Very Rough Draft – Table For Two

He set his drink down hard. The liquid that splashed over me was so cold it made my scar ache. I could hear a woman’s words as she shouted across me at the man but I didn’t really listen. I had witnessed thousands of arguments. When would they clean up the mess? Then the man said something that drew my attention away from the wetness.

“Do you remember when I carved our initials under a table here?”

Could it be? Had the despoilers returned?

“Yeah,” she said. She bent down and looked under me. “It was this one. Silly nostalgia isn’t going to make me stay.”

I could feel it when the air was cold. Many people marred me, but none as deep as these. Ten years ago. I can still remember that night. It started off gentle but the man kept digging, carving away until their initials and a crooked heart were larger and deeper than the others. There were already almost a hundred there. I always felt them as they were scratched into me but none had hurt me until that night.

The two people started fighting again. Tuning them out was impossible now. I tried to push encouraging thoughts at him and calming ones at her. How dare these people even consider breaking up? The scar they gave me could never be erased, could not be filled in. It was as permanent as their relationship should have been. If she left him now, the night of my torture would become meaningless.

“I’m done,” she said and walked away. A crack that had been growing over the last ten years started aching. He didn’t chase her. There was no begging. He hit me. I quivered. Another strike and the crack grew. His rage was intense, his hurt, more so, as he continued the abuse. Finally he stopped and left.

The next person to place their pitcher of beer on me broke me. The split was down the middle of that wretched heart. I’ve never felt so much relief. Now I am two tables for one. Life is so much easier this way.

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I wrote this from a prompt:

Write a story, scene or paragraph told from the point of view of an inanimate object that witnessed a disaster.

I didn’t think I could do justice to a story about a major disaster with flash fiction so I bent the prompt a bit and this is what happened. I’ll polish it up at some point but for now I am going to try to do as many prompts as I can. I figure if I write a lot of them at least one will have the magic in it. I’ll work on editing sometime in January.

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