"Oh, no, no, no, NO!"

     I was getting out a plate for my dinner tonight (ham salad on a toasted "everything" bagel with diced radish) and a couple of saucers caught on the edge of the plate as I tugged it, one-handed, from the stack.  I had a radish and a paring knife in my other hand.  I didn't have my head in the game (I'd just realized I'm overdue to renew my license plates) and the saucers were falling before I realized it.

     A frantic grab secured one but I was out of hands for the other; I tried to get a leg up and slow the fall, and the whole time I was saying, "Oh, no, no, nonononoNOOOO!"

     My "china" is glass (Corelle, "Abundance," off-white with a harvest kind of pattern, a wide maroon stripe at the outside, a gap, a narrow dark-blue stripe, a wide gap and then a ring of leaves, vines, oranges, grapes in two colors and and cherries just inside the flat portion).  The saucer hit the ceramic-tile floor and all but exploded into tiny, sharp shards.

     I got my breath and projected. "Tam?  Tam, get the cats and shut them up in back with you! I dropped a plate."

     Roseholme Cottage has a door between the living room/dining room/kitchen and the hallway, bedrooms and bath.  Tam rounded up the cats, shut the door on them and offered to cancel her evening's online RPG.

     "Nope, it's my mess and I'll clean it up," twenty minutes of sweeping, mopping and wiping the flow down with damp paper towels, checking under and behind things and feeling for the telltale scritching of a shard of glass.

     And the whole time, I was slowly realizing that the slowed-time interval of watching the saucer falling irrevocably down, down to the hard floor and certain destruction is just a sped-up, compressed version of the way I feel about Time's arrow, pushing us all down the slope of entropy: No, no, NO!  But there's not a darned thing to do but save what you can, as much as you can, and try not to panic.

     At least dinner was good.