Once a page from a magazine or a newspaper sticks to the flooring, it’s stuck. It’s impossible to peel it away cleanly, and it always leaves a splotchy pattern of the pulpy soft part of the paper, looking like the connected waterways on an atlas page of a marshy part of the world. The splotches of paper get walked on and rubbed by the bottoms of our feet until they turn dark grey.
When it’s raining and the humidity is high enough, the flooring gets slick.
Sometimes I want to read lying on my back, holding my magazine over me, and sometimes I want to lie on my stomach and read. But a magazine this heavy I can’t read on my back. The pages printed in colour smell of ink. I read on my stomach for a while, propped on my elbows to hold up the weight of my shoulders, but before long parts of me start to ache and I can’t hold that pose very long either.
I lie on my back. I stare at the ceiling and stretch my whole body out, my trunk and legs pulling in opposite directions, like I was trying to rip myself in half at the waist. The ceiling doesn’t stretch, or contract, it just looks the same as always.
At the counter where my husband is sleeping, on the tray he has pushed to one side, next to his mobile phone, is a white mug. There’s a centimetre or so of coffee left in it, which looks more like a shadow at the bottom. Beside the mug is a small wicker basket with the crumpled wrapper that held the hamburger my husband ate before he fell asleep.
One corner of this wrapper has managed to escape being crumpled, it’s kind of flat, and on the back side of it is a splatter of ketchup. In the centre of the tray are a handful of napkins my husband grabbed from the dispenser but didn’t end up using, still in the same bunch from when he pulled them out.
Before he dozed off he pushed the tray to his right so he could put his head down on the counter in front of him. One hand lies on top of the other wrist, and his forehead lies on top of his two hands. He doesn’t need to get going yet, and he’s been in that position for a while. It won’t be long before his hands start to go numb.
His hands smell like sanitizer. The smell mixes with the smell of the meat he pulls from tightly packed plastic bags in the freezer, that meat patty smell, and the smell of the sweet sauce that goes on the meat. His hands smell of all that, as does his hair.
I no longer have the urge to stroke my hair, and instead I run the palm of my hand over my cheek, to my chin bone, to the curve of where my jaw meets my neck. I apply pressure to my chin, so that it hurts a little, so that I can really feel the bone in there.
My husband’s bag, stuffed to bursting, rests under his legs, crammed between his stool and the counter. His hair looks greasy.
Sometimes when my husband is sleeping I sneak my face close to his hands, so that I can smell them. It’s not that I like the smell of meat. I actually find it disgusting. But I keep doing it because I want to make sure I still find it disgusting.
As for his hair, as soon as he shampoos, the smell goes away.
There’s one TV show that I absolutely have to watch, it’s on once a week, on Tuesdays at eleven, and last week when I was watching it my husband was at home. I don’t know if it was because he was asleep or because he just wouldn’t watch it with me but suddenly my frustration at him boiled over, and I knew I shouldn’t have but I started in on him, attacking him, while my show was still on, through the end of the show, past midnight, on and on until who knows how late, basically telling him he was a good-for-nothing coward, which would have been too cruel to actually say so I didn’t, but that about sums up what I was feeling.
When I was watching TV, I was lying there motionless, my body feeling heavy and tired like it is now, training my eyes on the screen, absorbing the flickering light. I can’t remember what set me off, but I started saying wouldn’t it be nice if we had a little more money, don’t you think we should try to do something about that, I really think we should be thinking more about the future, that kind of stuff, trying to make it seem like it was just occurring to me, when of course I had it on my mind, and I was talking with an edge, and once I got going I sat up and leant forwards over my knees on the vinyl flooring.
Before long I was shouting at the top of my lungs, not holding back at all, lashing out at my husband and it was like I couldn’t stop. At one point my eyes were swollen and burning. I had the vague feeling that if I really wanted to talk about this with him, it might have been better if I wasn’t screaming and crying.
Thinking back to that whole thing, I start to feel the laziness in my body tighten up at the back of my neck. It could be that the tension was already there and building up and I only noticed it just then. When I was freaking out at him, I knew that we were both working, and that we weren’t broke or anything, and that this tantrum I was throwing wasn’t doing me or him or us any good. It’s not that I understand all of that
