Blueprint for Living
A Flash Fiction by Anna Mantzaris
The sofa was parallel to the clawfoot tub. The vintage chrome kitchen chairs looped around the bedroom perimeter like a horseshoe-shaped waiting room. The queen-size bed, with our coveted avocado green mattress, sat strategically centered in the sunken living room.
A silver basket designed specifically for bananas, filled with a bunch of green organics, dangled from the hallway ceiling above the Viking range, blocking what was once an easy path from the front of the house to the back.
It was disorienting brushing my teeth over the Broyhill dining-room table.
“Things shouldn’t be this way,” I told my wife.
She had always been an orderly person, keeping the house tidy with planning lists and schedules, evenly dividing chores among the two of us now empty-nesters.
It had started with a mini fridge after the eldest left for college and she had overbought for his dorm room, taking advantage of impractical two-for-one deals. “Wouldn’t it be great to have a cold drink whenever you want without going into the kitchen?” she asked pointing to the duplicate.
Shortly after, I walked in the front door after work and hit my shin on the four-poster bed.
“What’s this doing in here?”
“You’re always so tired when you get home,” she said, “now you can flop onto the mattress right away!”
I hadn’t heard her this exuberant in years. The kids leaving had been tough on her and she’d been forced to take early retirement when her company downsized.
I figured the shift of our blueprint for living was temporary. And she had never even asked for help, doing it solo when I was at the office. I did wonder how she got the baby grand to the attic and the pool table to the roof deck but decided to just accept it like I had the mysteries of Easter Island and Stonehenge.
I figured it was a phase. For years, she’d start projects and then abandon them like leaving a confused lover who couldn’t figure out what had happened or why. The garage, before we began eating our weekly Sunday night Chicken Milanese dinner there, had housed an unused potter’s wheel, a loom, and unopened boxes of bulk wax for candle making.
“We had to move things around anyway,” she said each time I brought it up. “The kids are never coming back.”
It was true, they rarely even picked up their phones when we called, but after she plastered the rugs on the ceilings I told her it had to stop. All of it. I’d never been one to tell my wife what to do but I’d also gotten side-eye from our next-door neighbor after the velvet drapes were being used to cover the pool.
“Why can’t we live differently?” she said. “Not everything has to be status quo.”
“I want everything back, the way it was,” I said pointing to the ceiling rugs now sagging like heavy crawfish in an overfilled net, “and by morning.”
I felt like a sexist husband from a 1950’s television show. I barely recognized my own voice.
I figured I’d let her cool off. I fell asleep on the sofa from the stress of it all and had rolled into the damp tub before waking up with my head under the faucet and heading out back to look for her.
The sun was just starting to set. She had gathered every stick in the yard and put them in an Andy Goldsworthy-type swirl, held together with drying mud. She was seated in the middle.
“For God sakes,,” I said, now worried our neighbor would see my wife sitting in an oversized nest and file some sort of complaint of a woman impersonating a bird.
“It’s happened,” she said.
“What?” I said. “What’s happened?” Looking to the sky for some reason.
“The cosmic shift. Of our lives. We can never go back, to how things were.”
I reached down and gingerly pulled a leaf out of her hair. She was still beautiful with her perfect bone structure and wide eyes, dressed in a somehow pristine cream dress. But even if she weren’t. Even if she wouldn’t be some day, I knew I’d always see her this way. It didn’t matter.
I stepped into the twigged circle.
I sat next to her, wrapping my arms around her. “You’re right,” I said.
We stayed there, letting the night fall around us with the light dissipating just like it should.
Author: Anna Mantzaris is a San Francisco-based writer. Her work has appeared in BlazeVOX, The Cortland Review, Five on the Fifth, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Necessary Fiction, New World Writing Quarterly, Sonora Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of Occupations (Galileo Press).
Read the interview with Anna to discover the story behind the story…
Now, we can arrange things to satisfy ourselves.
A great story. A lesson in layering, I think. 😀