The Unbreakable Cup

It had never made sense to Eric that the coffee cup was unbreakable. But he couldn’t deny the fact that, despite all the times he’d accidentally knocked it off the counter onto the hard kitchen tile, despite the time he’d dropped it down the hardwood stairs and watched it tumble all the way to the landing, and despite the few times he’d intentionally slung it against a brick wall, the cup had yet to show a single chip or crack. It was bizarre.

This was not the sort of thing that usually occupied Eric’s mind. More often, it was the water bill which he always managed to pay late, even when he had money and he tried to get to it early. Or else it was the neighbor who kept getting drunk and knocking over his garbage cans. But now, the unbreakable coffee cup occupied almost all of his attention. When he went to work, he took it with him and drank water from it all day, and when he came home, he poured coffee or tea or scotch into it, and sometimes he felt bold and threw it to the kitchen floor and stomped on it, and it always hurt his foot and the floor more than the cup.

More than anything else – more than injustice or bizarre happenings or the peculiarities of the human condition – the unbreakable cup had convinced Eric that the world didn’t really make as much sense as people liked to think. For, if something as odd as an indestructible mug (white with little purple flowers around the rim, which annoyed him) could exist, what other anomalies might there be in the world? What other invincible objects might there be?

Eric bought the cup at an antique fair in Hickory that February, and by April he was convinced of its indestructibility. He tolerated it until June, when the unlikely thing began to get on his nerves. It just seemed wrong to harbor such a fugitive from the laws of physics. So he took it outside and waited for the garbage truck, but at the last minute, decided that he wouldn’t throw it away. Instead, as the truck lumbered down his street, he wound up his arm like a bowler, and sent the mug skittering across the asphalt. The truck missed it with its front tires, but it ran over the cup with the rear ones. There was a pronounced thumping sound, and the truck’s acceleration slackened for a moment, then continued as the driver apparently decided there was no flat tire to worry about. And there was the cup, sitting unbroken and unscratched in the middle of the road.

He didn’t own a gun, but his neighbor did, and they got along well enough that the man agreed to lend it to him without asking any intrusive questions. Eric propped the cup in the fork of the gum tree in his backyard and stepped back twenty paces or so, then inexpertly took aim and fired. The tree’s bark exploded in one place and blew the cup off its perch, and it made a little thup sound as it landed in the grass. Eric didn’t bother to set it back on the tree, he just took the gun and went over to the cup and shot it at point-blank range, and the bullet fragments that sprayed out of the mouth of the cup lanced through his shin, and he ended up having to call the ambulance.

A month and many thousands of dollars later, Eric had decided that it was time to get rid of the peculiar object before it drove him to do anything else as foolish as shooting it. But on his way to the antique fair to sell it to some other poor soul, he passed by the Red Rocket fireworks stand, and an idea came to him, and he went inside and bought as many M-80s as he could, and drove home with a brown bag full of explosives and the cup sitting next to it on the passenger’s seat.

It didn’t seem like a good idea to try to blow up the cup in his own backyard, given that his neighbors had already heard him shooting out there and were probably only a suspicious noise away from phoning the police. So he drove down to the little field that had had a sign in it saying “Coming Soon: Marc Waters Luxury Homes” for five years. The field still bore nothing but a few preliminary surveyors’ marks, so it seemed as good a place as any. He packed the cup as full of firecrackers as he could, twisted the fuses together, lit them, and threw the cup with all his strength. He watched it tumble and flash in the evening sun, and as it arced upwards, he could still see the irritating little flowers around the rim. Then there was an orange flare, a loud bang, and a puff of smoke, and something grazed the tip of his earlobe quite painfully. There was a loud CRACK! in the dirt behind him, and the distinctive sound of a cup thudding to the ground among the dry grass and pebbles.

The next day, Eric decided it was best if he took it to the antique fair and just left it there without bothering to sell it. The sooner he got rid of it, the better. That would be his only hope for sanity, getting rid of it immediately.

But once he got on the road, he glanced over at the unbreakable coffee cup again, and the row of stupid little idiot flowers made him so angry that he just cranked down the window and threw it out onto the highway, making sure to angle it so that the cup would bounce all the way across both lanes and land in the roadside ditch where he would have no chance of finding it. A tractor-trailer intervened, though, plowing into the cup at full speed going the opposite direction, and punting it high over the roof of his car, out there into the fallow cornfields, never to be found.

Until, that is, Rex Keenan started tilling his field in preparation for planting the corn, and something rattled with a horrible grinding noise through the tiller blades and was spat over his head, landing a few yards in front of him. He stopped the tractor and went to look at it, and saw that it was a coffee cup, in very good condition, white with a row of little flowers around the rim. He thought his wife might like a new coffee cup. She did love flowers, after all.

“You see, my Lord,” said the angel, “how fragile they are? If they are incapable of understanding something unbreakable, how then could they hope to understand something omnipotent, something eternal. You have made them too weak-minded to understand You!”

And God banished yet another troublesome angel.