Flash Fiction Friday

The champagne cork was on the floor and in her hand was her boyfriend. Right in the palm of her hand. Not wrapped around her finger. That would be too possessive, too commanding. After all, she was in his pocket as well. Right in the hammock of his pocket. No, he wasn’t wrapped or contorted around one of her digits. He wasn’t a toy to bend to her will. Rather, they were both playthings for each other, shiny and colorful toys that wanted to be played with. They were ordinary people in a cubicle and coffee ordinary way. In a grocery shopping, TV watching ordinary kind of way. And it was only in combination that they became an amusement park of fun. They were toys that could, and would, bend any sort of way imaginable and in every room in the house. At the drop of a hat or a lift of the skirt. They were toys that imagined in an idealistic, playful way that they were the ones who made up the game in the first place. That no one before could have played it in quite this way, quite this well, could they?

The champagne cork was on the floor and rolling into a crumbed-up corner along with all their fears of being unlovable and dying alone in a house full of cats. The spatula in her hand, the veal in the skillet, the bubbles gently rising in the half-full flutes. And she was in revel, reveling in the domestic moment of commercial-perfect domesticity, finally understanding why such advertisements would make one teary-eyed and heart-swollen. She was cooking in a very feminist way. Barefoot and juicy with the artistic aspect of the act, of creating something fabulous from nothing at all. Or, well, from many things that alone were raw, dead, dry, pungent, and inedible but together would feed her artistic soul and her mate’s stomach like birds in a bush. Rather, like birds killed with stones that didn’t fall into the bush. However that phrase goes.

She was moving into his place because it made sense, what with the neighborhood and the equity. She wouldn’t really miss the small studio four miles away with vaulted ceilings. Vaulted and painted with a mural of self-created love—a love that loves for the emotional value of a thing, for the worth of its history and because it is a reflection of our own soul—not for aesthetics. She wouldn’t really miss the baseball hats. They really did get in the way of those casual displays of affection, like kissing a duck below its beak, and she believed her eyes were truly as pretty as he said. She believed it now as much as she did then, when they met, when he wooed her in holey weekend jeans and, well, a baseball hat.

In her hand was her life and she added in the mushrooms to absorb the broth, sprinkled the sage across the top with a flourish of the wrist as he sat the adjacent room, still too in love to pick up a paper in his impatience. It was early enough in the relationship that he didn’t know he was becoming dependent, that he was being shown into the comfy recliner in front of the TV that we call relationship land. It was early enough in the relationship that she thought it was cute, that dependence, and not at all repressive or gender-specific but only yet another venue for the expression of her joy.

It was too early to realize that she couldn’t divide the food equitably, with equal portions on two plates without eventually dimpling her thighs and making those nostalgic weekend jeans quite tight. It was too early to know that his getting off this early from work was not going to be a regular occurrence, that he knew the continued presence of veal on the table required his continued presence behind his desk. The desk where the little framed picture of her, sans baseball hat, was angled.

No one could yet have foreseen how the Lifetime Movie Network and prime time sports would separate the cuddlers on the couch. Because she was wrapped in his arms as they prepared to watch their rented movie, blissfully full of veal, blissfully happy to be blissfully alone and not in some bar or online dating site looking for bliss. Rather, it was not a couch but a love seat and, though his legs were slightly cramped, that was okay. Because there was the smell of each other’s shampoo in their nostrils and the warmth pressing against their chests was not the chill of lonely nights with feline companionship, but of love. It was too early to know that cuddling was not, as they insisted, something they just discovered was in their nature but an urge that would unconsciously fade with time. That they could laugh about together, knowing they had been through so much since those days, laugh as he took off his knee-high black socks and she rubbed lotion into the rough skin of her elbows.

“To us,” he said, raising what remained in his wine glass. “I love you.”

“To us,” she said, the champagne in her hand. “I love you. And always will.”

But it was still too early to know.