In Which We Relax At Home For The Evening

by Liu Chenyang

Chimney

by DARLA ROSENSTEIN

One bone of contention was the fireplace. Mark worried she would light a log and walk away. A spark could catch on the fabric. This was all that came to mind when he thought of it.

He wrote in his journal, "The lark is many featured bird. Caring for it presents a number of difficulties," and laughed like a maniac.

+

She found his laugh grating, distasteful, somewhat hysterical in its intonation. When he emitted it, she curled her fingers in on themselves, into tight fists, as if physically straining to contain her complaint.

You just can’t tell someone they have a terrible laugh.

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While he was waiting for her to come from work, a Jehovah's Witness came to the door. He was aggressive, impolite at first, feeling undone.

Then he softened and invited the woman in. He gave her a glass of water. She asked, "How do you decide how high to make your ceilings?"

"We're just renting," he said. The woman nodded, sitting on the edge on the bench on his front porch and made as if to go.

"Wait," he said, "do you have a flyer or something?"

+

On the second floor of the public library, it was possible to exchange your library card for a key to a small, soundproof room.

This seemed to her an imperfect system, because a library card wasn’t like a credit card: what was its worth in relation to that of a key to a private room, why would you not just forfeit the library card and keep the key?

“Is Room 24 available?” she asked the library page. He said that it was.

She took the key to what she now thought of as her room.

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He could not contain his irritation. He had expected her early, and she could not even be bothered to be on time. A delivery man unloaded a large package meant for another house.

Her voicemail was unhelpful, and he considered the message he left tame by his standards. In the car he felt more secure, so he turned it on and drove to an ice cream stand that featured live cows as an attraction. A homeless man wore a t-shirt that said, "Samsung Galaxy note." He gave the guy his sunglasses and finished his sherbet in the car.

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There was a chair in the library room but she sat on the carpeted floor, back propped against the door. There was graffiti on the wall, pairs of initials connected by plus signs or ampersands, enclosed in misshapen hearts. Someone had written, "Everything is beautiful and nothing hurt," in capital letters near the floorboards, a teenager, she thought.

She removed her phone from her pocket. There was a new message and a new-old message, that is, a message she had avoided listening to for several days now.

The soundproofed white walls pressed in around her; she pressed play. "Hey," it said. "The Japanese restaurant I told you about, the new one, I looked it up, it's on Washington. There's a soft opening this week. But I can't go." There was a pause and then he started to speak faster, the way he did after two or three drinks, like there were words he couldn't get out fast enough and needed the aid of his limbs, head bobbing, hands moving through the air. "I can't go this week and I can't go next week. But you should take Mark.”

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Before bed he continued his discourse on the lark. He sketched the lark high on some parapet, observing all below his wings, but scratched it out when he decided the bird's expression appeared too cockeyed.

In the new version, which he would compose the following morning, the bird had seen something in the sky above him, and was very near to cowering.

When she came in, long after he had gone to sleep, he did not wake. She climbed in bed for a minute, moving as little as possible so she might not  disturb his slumber. He woke and opened his mouth to speak, but she was no longer beside him.

+

For a minute, she wondered where to go. The library was closed. She tucked her hands in her pockets and walked south, towards Washington. The lights were out everywhere except the second-story of the building that housed the newspaper. On the ground floor was the Japanese restaurant. The neon sign on the door advertising KIRIN illuminated chairs upturned over tables inside.

She sat down on a bench across the street and took out her phone. There was an old message and an old-old message, that is, a message she had listened to many times already, so many times she did not need to press play to hear its words distinctly.

Instead, she played the other one, the plain-old message. 

"It's me," he said, as he always said, even though she had pointed out to him that his name showed up on her caller ID, that this introduction was unnecessary and a waste of her time. "I wanted to know when you were planning on coming home because, I was thinking..." There was a pause. "Goddamnit." Another pause, while she heard him swallow. "I just was thinking we should go out to dinner."

Darla Rosenstein is a writer living in Houston.

"Distance" - Why? (mp3)

"Waterlines" - Why? (mp3)

The new album from Why? is entitled Mumps, etc. and it will be released on October 8th.