The pooka of a distant lover.

"Oh, how exquisite" the old hub-bub was remarking.  "Slight fracture" he was saying, squinting, looking under and around, moving the thing all around his field of vision, "but it truly adds to the beauty, I think."

"I'm thinking it may be Persian or something, from somewhere like that, using a process long forgotten" said the shopkeeper.

"Would it be an expensive ware, I wonder?" said the hub-bub.

"Think of all the children's teeth that could be made from this thing" said the shopkeeper.

"Oh its really just an emblem of my lover" said the customer, the hub-bub.  "See, its like this: its to be kept on a shelf so much, then maybe postulated with some hot food at requisite times, like called upon to be used in service."

"How utterly Jolly" said the shopkeeper, reaching for the bowl, as if he were so enamored by the idea that he might keep the bowl for his own personal use.  He had his hands out, like a faux-wooden dance partner, with some indistinct space in between.

"Certainly you understand the little lady at the thrift shop shall die" she was saying, a ghostly hand at her own throat, some color having come to her cheeks.  Rose and cream, all it was with her, so slight a countenance as to be floated across the room by the force of simply his coarse breathing.  And there was further ghostly blue smoke hanging in the air, between the various drafts in their rooms, the glorious open window with the curtains drowsily fanning at soft washes of wind.

"Something of substance for her then" said the hub-bub, taken a sudden scowling toward the indolent child on the fringed-area rug.  "Liver, maybe.  Dinner bread, milk gravy and such."

"What a lovely thought" said the mum.  "I shall present the fare with our new golden bowl".

"You shall do no such thing" said the husband.  "Do not touch that ornament until asked by me.  Elseways, I would think to recommend the little lady to debtor's prison."

"I'm afraid I've brushed across your felicities with an indelicate, trembling hand, love" said the mum, head tilted oddly, as if marking an odd thought inside that head beneath the pinned hair, and that with powders and scents dabbed.

Out of the room, a besmirched explosion of glassware.

Immediately, the husband came, his sockfeet looking rather elvish, and with a perfect horror he saw his weekend ruined, his ritual timing vessel, you see, laying in pieces, that golden bowl, quite dead, discorporate and now rendered quite useless.

The golden-dipped bowl was lying there in three pieces, now hopelessly broken.  And with a voodoo-mysticism-inspired horror, he pictured his own lady of the evening, his secret other, of dirty postings and boxes of secret undergarments, that she would be lying broken herself, possibly at the bottom of a dark stairwell.