Something Random

“I am sick of being cooped up in here!”
“What do you mean, ‘cooped up in here’!? We’re all in here! I’m here. I am here with you.”
“You think because we’re fucking I’m happy?”
She froze, and instantly there was an icy anger in her gaze, muscles clenching across her face as though from the point of impact of a slap; they stared, eyes dark, hard, and glittering with malice, suspended at their opposite ends of the room. Then she turned, a sharp corner navigated briskly, and throwing words over her shoulder, shook off room and occupant.
“Fine. That’s fine.”
Then turning at the top of the stairs thought better of her benignity.
“Don’t let me make you miserable. I didn’t know. I don’t know. You find something to make you happy, I’m not here with you anymore.” Then slamming the door; and down the hall came shrieks of agony from the portrait on the wall and in the kitchen he kicked the stove on a pivot yelling FUCK and sloshed liquid over his hand from the mug in it.

*

Elly arrived at the house one afternoon in mid-November, flakes of early snow on her shoulders and flaming hair, a patch of colour on the skin of each cheek taut in a white smile with red lips, asking where he was as she pulled off her gloves. A sort of awe followed her through the dark house as she pulled cold into it from outside still clinging to her clothes and walked through the halls as if indifferent to the contrast she made against them. When he caught her in the upstairs hall by the door to the old room now full of the bones of rodents and a persistent scraping and whinnying he was halted, stunned as though literally and he looked only at her, noticing not the difference she made in the green-grey halls, noticing only the hair in wisps escaping an elastic, the tendrils pulled back from her face, tight white skin and freckles and the redness of each cheek, snow on her shoes. A glow, or perhaps just the outdoor cold hovering around her and away from her, and he could only stare, and she still smiled so wide and laughed a small laugh bigger than anything else in the house or the city or the sky outside reaching up indefinitely to the clouds and the birds and past those stars and planets and a million asteroids in a belt circling an alien moon.
“Hi, you.”

*

And she was too much like she had always been, whereas he had altered, a complete change from one extreme to another and back to a middle ground that no one from either end of his life recognized. They kissed on the stair, she going down and he followed her, emerging from the room at the top of the house with the bones and scuffling, not asleep as she had thought, and caught her by the elbow, looking at her still as though at a puzzle or a problem, an equation walking through his halls and writing herself over all the walls on top of the striped wallpaper in the attic and over the concrete slabs of the kitchen and on baseboards and doorframes and on top of the shelves where he searched for something unrelated or for nothing at all or for a distraction from a million different things. Brow furrowed he simply stared, as though confused, irritated even, fingers on the crook of her arm tightening and pulling her back up to the step she had just left empty for him, an unconscious tightening of the muscles in his arm, and she took it to mean what it would have if it weren’t for the creases in between his eyebrows and the sunken sockets of the two dark eyes glittering under the furrow and suddenly he recognized what he hadn’t been able to find until he saw it in the thousand details of her face up close to his and felt her breathing close to his mouth and saw her eyes darting between his lips and eyes.

*

We’ll wait until it ends
What ends?
These things. All these things we hate.
These things in this house? Those dark things in corners in this house and outside?
And in other houses. All of those things.
We’ll just wait?
We have to.
Just wait. We’ll just wait, then.
We have to.

*

“We were walking I think, by a river maybe? No, in a park, it was winter – December – and there was frost, like there is now, and I slipped on a stone maybe, or a leaf – it was something broad because it was covered in frost which made it slippery, not something that was sticking out for me to trip on – and, and I didn’t know you well at that point – you know that thing you have? – the laugh and the crinkle, or the quizzical look, it seems harsh to people who don’t know you and I still didn’t know you – and I didn’t think to laugh it off, I just sort of – sort of… I don’t know, but you laughed, and I was so worried about what the crinkles by your eyes meant right then and I remember I panicked because I didn’t know and I thought if I didn’t know then that meant there was some sort of secret key I didn’t have and I would never have and you would just continue laughing and I would continue slipping on leaves. It was – I’m serious! – it was terrible. Was, I mean, then, now it’s funny.”
“I don’t remember you slipping on any leaves. And I wouldn’t laugh at you!”
“Well then it was a rock, maybe.”
“With you, always laughing with you.”
“That is a talent.”
“What is? I am a talent, for sure.”
“To laugh with me when I’m not laughing.”
“I’ll make you laugh, just wait.”

*