"Harper, you're an idiot," he said to himself as he looked wistfully at the shattered stone in front of him.
He had just hurled the bobcat stone carving he was working on at the wall because he was edgy. Harper Rugby, incredible jokester and stoneman extraordinare, was in the most terrible mood he had been in all year. His day had even started out rotten...he awoke from slumber with an excruciating headache due to the refusal to cry the night before. Yesterday afternoon the woman he was currently sharing his bed with had left. For good.
"You just don't know how to be serious, Harp. Therefore, I want nothing to do with you. Goodbye," were her last words as she walked out of his life.
Scowling now, flexing his hands into fists, Harper turned from the broken stone on the floor and paced angrily up and down the length of his shop. Grunting with every step he took, he knew that he would have to calm down...way down...in order to finish the project. But first, he had to fix the bobcat.
Turning to face the broken stone, he closed his eyes and envisioned the moments just before he threw it...and pushed. He pushed the time back with his mind, into the place where he had been when he still had the stone bobcat, whole and unmarred, in his hands. He pushed...and opened his eyes. Looking down at the floor, the stone had disappeared and it was as if the angry fit Harper had embraced had never happened. The bobcat was once again in his hands, whole and on it's way to becoming beautiful.
"Solexa um kapki fie," he muttered to himself, remembering the old saying he was taught in school. It meant, "your anger is your ruin" and he knew it to be true. Thank the Gods he was able to fix whatever he ruined, though. Now, he had to concentrate on bettering his mood before he maimed some unsuspecting customer.
Whistling now, he trained his mind to think of happier times when he was a boy...the delicious jokes he had pulled on his friends, the food he had eaten to satisfy the hunger he always felt, the way he felt when he finished a particularly good carving of stone.
Knowing nothing of the atmosphere around him as he usually did when he worked, he began to finish the bobcat in the silence of his shop.
