Red-Trimmed House

From the northeast corner of the house, through the window at the top of the stairs, we could see the buds of the fruit tree, pink and soft in the last days of spring. The bare branches had grown new leaves, and by the time the sun warmed our skin, their fruits were beginning to emerge. Red seeds, they looked like, about the size of acorns, but they weren’t close enough that we could really see them, even though the branches could scratch the window at night when the wind made its way through the pines. If the tree had been a bit older, and us a little lighter, we might have climbed out of the window and into its branches to escape for a little while.

The webs appeared a month or two later, arriving like little packages too tightly wrapped to tell what was inside. We could see that they were denser than a spider’s web, and not built for the same purpose. The white lines crisscrossed, threads of thin, soft sheets. They spun larger without us noticing until they were big prisms surrounding the fruits and the leaves with irregular planes. Just a few branches—they didn’t cover the whole tree. They looked just like cocoons from where we saw them, cocoons big enough to hold a bat, probably. They got to be a couple of inches across, and about as long as my arm, up to the elbow. And that’s when Papa said he had to go to the store, and after he went to the dump he drove to the store and bought himself a long stick, and the stick came with a long blade. We watched him from the window, his arm now a straight black shaft with a scythe on the end. So easily he sliced off those cocoons, letting them land on the damp mulch below, so gently they might have bounced if they had not been so light. The tree was unburdened now, lifting only its own fruits and leaves.

Later, we saw the black bin outside the garage, left from Papa’s trip to the dump. Papa had forgotten to wheel it back in. Papa was glad to have saved the tree. We asked about them at dinner, those prisms and how they had looked up close. He had wanted to show us, the way they were spun, the way the little eggs sat within the planes. And the bigger ones too, so many of them, sharing this one cocoon. Hundreds, there must have been. And what did you do with those cocoons, we asked, and Papa had not been forgetful. The bin was full of water, and the cocoons were sunk in there, and I knew they were still hugging their branches, waiting to drown, waiting in the dark underneath that tight black lid. But the small ones had been able to swim; they swam within their cocoons, Papa said. They didn’t die. Come see. They’d crawled up the sides to where it was dry, and there they were, clinging to the lid. Now he stuck out his finger, his finger a shaft jabbed straight into the small bodies until they fell. Too many remained to kill in this way, so Papa wiped them off the lid and threw them into a bag of trash. Hundreds, he said, there were hundreds of them, if a hundred is just ten by ten. They suffocated there, the little ones in their cocoons, and went back into the bin, the bin now drained and dried and wheeled back into the cold garage. Papa drove to the dump again and came back and looked happy about his new tool.

Receipt

This was meant to be your day of resisting temptation, but more important than money is generosity. You will make this quick. You begin in the large sale section, circling a sea of racks, but the large t-shirts are stained with trendy brand names and stupid slogans and none of the pants appeal to you. You descend to the men’s department. One plywood surface is full of sweatshirts in tan, grey, and pink hues, on sale for $29. One of these might do, but the collar is just a bit too high, and that logo. You find a separate sale section. Hats, boxers, ugly shirts, polyester and rayon. At the end of the shirt rack, in the farthest corner of the store, you find a black terrycloth short-sleeve shirt. $14.99. The material is cotton and cheap. You can see through it. But it would do as an extra gift to round out the package. You walk by the sweatshirts again but the small logo is still there. You find the two lanes for checkout, one to the right for the human cashier and one straight ahead for self-checkout. The cashier looks bored and you are tired. You move forward and scan the tag yourself. It rings up as ten cents. The two employees standing behind you are still exchanging jokes, maybe flirting. Can they see the massive screen of your register? Should you say something? You decide not to say anything. You stand there and wait for the machine to roll out a disproportionately long receipt. At the door, someone says something. You turn to them with fear, and they repeat it: Goodnight. Good night. You get away feeling like you have gotten away with something and descend into the subway. Home again. You eagerly pull out the shirt and feel a hard lump. The security tag is still attached. Google tells you that the tags are full of ink, so that if you try to steal, you will have blood on your hands, plus the goods will be ruined. You could return the item to the store and ask them to remove the tag, but then you would have to show them your disproportionately long receipt to prove that the item is in fact yours, and then they might see that you had only paid ten cents for it. No, you’ll have to pry it open. YouTubers show you how to do it—strong magnets can convince the devices to open—and end with disclaimers that they did not in fact steal the items. Another method involves the use of two forks in a rocking motion. You opt for the screwdriver instead. Your leverage is good, and you manage to yield a nice margin on one side and then the other, but you have to keep circling the central prong because widening one side causes the other to close up. Your clearance is now half an inch wide, just enough to slip in the metal shears. But the metal shears are dull, and your cuts become increasingly violent in your impatience. There. The deed is done. You remove the round black lump and its bent plug from the shoulder. But now the t-shirt has a hole in it from your blind probing. With your needle and your black thread, the last length on the spool, you sew up the hole just like your mother taught you, first circling the event with small stitches in and out through the intact perimeter and then closing it up with one cinch.

Bed Springs

A short story about a couple whose marital troubles are channeled into an ongoing, accelerating frustration with the conditions of their mattress, which, rather than their difficulties with each other, they cite as the reason for their lack of sleep, restless demeanors, and increasing anxiety. This leads to an endless search for a better mattress, which inevitably adds to their troubles those of financial insecurity and the physical strains brought on by the recurring trips to mattress discount stores and repeated trips up and down their third-story walkup, with and without a mattress bridging their cold shoulders.

Once the economic toll of again purchasing a new mattress clearly becomes untenable, the couple turns to mattresses they find on the street. Through these dirtier acquisitions, they begin to also take on the psychic weight of their neighbors’ marital troubles—a blood spot there, bed bugs everywhere, copious urine stains, and unreadable traces index the unspeakable plights of the others they hear arguing on alternating weeknights, or see returning hand in hand from the grocery, or nod to across the subway platform each morning, or pass on their way to the bodega at night.

While chatting casually, laughing, gleefully, even, for example, they have sex, but, finding it unfulfilling, spend ten postcoital minutes discussing the relative merits of the springs on this mattress compared to the last and decide that it did not provide enough give for the positions that would have given them satisfaction.

A month later, she announces at breakfast that she has noticed a decided slump in his shoulders, an irregular curve that begins at the nape of his neck and gently holds the S curve of his scalp at a low angle, as would a slack line. It’s not firm enough, he complains, and she knows what he means.

They had begun with the pillows: Sealy, Tempur-Pedic, insubstantial, IKEA, his deceased grandmother’s, her childhood’s. None provided quite the right level of support. Switching sides of the bed similarly provided little relief, though they did have a discussion about the tissues he found stuffed into the crack between the wooden siding of the bed platform and the mattress.

They take a trip to Home Depot that May to purchase some plywood to line the underside of their box springs, a DIY solution he had proposed in hope of solidifying their mutual commitment to this bed, this mattress, his back. She runs her finger along the rough surface of the boards, procuring a splinter.

One morning, she wakes to a high-pitched whine; the window has been left open in winter, introducing a strong, cold breeze, which in turn gently rocks the closet door back and forth on its old hinges. Dutifully, she rolls back the clammy blanket from her chest and lifts herself from her foam imprint. Before closing the closet entirely, she sees (nearly glowing in the light of dawn) an air mattress folded tightly on the top shelf. It has traditionally, in their household, been reserved for guests, but now, she reaches for it. It is inflated by mid-morning and remains so until the subsequent evening, when she warmly suggests that they try something new. He complies, eagerly. By morning, her shoulder blades make contact with the hardwood floor.

It ends only when their landlord complains about the number of mattresses in plastic wrap that have been abandoned on the sidewalk in front of the building over the past few months, in increasing numbers—a sign to current tenants and potential future renters that the building is unclean. Soon evicted by force of increasing monthly rent, they begin their search for a new studio, but, finding that their respective commutes from affordable boroughs will likely have to increase, they find that they would instead, perhaps, be better off finding their own respective places, at least for the next year. Rather than returning to the mattress store in search of two comfortable twin mattresses, one for each apartment, they agree to retain the mattresses of the previous tenants of their new respective rooms.