Lumbar Support

The pillow had moved on from somersaults to cartwheels, its rectangular body undeterred by a lack of arms and legs. It demonstrated its newfound agility in the backyard for Bree’s five-year-old niece, Anna, who tried to imitate the particularly tricky landing the pillow had just made. Bree did not share in little Anna’s wonder. 

“It’s been over a month,” Bree said through clenched teeth. “Why is the thing still traipsing around my house like a gymnast?” Jess didn’t take her eyes off the scene. A tiny smile pulled at her lips and her answer was as tepid as the tea between her hands.

“Maybe it’s not ready to go.” Bree did not know what to say to this and so she took a long drink of her own tea, now cold. 

Jess tried again. 

“Stuff like this happens. One of my co-workers said when her mom died her collection of vintage teaspoons started clinking together like bells at midnight. This went on for a year. We’re talking about over two-hundred spoons, it was so loud she said it felt like living in Notre Dame. No idea why they did it. Best just to get on with it.”

Bree was fairly certain she knew why the pillow had pulled what she had secretly been calling a Pinocchio. It was the last thing Daniel had touched before he died. 

“What exactly does getting on with it look like?”’ Bree asked.

“Not fighting it. Let it do whatever it’s supposed to do.”

“You mean cartwheels?” 

“Yeah, for starters. Let it do whatever it wants, even if the means letting it do parkour off the fucking roof. But you need to open yourself up to it, emotionally.” That was too much for Bree.

“I don’t think having a heart to heart with it is going to…” Oh. There it was. That invisible hand that liked to reach out and take hold of her windpipe at the most inconvenient of times. She took a shaky breath, feeling the phantom fingers loosen.

“Bree?” The concern on her sister’s honey-smooth face acted as an anchor. 

“I’m fine.” 

“Are you sure? It’s just…I haven’t seen you cry since it happened. Like really cry.”

“That’s not true. And what does that even mean?” Bree hated that she had to be defensive about something as silly as crying. Why was that a prerequisite for grief? Besides, she felt like crying. All the time. She was sure her face had taken on the harried, pinched look of someone grappling with the fate of the world. 

“Bree, you shouldn’t keep those feelings inside. They’ll find a way out somehow.” 

“Well I don’t remember you crying at grandpa’s funeral.” To be fair, they had been only teenagers at the time, but regardless, the words left Bree’s mouth like a missile, meant to hurt, to destroy. Everything that came out her mouth sounded like ash and rubble lately. 

“Husbands are different,” Jess said quietly. 

When they left, Bree began her Sunday rituals. She cleaned the dishes from afternoon tea, swept the hallway and attended to laundry. There was very little to do; she was still on leave from work and her cleaning now bordered on obsessiveness. Her hands worked fast, sorting and folding clothes, but when she pulled a worn blue shirt from the dryer she paused. She had recently taken to wearing Daniel’s clothing around the house. Bree leaned forward and pressed herself into the fabric like a deer drinking thirstily from a river. His scent was long gone, replaced by the smell of pseudo lavender and rain.

Small thumps, soft as distant thunder, brought Bree unwillingly back to the kitchen. The pillow was pawing at the patio door, one of its corners scrunched into a fist. They watched each other for a moment, or so Bree imagined as the thing had no face. She opened the door and it flopped onto the floor, all signs of its former grace abandoning it. 

“No one to show off to anymore, huh,” she murmured. She moved aside and allowed it to inch past her, clearly exhausted from its day of work. There was no point in trying to get rid of it. It would simply return as Bree has learned from experience.

The first signs of life had been lackluster. Bree had returned from the funeral, having dismissed all attempts from family and friends to go home with her. She poured the last of the whiskey and wandered around the house for hours, not bothering to turn the lights on when night came. 

Someone had returned the pillow to its proper place on the couch, and in the dark she saw it begin to move weakly from side to side, unsure how to maneuver its body. She didn’t scream, instead watching it with a cold, clinical interest. If she was honest with herself, she was relieved that something could find life in the house. Bree sat the empty whisky glass on the coffee table and went to bed. 

But after three days of the thing following her around the house, reduced to inching like a worm as it had yet to discover its more robust nature, she chucked it out of a second story window, watching one of the rose bushes claim it below. Two hours later it was on her front porch, covered in thorns and brambles, its corners stretched toward her like a beggar. It was such a pathetic sight that Bree stepped aside and watched it amble tiredly into the hallway. She thought she might like it better if it at least acted offended.

Since the pillow decided it wanted to give living a try, Bree began to think about its life in stages. It had been “born” in Indonesia, based on the little tag that jutted from its thigh, and she liked to imagine it spent its formative years with its peers, other pillows that dreamed of the heads and backs they would one day prop up. Maybe they would be under the heads of someone famous, someone who would change the world for the better? Young, naive pillows waiting for their lives to begin.

Who knows how long their pillow lived in one of the bins at Home Depot before Daniel scooped it up. Had it felt joy at being chosen or terror, knowing its sole purpose was to support some ungrateful human’s back? Or maybe it felt a sort of hollow acquiescence, much like that of someone settling on a job after being passed over for promotion again or a relationship which was just enough. 

Bree remembered the words Lumbar King embossed on the little tags dangling from its side.

It’s supposed to help with your lower back pain, Daniel had explained.

By being so ugly it makes me forget my back is on fire? Bree had asked, eyeing the pillow dubiously. Pistachio green flecked with little yellow diamonds. Hideous. 

Daniel asked Bree to at least try it out, and she did. Until she forgot about it. Since having the position of couch decor thrust upon it, their pillow had lived uneventfully on their sofa for approximately one year. It was treated with casual indifference, excluding the one time they had tossed it fiercely aside when they had sex on the couch after dinner and too much wine at Bellagio’s. 

Other than that, the thing was for all intent an inanimate piece in the tapestry of their home. Mundane. Utilitarian. Soulless. 

People soon grew tired of Bree’s complaining about the pillow. They wanted to talk about Daniel, but she didn’t want that. What else was there to say? It was sad, tragic, unfortunate. But if she pulled the curtain back, showed them the gaping wound that Daniel’s absence left, her audience would shrink away. The pillow was far more interesting, having reached the two month mark since its “awakening” and it had taken on a new zest for life. Despite the rancor she sometimes felt toward it, Bree admired its will to live, to thrive. 

Bree’s cousin, Caroline, came to visit and she took to the pillow as if it were the child growing in her swollen belly. As soon as her vegan leather boots touched Bree’s doormat, the pillow whirled toward her, sensing an easy mark. Bree had started to treat it like a pet, but she noticed that it was now displaying more human behaviors, childlike in its urgency. Without question, Caroline picked up the pillow on its silent bequest and she patted the thing, its tiny corners flapping like a fish out of water. It was so pitiful that Bree had to look away. 

“It’s not really alive, you know.” Bree was beyond exasperated at this point. 

“Should you really say that in front of…?” Caroline tilted her head at it.

“It’s a goddamn pillow!”

“Sure, but I get the feeling that it’s more intuitive than you think.” She paused for a moment. “Have you thought about naming it? Seems like it isn’t going away anytime soon.” Bree looked down at it, searching, not for the first time, for some sign that is understood. 

“You’re too sentimental.” It was not meant as an insult, but a fact. Daniel had been sentimental, too. “Can I name it git?” Caroline smiled Bree’s favorite smile. The one that showed every single one of her prominent teeth.  

“I remember you saying the same thing about Daniel sometimes.”

“I used more colorful names than that.” Bree hadn’t realized how dirty the pillow had gotten. Since leaving the safety of its cushioned fortress, it had gained a number of stains and loose threads. As if reading her mind, the pillow lifted its corners and waved at her from Caroline’s arms. It needed her, and for the first time Bree obliged. 

It wasn’t until she was alone that Bree indulged the maternal instinct. She held the pillow and walked it to the upstairs bathroom, her gentleness easing its restive movements. She ran the tap, hot water filling the tub while the pillow sank unresisting into the foamy depths. It would have felt wrong to toss it in the washing machine. What if it had killed the thing? If that was even possible. Nurture was not in Bree’s nature, but she certainly wasn’t a murderer. 

As the pillow splashed playfully about, Bree’s mind wandered to strange, unexplored places. Would she and Daniel have had children? There had always felt like there was time if they chose to. They’d met at twenty-five, married at twenty-eight and bought this house at thirty. Children had been abstract swirls and colors, late night murmurs, jokes about how they would name them after her great-aunt Ester or his grandpa Linus or that they would, without a doubt, inherit Daniel’s monkey feet or Bree’s inability to cook. 

Memories were dangerous.

Bree did not want to live in memories, in moments where Daniel had come home after work, plunking takeout on the kitchen counter and complaining of chest pain. Aspirin should be on the counter, she had called from the living room. A memory where he had entered the room, staring at the television like he had never seen it before, swaying for a moment before collapsing like a hundred-year old tree on their hardwood floors. Bree had reached blindly for anything and grasped the pillow, shoving it under his head while her shaky hands dialed 911 and he said words, some she understood, like Tuppy, the German Shepherd he had as a kid, and some she didn’t, like the spot by the river or he was right, he was always right.

Daniel had died before the paramedics arrived. His hand held onto hers, squeezing so tight she thought their bones would meld together, and then suddenly a thick gulp expelled the tiny sliver of life and his fingers slackened. Bree didn’t know how long she held on to him like that, but she remembered how quiet the house became, as if its spirit had departed alongside Daniel. There was nothing, save her and the tidings of newfound grief. And, as she discovered in the coming weeks, grief was miserable company. 

Bree wrapped a towel around the pillow, using one hand to get the hair dryer ready. The air it expelled was stifling hot, but the pillow shivered with delight. She thought she was getting better at understanding it, the things it liked, what it needed. It wanted the same things a human did. Attention. Comfort. Warmth. Love.

Afterward, Bree put the pillow on the bed while she began her own nightly rituals. All four of its corners swayed gently, the restless movements mimicking an infant fighting sleep. She moved about the house, coming and going, taking her time as she ate her instant dinner, and later dawdled thoughtfully in the shower.

Back in the bedroom Bree wondered how long it had been since the pillow moves. She dressed quickly, watching her bed from the corner of her eye. It could be resting, but there was something ordinary in the way gravity pulled its sides downward. Disquiet brought her closer and she reached out, nudging it with her index finger. It didn’t move. It resembled the other pillows that decorated her bed, bland and motionless. 

“Hey,” Bree said. “You okay?” Nothing. “Give me a wiggle if you hear me.” Where would its ears even be? Bree picked it up roughly and pressed her face into its center, trying to breathe some of her own life into it. It remained unresponsive. Timidly, Bree whispered, “Daniel?” Her voice was plaintive, and the reality that she was clinging to a lumbar pillow, calling out to her dead husband sent shards of sorrow throughout her body.

Sudden cardiac arrest had killed Daniel. It was strange to think that his heart had betrayed him like that, that good, brave heart which had taught other hearts to be just as good, just as brave. And the memory of that long wait, the time between calling for help and wondering, hoping it would arrive in time had been agony.

It was agonizing now. Bree’s face was so deep in the pillow she thought, surely, she should feel whatever it was that kept the thing going, a brain, a heart, a lung. Hell, she’d settle for a spleen at this point. But it was her fear, that wondrous, terrifying feeling that awoke then, lighting a dark part of her that had gone dormant. When had it even departed her, that base instinct to fear, to really fear losing something, to have it in your hands and know that was not enough to keep it, to make it yours?

When the room’s stillness threatened to take hold and lead Bree into dark, silent waters, the brush of rough cotton against her hair caused her entire being to tremble. The feeling did not stop. It moved quicker, assured in its purpose, as steady and deep as the thrum of her own heartbeat.