The Pickle Jar

 It wasn't about the broken pickle jar.  Although the rumor is that was what the fight was about.  It was a standard jar.  Millions of them being massed produced and stuck on supermarket shelves before finding their way into a shopping cart and into the refrigerator of one of a million different homes across the land.   It wasn't special, it wasn't rare and it most certainly held no sentimental value.   It was a jar of pickles.   There were only three pickles left in it , floating in a murky pool of salty dill juice, flanked by errant seeds that had escaped and would eventually sink to the bottom of the jar.     It had sat on the refrigerator shelf for two weeks, starting out so full it was a challenge to pry a single baby dill out of the tightly packed array of late night craving stardom.  As the supply dwindled, the jar was shoved to the side or pushed behind the ketchup and mayonnaise until someone would get the afternoon munchies or a case of the mid-day boredom.   It was nothing more than a jar of pickles, until the day it was accidently dropped on the kitchen floor, the edge of the glass hitting the plated aluminum foot of the table leg at just the right angle to send a fracture across the surface.  As pickle juice exploded across the linoleum and the three errant pickles bobbled in a bizarre twisting skid towards the cabinet, that pickle jar took on a whole new meaning.   

Jason was already angry about dinner not being ready when he got home from work.  Karla was angry that he felt she had to make sure dinner was ready for him when she also worked all day.  The fact is, they had been angry with one another for months and instead of talking about it, they had resorted to childish games of silent treatments and passive aggressive statements as a way of communication.   As those pickles slipped across the floor, everything they had not been saying was suddenly there at the surface and ready to be said. There was no way it was going to be a pretty scene.    It began with Jason yelling at Karla about being clumsy and Karla yelling back at him being a bully.   Voices began to rise in anger, the words became more and more vicious as accusations and hurtful comments were hurled back and forth like a heated tennis match.  A dish was broken accidentally at first, and then the feeling it brought was satisfying. More dishes were broken and then furniture was upended and the shattering of glass could clearly be heard by any passerby.   

Then as suddenly as it had begun, it just stopped.  Jason and Karla exhausted like two dogs who had fought with all their energy until there was nothing left and no winner to be had.   They looked at one another.  They looked at the chaos around them.  They looked at the red and blue lights of the police cruiser as it pulled up in front of their house ( because of course someone called that fight in ).   They reached for one another and decided that moment...   they were hungry for a pickle.