That Morning

There was a little mountain of used handkerchiefs on the middle of the bed when I got home that morning. Crumpled, sticky, soaked with tears and snot and silent contempt. Just there, piled up on my expensive Egyptian cotton sheets, a monument to her unhappiness.

She really could be so fucking dramatic when she wanted to.

Imitation

1. 

In the morning Robert announced that later he would go down to the lake and drown himself, if he wasn’t too tired, or if he wasn’t feeling too lazy.

He took comfort and joy in the thought, and the announcement of the thought - he knew, indeed everyone knew, that he would always feel lazy and thus, his proposed suicide was simple and warm and harmless - it justified his sadness and made other people uncomfortable and therefore was almost as good as the real thing.
There were three other people in the room that morning. Rosie, his wife, a crumpled ball of a woman. Edna, his mother, whose skin was now the colour of cold breakfast tea with a few drops of condensed milk in it. And Leo, Robert’s imaginary friend, who stood in the doorframe of Robert’s bedroom with his arms folded across his chest and a rather slow, easy smile that sharply molded his sour-cream face into a study of lines and angles.
Robert, who in that moment lay in a bed wearing a black bathrobe and stained underwear, was a man that had done much in doing very little. He had tried his hand at art and poetry in college, but struggled terribly finding a rhyme for “when love is lost,” and so put down his leather bound notebook somewhere and hadn’t looked upon the thing since. In his youth he had read many books, and saw many movies, and scrutinized many paintings, and in all of them he had offered a sort of cold admiration that weighed the banalities and immensities art as “just about the same.”
It was with this same cold admiration that he looked at the reality of his family, all stood around the perimeter of his small twin bed, each possessing, in his eyes, a certain bright, cheerful ugliness that both fascinated and disgusted him to such a degree that he found in fact he didn’t actually feel anything at all.
Robert gazed at Rosie, with her soft rolls and bulges, the wiry hairs on her chin that looked like a family of flies had drowned in a vat of milk before the cheese was made, the small beads of eyes that should have been hazel but looked almost piss-yellow in the morning light, and he wondered not if he had ever loved her but rather if he had ever liked her. She was lovable in her grotesqueness, her unspeakable devotion to him, her very good pork pies that came to him every Thursday or Friday afternoon on a plastic tray with a gradually peeling photo of their wedding day on it. She was worthy of a very matter-of-fact version of his love that manifested itself in either ambivalence or complete obliviousness. But she was not likable - she was too plain, too good, too simple to be liked and that, Robert thought, was probably the reason Leo was so keen about “doing away with her.” 
Robert supposed he agreed, but the question now presented itself: how?

The Comfort of a Key

You have not been the great adventure of my life. You have been the comfort of a key. Knowing, on a freezing night, there is a door that only I can walk through, and a room for me to rest in. 

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1. Tavia

The night he was stabbed, she was sitting in an empty bathtub with her sixth grade Algebra homework in her lap. She also had a lump in her throat, a tight knot of sadness that she didn’t quite understand the meaning of just then. It had laid itself there when she’d gotten home from school that Friday afternoon. She’d turned her key and entered the tiny box apartment in Kennedy Gardens that had been her home for the last three years that smelled always to her like dust and honey.

Her mother had been getting ready for work when she’d arrived. Her mother: tall, a little fat around the middle, light skinned, with a slight overbite, and a tattoo on her shoulder blade that said Pablo. Tavia still didn’t know who Pablo was. Her mother had stood in the bathroom, staring into the grimy cracked mirror over the sink (Omar had punched it six weeks ago; he’d needed stiches; reflections were now only jagged slivers of undistorted bits of a face – teeth, eyes, bridge of nose).

Her mother had a ritual. First she’d carefully iron out her waitress uniform on the coffee table while watching Judge Judy. Then she’d do her hair, slipping a brown stocking cap over her head and then a long, chestnut brown wig made from real Indian hair over that. Next, she’d apply her makeup – powder, brown lip liner, a thin blue eyeliner atop her brown eyelids. This was all down very slowly, while she complained about the building manager and how he still hadn’t done anything about the rat infestation, about the cost of most things (gas, groceries, soap dispensers), about her white manager at the restaurant, about white people in general, and about Omar.

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