“Again”

“Again. Again. Again.”

“I’m hitting it as hard as I can.”

“Don’t hit it, grind it.”

He looked up, through the glass doors backing the kitchen. The sun had just risen at 7:30, late for a South Carolina summer day. When he had stayed there with his grandmother as a kid, she always told him she would be up with the sun. He tried a few times to wake up before her. He loved to watch her made breakfast. Twice to hit the snooze button only one time. Both times the eggs were on the table before his head broke from his pillow. Once his grandmother had eaten all the peaches before he put his pants on. The sun would come hot and early tomorrow.

—-

The house had been there before the Sunday flea market had begun to draw tourists and it would be there when they stopped driving in from Asheville, though he wasn’t sure when that would be. At that flea market a headstone store had moved in and moved out all while the house was being built. The house had grown up with the pines and it would die with tilted crabapple tree in the yard. The house peeked over the hill, only the brown roof and peaks of green paint above the black wooden doors visible from the road above the plummeting driveway of white marble gravel. It looked so perfect where it stood that the locals laughed. They thought it was tacky. No character. The builder, his great-grandfather, had polished all of the character out of it on purpose. For a man like that character wasn’t something a house could have. If it was, he didn’t want it. This family needs some class, he said.

—-

 

“Again. Hey. Fucking Again.”

“Will you shut up? Give me a minute here.”

“Just playing. You know how get when I’m bored. And fucking hungry.”

“I’ll get it done.”

The bowl rattled to the granite counter, circling and ringing and clanking and circling until it shimmered to a loud stop. He clamped his left hand to his hip, his right hand hanging down at the end of his dangling arm, beginning to curl tightly.

“Remind me why you aren’t doing this.”

“I’m not supposed to handle sharp objects.”

“This pestle isn’t sharp. It just crushes the pills.”

“The patient should not handle items or objects which could pose a threat to himself or others. I’ll show you the doctor’s note again if you want. I have that shit memorized.”

“No, I got it. Who are you going to hurt with this thing?”

“Did my mom show you all those photos in my file?”

“Yeah, they were nasty.”

“Remember the pictures of my fingers? I did that with a spoon.”

“I did that with a spoon.”

“Oh. I guess I should handle this, then.”

“Thanks.”

—-

At one point he had hoped to fill the house with children. His grandparents had always loved when the house was crawling with them. His cousins climbed trees in the front, played catch in the back, tore the swing of the tree across the street after pushing each other for hours. The house sprawled then, wide and expansive with potential. Now, just the two of them, it was shriveled, always uneasy with enclosing only two visitors. He dreamed of filling it with a family. He assumed there would be children, but he spent more time imagining the wife. That’s how he spent most of the time when he wasn’t grinding pills or calling insurance companies or picking up prescriptions or scheduling appointments with one of the psychiatrist’s three secretaries. One of them was nosy, one always forgot his name, and the third was always late to work. “Beautiful Aryan babies,” is what his friend said should be filling the cribs in the master bedroom, the second bedroom, and the three guest bedrooms. There had always been cribs all over the house and no one had ever bothered to move them. Now there wasn’t the money or space or consecutive free moments to even put them in the garage. The garage was stuffed with all of the books on addiction, recovery, self-help, and nutrition that could be found in southern South Carolina. The cribs couldn’t fit, and making space would have meant that the two of them would have to discuss the books.

—-

He never told himself he was imagining his wife, never admitted how much the idea filled his head. He was a romantic, he told himself. Grow up, it can’t happen. You have a bigger problem. A dangerous, pill-popping problem. He thought about her most in the dark. The nights in the mountains were naturally dark, free of the yellow blink of third-world streetlights and the spilled light of half-broken TV sets through thinly woven blinds. That was where he thought he had seen her first. In that darkness, she melted, a bolt of blinding, ski-bum blonde hair sinking into the incomplete, mottled urban darkness. Melted into the surroundings the way he had watched the still sink into the trees when his grandfather sprayed the glinting tin dark green. She would look different in the mountains, at the house. She wouldn’t sink. Maybe he had met her already, maybe he hadn’t. He wasn’t sure.

—-

The Sun did rise early the next morning. He was awake when it rose, listening to the crashes on the other side of the house. The windows in the guest rooms were being shattered again. That would make the third time in a month they would have to be replaced, along with the furniture that was

The first time it was a luxury to replace the creaking splintering furniture from the older wing of the house. The second time he tried to pick cheaper furniture. This time he probably wouldn’t replace it. He walked to the room from which the most recent crash sounded and knocked.

“Leave me the fuck alone.”

“We can’t afford new windows.”

“Leave me the fuck alone.”

“You’re going to have to sleep without windows.”

“You’ll just buy me some new ones.”

“I can’t afford them.”

“Fine. Did you bring me my pills?”

“No. You can get them this morning.”

“Leave me alone if you don’t have my pills.”
He opened the door and walked in. Four of the five windows were shattered and one had a long crack in its bottom half. The desk chair sat on its side beneath the last half-intact pane. There was less glass than usual on the carpet, but there was beneath the window nearest the bed. He spread out the pile tossed the longest shard he could find to the source of the debris. He caught it with both hands without flinching. The glass was already bloody. Maybe there would be kids and a wife in the house after all.