The Parisian Wife

“So where are you going in Europe?” I ask her as she tries on another pair of shoes.

“We’re going to Barcelona, Madrid, and Paris,” her husband answers. “We go to Europe a lot, but somehow we always seem to end up in Paris.”

She smiles at this, and he continues, “She would probably say that we’re going to Paris via Spain."

Pet Shop Girls

I shake the final scoop of kitty litter down into the plastic jug until it’s as full as I can possibly make it, and think to myself “mene, mene, tekel” because I’m that kind of nerd.

I walk up to the front of the store, but no one’s behind the counter. Off to the left, a woman stands behind a display selling raw food for dogs, but she’s on her phone and ignoring me completely, not in a pointed or rude way, but just that she genuinely does not know I’m here, and I just watch her for a little while, enjoying the sensation of watching someone who isn’t conscious of being watched.

Eventually I clear my throat, and when she looks up, eyes wide, I say, “So, are you it?"

The Cardinal Sin

We’re listening, rapt, as the NY Philharmonic soars through the piece they’re playing. The soloist grins, and he sways with the music, his body a palpable expression of his joy.

And just as the music reaches a quiet interlude, we hear it: the rustle and crinkle of someone opening a bag or unwrapping a candy - the cardinal sin of concert-going - but instead of it stopping after a moment, or even a couple of moments, it goes on and on and on and on....

Katie, John and I turn almost at the exact same time to see what the hell is exactly happening here, only to be confronted by a woman rummaging through what appears to be, not one or two, but an entire grocery store’s worth of plastic bags on her lap, while everyone around her just seems to ignore her.

train sleep

I close my eyes to better concentrate on the music. The rocking of the train and the hard subway seat fade away, and I’m left moving through the mix on my headphones, navigating the space between the cymbals and the toms on the drum kit, teasing out the separate threads of the vocal lines from the fabric they’ve woven together, feeling the bass out in the dark seas of pitch where notes cease to exist.

I can almost see it, some kind of light or consciousness at the center of the sound, right there, as close as a person can get to the center of the universe.

My body jerks and I awaken with a start.

Fatten Me Up

I lay my head in her lap as Katie scrolls through her phone. She looks down and then pokes the rise of protruding ribs underneath my t-shirt (my chest is shaped much like my grandfather’s and the bottom of my ribcage sticks out a bit). 

“I have muscles elsewhere,” I say.

“You just have to eat a stick of butter before bed,” she says playfully.

Backhanded

I’ve only just arrived to work when I hear the woman’s voice outside the stock room at the cash wrap asking, “Are you a manager?”

“Well I want to complain about one of your employees,” she continues after presumably receiving an answer in the affirmative. I freeze where I am in the stock room, listening: what will she say about one of my co-workers?

“I want to complain because he’s just too nice,” she finishes, lamely.

Different Kinds of Problems

“Speaking of the coronavirus,” Katie says nonchalantly as we walk into the grocery store. “There was a...,” she pauses, “...I’m sorry to say, viral video of a doctor freaking out on his supervisor because he was so overworked, just asking to be fired.”

A man perusing the avocados gives us a bit of a look as we walk by, and we ignore him. I go to the produce section, look around for a moment, and announce, “Looks like they moved the Brussels sprouts again.”