The Mat

The cork mat had been on the floor for hours. Sandy nearly tripped on it twice, and since she’d had 3 Zoom meetings back to back, as soon as she remembered it was there, the thought shuttled through her brain and out the other side. Around 3, she looked at the clock. Kevin should have been home by now. He was supposed to be making the pasta sauce for their dinner, and the lack of sour tang in her nostrils as he put in his usual overdose of tomato paste was puckering her tongue to the roof of her mouth in a ghost of anticipation.

Not that she was hungry. Hunger seemed such a strange, small thing to her these days. A quiet black speck hummed around her aloe plant and she itched the inside of her ear. The mat caught her attention again, blurring the world around it. She felt like her whole face might pucker inside out. That she might invert like a stop-motion character from Beetlejuice. “Yes, I’m still listening,” she told the client.

At 6:25pm, she called it. More like, the porch called her. Sandy liked her home, God knew it took her long enough to get there, but, sometimes, the 90s honey-beige cabinets and berry coral rug took on an odd gray cast in the fading summer light that seemed to melt it in with the windows, and the claustrophobia put her in mind of the time she was 6 and got ‘trapped’ in the dryer. Her mother found her, eventually, and punished her brother for his little stunt. Mothers always did have a knack for knowing those sorts of things, so she heard. Sandy shifted a gold Marlboro from its case and pat it to her lips with an airy huff. She wondered if she ever guessed it was untrue.

Sandy walked out to the porch. The wired-too-tight white metal screen door clanged behind her. The smoke played a heady note in her sinuses. A neighbor walk-scooted by pushing his little girl on a trike, and she waved. He waved back. They went on.

The air was warmer on the porch, and trees were contrasted dark beneath a sky couched in smooth, muted raspberry, like a Yoplait yogurt cup. She smiled, ashing her butt, remembering that time Kevin tried to steal a taste of her Yoplait, oh, ages and ages ago. His flat metal dinner spoon was too big. The rim of the cheap plastic cup, too small. Sandy was about to go in when the blue fiat she’d made him get off Facebook marketplace finally rolled in, looking about as gray against the dusk as the inside of the house looked against her eyes burning from 7 straight hours on online. She made a jerk of her elbows slightly, unsure if she should grab at the door, make it look like she was going inside, or pose, like her cigarette had more to go.

She went with the later.

“Welcome home, big guy,” she said, holding one elbow, crumbled filter pinched in her right hand. He was slumping. She should feel sorry for her tone, empathize with him, but she knew what that would do, and what it wouldn’t. She held her smirk.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said, his breath coming out hard.

“Another bum interview?”

“Yeah.” He pulled a white cloth down from over his shoulder and flopped one end of the apron at her as he heaved back the screen door. The stench was stronger than the hit. Burnt dough. Old cornflower. Something worse.

“You coming in?” He said.

She relit the finished but for real. “In a minute.” The dead restaurant smell needed to come out of her nose.

When the crickets started up and it got too dark to pretend she had more to smoke, Sandy went back inside. The mat was still on the floor, and she wrinkled her nose at it. Kevin had crossed the divider that separated the cooking area from their dining area, and was doing a moseying two-step around the stove, grabbing this and adding that.

“You’re too late for pasta.” She said, and when he didn’t answer, “you miss making a mess that bad?”

He stopped and she heard the slow metal thunk of some sort of vegetable landing in the pan. “I’m hungry.”

“There’s beef stew left in the fridge why don’t you—”

He whirled. “AND WHY DON’T YOU—” He looked down at the floor. Something seemed to wilt out of him. He returned to a slump. Several more pulpy thumps hit the pan.

In bed that night, they both lay flat on their backs, blue tv light flickering over them like a memory.

“You forgot the mat.” He said, and when she didn’t answer, “the yoga mat, on the floor.”

Sandy felt the room melting together again. The swamp of his flesh and her sagging skin and the silent nagging of Fraser cast over by the beaming light, blue as a cop’s car made her shoot up. Her hair stuck out on both sides, but at 40, with him, she didn’t care about these things anymore. “I know which yoga mat.” She fished for a cigarette, “it was YOUR job to get the yoga mat—”

“Please don’t smoke, Sandy.”

“Please don’t smoke, Sandy,” she mocked, loading a new butt into her mouth. She heard him huff and roll his eyes. Her face burned. She wondered what it would do if she just stuck him with it, if he’d finally cry. Something in his slumped, wheezing figure made her stop. He’d been a passionate chef once. Now, he was just a passionate eater.

Technically, that was her fault. She’d needed a few things.

But the stupid yoga mat, that was his. He promised he’d get rid of it. That she’d never have to touch the wretched thing.

The smoke felt cool leaving her lips as they puckered. She remembered back to the time her brother ‘trapped’ her in the dryer. How he’d paid her .35 to get in and distract mom while he took $35 from their family vacation fund. How easily she’d fallen for it. How cheap she’d been.

His breath was coming slower now. She switched her cigarette to the other hand and clicked her nails on the phone, dialing.

The bed shifted as he rolled. “Who are you calling?”

“The police.”

“For what?” The bed bent.

“For a lazy fry cook husband who stole $500 from his last job and killed his skinny-minnie girlfriend because his wife threatened to leave him, and now won’t throw away the final evidence she was here.”

“You’re insane,” he grumbled, heaving out of bed. “Put the receiver down.”

She did, smirking. His feet padded down the hallway, and she donned her robe like a sealskin. Sandy watched through the blinds while he, yellow and shirtless, put the mat in the trash.