She came into the living room holding something small and black between two fingers, the way you’d hold a bug you weren’t sure was dead yet, and said my name in the particular tone she uses right before something is about to happen to me that I haven’t agreed to. I have learned to recognize … Read more
The top of the refrigerator has been in my peripheral vision for weeks now. Not the side of it, which is nothing, a flat white wall I have no interest in, but the top, which I can only ever see from an angle, from the floor, looking up past the cabinets. There is a wicker … Read more
I came downstairs this morning to find my bowl had been replaced with an impostor, and nobody had thought to ask me first. The old bowl was deep and blue and had a small chip along the rim I’d long ago decided gave it character. It had been there, in that exact spot on the … Read more
A new plant appeared on the windowsill in the back room this afternoon, small and green with leaves shaped like little paddles, sitting in a plastic pot that still had a price sticker curling off one side. She carried it in from the car wrapped in a sheet of thin paper, unwrapped it at the … Read more
A large flat box arrived on the porch this afternoon, thin as a cracker and much too big for its own good, and I want it noted for the record that I was consulted about none of it. Not the ordering, not the delivery, not the decision to drag it through the hallway leaving a … Read more
Something happened to the kitchen today and nobody asked my opinion of it first, which I want on record before I explain the rest. It started with a smell. Not a bad smell exactly — I want to be fair about this — but an aggressive one, the kind that doesn’t stay politely in one … Read more
I want it on the record that I did not object to the candle itself. I objected to what it was doing. There is a difference, and I intend to explain it slowly, because I suspect no one in this house has fully appreciated the scope of the problem. She brought it home in a … Read more
I want it on record that I was not consulted. The reading chair — mine, functionally, though she sits in it sometimes when I allow it — has been moved. Not far. Perhaps the width of three of my own body-lengths, which I recognize is not a great distance to some, but to me it … Read more
