cast iron

there are so many ways to be alone (fiction)

It’s five minutes to five and she’s sitting on the rounded green couch in the rounded living room, the room that sold them on this house. The couch is light green. The walls are dark green. They had envisioned some kind of foresty, earthy feel when they picked out the paint and she never let on that she felt almost claustrophobic in the room because he loved it so much. She thinks she may swap out the brown throw rug for something white or yellow one day. She thinks she may just end up selling the house.

It is five o’clock and she makes her way to the kitchen, the way she always did, always will, long after the routine has ceased to be necessary. She takes out the cast iron skillet. It’s heavy in her hand and its weight feels good, like she’s holding on to something instead of emptiness. She stands there by the stove with pan in hand. It pulls her arm down and it’s not until she lets go and it bangs heavily on the tiled floor that she remembers she was even holding it. There’s a chip in the floor now, but it doesn’t matter. She made up her mind. She’ll sell the house. She picks up the skillet and lays it on the stove. She moves absentmindedly to the refrigerator and looks for something to make. She doesn’t know how to cook for one, so she’s been cooking for no one. Oh, she makes things — omelets, turkey burgers, pasta, chicken — and it all sits on the counter untouched until she throws it out the next morning. She imagines him coming through the door at 5:30, she imagines him taking off his coat and kissing her at the same time, she imagines his touch, his breath, the way his hair always looked so disheveled by the end of the day. She forces herself to stop imagining.

It is nine fifteen. She is in bed. She keeps the bedroom door open so she can hear any noises in the house. They used to close the bedroom door at night to shut out the sounds the old house made, shut out whatever noises came in through the living room windows — the ice cream man rolling around way too late, dogs barking, teenagers laughing. Now she lets them in, finds comfort in the sounds drifting through the rooms, carried by summer breezes. Eventually the outside sounds die out and she’s left with the creaks and groans of settling walls and floors. She turns on the tv, turns a baseball game on low volume and goes to sleep. She dreams of him, she always dreams of him, there’s never a night where he’s not there, doing the things they always did. Her dreams are nothing special. He doesn’t tell her anything, he doesn’t send messages or let her know he’s ok. They are just dreams of days they’ve spent together, just them walking around the Bronx Zoo or running through the park. Tonight she dreams of that one restaurant where they ate the bucket of crawfish. Her hands are messy and she drops a beer bottle on the floor. The waitress comes over to clean it up and when she looks at the waitress it is her own face she’s looking at. She looks back at the table and he is gone. It’s the first time she’s dreamed of him disappearing. She wakes up crying.

It is 5am. She is running in the morning darkness and she will run until it is light, until the summer heat makes itself known. By the time she gets back to the house, it’s 13 miles later and she wants nothing more than to tell him she accidentally ran a half marathon’s worth of miles, that she didn’t mean to and now she’s going to be late for work and he’d smile gently at her and continue getting dressed. But she can’t do that and she hasn’t been to work in a month and she suddenly feels dizzy so she lays down on the couch. She practices her breathing exercises because all the signs of a panic attack are there and she doesn’t want to take a Xanax. She does multiplication tables out loud and when she gets to the six times tables she has to really concentrate to get it right and by that time she’s breathing normal and no longer dizzy. The mild buzz of panic still surges through her but she’s learned to live with the low grade panic, she doesn’t let it ruin her. There are so many other things that will ruin her, she knows. Maybe she’s already ruined.

It’s 10am and she doesn’t know what to do with herself so she looks up local realtors on the internet and calls the first one she finds. She has no idea where she will go or what she will do once she gets there, but she knows this noisy house with its rounded living room and foresty paint job is no longer hers. It’s strange now. She doesn’t believe in ghosts but she does believe the house is a ghost of sorts, just a loose spirit of what it used to be and she’s invading its privacy by being here.

It is 3pm and there’s a For Sale sign outside the house. She sits on the green couch and thinks. She’ll want something small, something that doesn’t make her think there is someone missing from it. She’ll want a quiet neighborhood. She’ll want walls that are white and a kitchen floor that won’t chip. She sits there and imagines herself in a house for one and she cries.

It is 5:00 and she makes her way to the kitchen.