I didn’t say anything. Instead I scooted towards him, I was sitting on the floor facing him and I unfolded my legs from under me and thrust them at him and hopped on my butt in his direction and with my outstretched legs I kicked at him over and over again. For a second he laughed, maybe thinking I was doing a special move of a hero in a kids’ show, and he used his left arm to shield himself, but the next moment he whipped his arm back towards me to pin down my legs. Just before he got me I landed one good kick on his arm, right in the spot where he has three large birthmarks, which make me think of Orion’s belt. But then he had me, and I couldn’t move. I struggled for a bit while he held me down, but he’s a man, and I doubt he even had to try very hard.
His arm on the counter at Becker’s looks bulging, but it’s not from muscles, it’s from the bend in his elbow and from the weight of his head. There’s a burn on his skin from his job in the kitchen, something must have got on him, but it’s already crusting over with a scab.
After I was kicking him, as he was holding me down, I’m pretty sure this happened, I smelt something weird, and it could even have been coming from my own body, I had no idea what it was but it smelt rotten, like maybe it was the contents of a stomach, vomit about to come up. I’m thinking about it now, after it happened, and I can’t believe a smell that foul could be mine. Maybe I was imagining it, because when you actually smell bad, you only pick up the littlest bit of your smell, like a whiff from somewhere far away, so maybe I wasn’t really smelling it at all. But obviously I couldn’t ask my husband, so I have no way of knowing for sure. If I did imagine it, then why? I mean, why did I imagine a stench like that? At the time I think I was sobbing, tears and mucus running down my face.
Slumped over on the counter, asleep, my husband’s bony spine and shoulders twitch from time to time. When the spasm is big enough the counter creaks. But it’s still only a tiny movement, and the noise barely registers. His back is rounded and tight at the same time. He isn’t capable of letting go of all that tension, not even in his sleep.
Whenever I freak out, like I did that time, my husband always comes up with the best-sounding, most optimistic, most unrealistic solution possible. I knew he would do it that time too, I was actually expecting it.
He loosened his hold on me. Even though he let me go I knew that I shouldn’t start thrashing around again, so I stayed still. But I made sure to keep chewing him out, I said what the hell are you talking about, moving, how could we possibly do that, and you know, we haven’t even been here half a year, we can’t just go from place to place, it’ll cost so much fucking money, did you even stop to think about that?
He sat there listening to me, wiping his glasses with a lens cloth which he keeps in the pocket of his favourite jeans, the ones he’s always wearing. I don’t think that little lens cloth had been washed in months, but he did manage to get some of the smudges off the lenses. I guess even though he doesn’t wash the lens cloth itself, at least it is in his pocket when he washes the jeans, which happens once in a while. His lens cloth is here now. His jeans are inside out, stuffed into the washing machine, which I can’t see from where I am. The top of the jeans is spilling out over the top of the machine.
I stretch again. First out, then up, my palms spread to the ceiling.
My husband is wearing his other jeans, the old ones, with the hole in the knee. The crotch is worn thin, with little openings where you can see the flesh of his upper thigh. His blue T-shirt is also pretty worn out. The crew-neck collar is all stretched and shapeless, and the blue is faded. It used to be bright blue. His legs follow the line of the stool towards the floor, but his feet don’t touch the ground.
He listened until I stopped yelling, then waited until he was done wiping his glasses, then said to me you’re right, but you know, take the mould for instance, we knew the place was mouldy but we decided we would deal with it because our priority was cheap rent, but now that we actually live here if you can’t stand the smell of the mould, then of course it’s a shame to lose the money it would take to move but wouldn’t moving be the best thing? That’s what he said. But why couldn’t he say something like let’s just stick it out for another half-year?
I grabbed a kitchen knife and hacked down on the controller cord for his game system. I’m not sure if this was before I tried to kick him and he pinned me, or after.
I severed the cord neatly. This surprised me, because I thought maybe some of the wires inside the rubber casing would put up a fight. Cutting through the cord so easily was kind of anticlimactic. But at that moment there was no room in my body, my face, my heart, to express that let-down.
My head always feels like it’s full of dust balls, grey and jagged, mixed with shreds of metal, stabbing at me. I want to get rid of them, dump them out, like
