chapter 1
fiction
HUFFINGTON
09.23.12
poured a glob of dish soap on the pile of plates. “Actually, I
think I said something different.”
She picked up the drying cloth. “Oh?”
“I think I said that she doesn’t love me at all.”
He cleared a dish clean with the sponge.
She leaned over, to touch his arm. “Oh, Daniel,” she said.
She could feel the turtleneck, climbing up to cover over
her neck, her shoulders, her torso. Pants, covering up her
legs. Socks, over her feet. Underwear, over her pubic hair A
bra, over her breasts.
“I want to do better,” she said, quietly.
He placed a dish carefully in the dishrack, lining the circle up with the bent wire.
“Do you ever think about leaving?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
He turned to her. His eyes were bright. “Sometimes, I
do,” he said.
“Do what?”
“Think about leaving,” he said.
She shook her head at him, confused. “But you can’t
leave,” she said. “You’re the devoted one.”
His eyes were kind, and sad, at the sink. And she could
see, suddenly, that they were on their way to leaving already, that this conversation was only walking through
a door already open, and once those eyes left, they were
not going to return, and the clothing would be no barrier
at all, nothing, shreds, tissue, air, for all the pain then
rushing in.
Aimee Bender is the author of four books, including The Girl
in the Flammable Skirt and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. Her short fiction has been published in Harper’s,
Granta, The Paris Review and many more as well as heard
on PRI’s This American Life and Selected Shorts. She lives
in Los Angeles and teaches creative writing at USC.