Didn’t Get My Steps In Today

I flip the last switch, turning off the small lamp perched on the bookshelf, and the room goes comfortably dark. Before I head down the hall to take a shower and get ready for bed, I pause for a moment to check and make sure the door is locked, which it is.

Of course it’s locked, because, I realize at this exact moment, I haven’t left the house today, like at all. We spent all day putting the house back together after two almost back-to-back markets, and stayed in tonight watching TV, but for some reason it didn’t really occur to me that I hadn’t seen anyone but Katie, or anything besides the interior of this apartment, all day,

Pains and Puns

“You know why this absinthe is white?” Katie asks in the liquor store as she takes the bottle out of my hands. “The color... is absinthe!” (she pronounces it like “absent.”)

“I can see why you took the bottle from me,” I reply, taking it back from her after I’ve recovered.

“It’s because if you’d been holding it you would have dropped it in admiration,” she says, looking very pleased with herself.

Sleeping In

After a last, stomping pass over both our recumbent forms, the cat finally gives up on trying to get us up to feed her and resentfully jumps down off the bed. I roll over with a slow sigh, and Katie languidly reaches over to her phone on the bedside table.

“Jesus,” I say, “what time is it?”

She lifts her phone up in the dim, grainy light filtering through the blackout curtains and groggily announces, “Ten AM."

Forgot to Eat

The erratic, fierce wind blows hard down an empty 5th Avenue in Brooklyn like a fussy child having a tantrum and breaking his own toys. Katie and I both pull up our hoods against the bluster and walk in silence with our hands shoved in our jacket pockets.

“You want to get something at the taco truck?” I say, my voice spacey from having forgotten to eat as much as I needed today.

“I want to get some food, go home, eat it, and have my husband back,” Katie replies.

Smile-off

Before I started working with the public selling Katie’s sculptures, I had no idea how many people there were in the world who are incapable of or unwilling to respond to a genuine smile.

She sees me, this woman in the orange jacket and the tall knitted cap, I know she sees me, and my smile is genuine, because I know it is, because I’m the one that’s making it. So when she finally does  make eye contact, despite her best efforts to avoid it, she doesn’t exactly scowl, but her face hardens into what can only be called "aggressive neutrality.”

Now my smile is a little forced, I must admit, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let it falter, and I don’t drop my gaze, or my smile, until she has exited the booth.

Overshare

“It’s hard to imagine what your mom likes to get her a present,” the woman says to her soft-spoken boyfriend. “Like you said, the only reason I know she likes me is that I have a working uterus.”

She darts a quick glance at me as his face reddens. “That was an overshare, wasn’t it?” she asks while he shrugs and nods.

All In The Family

“Hello!” she perkily half-shouts in response to my gentle, “Hi there,” from the back of the booth, and immediately the people with her start busting on her: “Is that how you say hello?” they mock.

“He startled me!” she tries to explain, but they’ve already moved on to the next booth.

“I thought you did fine,” I say after they’ve left.

“Family’s always so judgmental,” she says sadly.