmed up some tortillas from yesterday and ate on the porch. Ally came back just as the night began to fall and my feeling of unease started to morph into anxiety. 

“Where were you? I was worried,” I said when she came through the door. 

“I went to check on the cup,”

“I could have come with you,”

“I knew you’d be tired. I didn’t want a fight, you know?”

“OK, just tell me in advance next time,”

“Alright,” she said. I sighed heavily and hugged her. I could feel that Ally welcomed the hug. 

“And?” I asked. 

“And what?”

“And how is the cup?”

“It’s doing amazing,” she said. She went to the fridge and poured herself a glass of cinnamon oat milk. She sat beside me and put her head on my shoulder.

“You know, I thought about what Elzvet had said. I tried reading more about it,” I said.

“Hmm?” she asked, sipping on the milk.

“You’ve externalized a part of yourself. Your subconscious now feels that the cup is part of you,” I explained, “and that you need that cup to be complete.”

“I guess that sounds logical.”

“And if you want to feel complete again… you need to integrate that part of you. Does that make sense?” I asked and squinted. I had only read a couple of articles and didn’t really know what I was talking about.

“The part of me from the good times?” she asked. She got up.

“Is that what this cup really is to you?”

“But that person doesn’t exist anymore,” Ally threw her arms in the air, pointing towards the ceiling as if it represented the general reality, “because of everything that’s happened!”

Something came over me. Suddenly I felt like I had all the answers, just like back there in the woods. I came up to her and looked into her eyes. 

“What if you just try to find the feeling of being that person again?” I asked. 

“What feeling?”

“Of being that person again,” I came up to her and took her hands in mine, “what would it take, to feel like that person you were three years ago? What would you need?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said and shook her head, “I guess, I’d need to feel safe.”

“What would make you feel safe?” I asked and my psychology trip ended right there, because I didn’t know what else to ask her. 

“I don’t know. I’d have to think about it,.

Ally gasped, when she saw the cup. We were sitting on Elzvet’s porch, on a Wednesday afternoon and Elzvet brought the cup for Ally to see. Elzvet was a skilled and experienced sculptor. She has somehow managed to pour molten copper into the spaces where all the missing pieces had been. She polished the copper to a mirror. The cup shone in the light, like an alien artifact. 

“Oooooooh, it’s beautiful!” Ally said and reached out with both of her hands. Elzvet handed her the cup and smiled radiantly.

“It was a pleasure,” she said. 

“It’s way more beautiful than it ever was,” Ally said, turning the cup in her hands. I gasped too, only on the inside, when I saw the bill. This was now officially the most expensive piece of pottery in our kitchen. Ally’s mood changed completely, even her voice changed. As I walked back from the privy, I heard her giggle like a little girl.

“Oh,” she sighed, “this cup is just full of good thoughts,” she said as we were about to get back in the car. 

“Would you care to go for a walk before you leave?” Elzvet asked. I didn’t mind and so we went. Elzvet led us down a different path this time. We didn’t go up the mountain but across, parallel to a pasture full of wildflowers that spread down to the valley. We walked a good mile, when Ally spotted something in the woods. Without a word she hopped off the path, leaving me and Elzvet baffled and confused. 

“What is that?” I asked Elzvet.

“There used to be a cottage there. The old beekeeper’s house,” Elzvet said softly. She looked a little worried. 

“Ally, wait!” I yelled, suddenly imagining Ally falling down a deep old well full of stones and rusty nails. I followed her quickly, flicking the bugs and spiderwebs that rushed to attack my face. When I got to Ally, she stood as if bewitched, staring at what seemed to be the remnants of an old cottage. 

“This Harry,” she said quietly.

“What?” I asked, pulling twigs and the rest of the spiderwebs out of my hair. 

“I need… this,” she pointed at the cottage.

Two months later the crew had just finished installing the roof. We had bought the cottage for a ridiculously low price, as it had stood abandoned for so long. The beekeeper’s grandson was a lawyer in the city and he was more than happy to get rid of it. After that it all went surprisingly smooth. The walls and foundations were solid stone and in perfect order. The teams of contractors piled in one after another like lego bricks. Plumbing, water, electric and finally the roof. Ally started a veggie garden in the back and I managed to get a good deal on some solar panels. Another month passed and we’d moved in. I stood in our new kitchen unloading the dishwasher and turned around to put the dishes in the cupboard. As I did, my elbow gently brushed the edge of the llama cup. The cup tilted slowly and, as my mind fought the urge to drop the plates on the floor and save the cup, my eyes must have turned into green dollar bills when in that split second I remembered how much we had paid to have it repaired. My tightened throat gave out a ghastly rattle and I screeched, 

“Noooooooo! Not the llama cup!” In that moment, the cup reached the floor and shattered into a myriad of tiny pieces and an unearthly, wonky, copper cup-skeleton. In the corner of my eye I saw Ally coming in and braced for a scream and maybe even some tears. But to my surprise, she just sighed. 

“It’s fine,” she said, “It’s just a cup.”