Nooks and Crannies

There it sat, in a framed glass on the windowsill that overlooked a spice garden and a sloppy view of the city. Mark never really noticed it, but he remembered it being there every time he washed the dishes, his hands moving brilliantly through the suds. Under stalks of parsley and coriander, his eyes would drift to it- its hard brown frame, the aged curl of the photo, his reflection peering ghostly over the two girls. Then it would disintegrate in his mind, into the hot, shifting clutter of his work, hiding until his sight reclaimed it the next day.

There were many objects like that in Mark’s apartment- a doorstop shaped like a Mallard, a black umbrella from a college he never attended, a half-opened pack of cigarettes hidden behind his blender. He knew of their existence, knew they were his, but was never sure what purpose they served in his life. Most of the time, he believed them to be the simple banalities of a couple in motion. But once in a while, when he filled his glass of bourbon a little too high, Mark saw them as the ultimate expression of humanity- the thin red line in a world painted black.

Tonight was one such night. He had captured the picture frame and brought it to the couch, where it hovered in his lap above a smoked old fashioned. Mark rubbed his thumb over the glass, and a small, clean window broke through the pane. It showed another time- the filter was grainy and dark, with a bright orange glimmer behind the two silhouettes of the girls. Carved on their faces were smiles, identical and gray and close to each other. In the bottom corner, the sharp edges of a timestamp sliced upwards. Mark excavated the yellow date from the dust: 09-14-2009

The front door made a loud snap as the lock was defeated, and then creaked open. He knew who it was before he looked up, but it still shocked him, and he felt the photo rattle off his knees and onto the rug. Portia moved quietly, as a cat might mid-stalk, and her hair burned crimson and blond and some other color. She made no acknowledgement when she saw Mark drunk on the couch. They were two pets playing house, and any engagement outside of eye-contact was a call for battle. Portia slipped off her shoes near the Mallard and moved to the fridge, her footsteps unburdened by gravity.

Portia’s presence had an effect on Mark, and although inebriated, it still sunk deep within him. With her entrance came water, and lots of it, filling the room until the vaulted ceilings swelled and the paperbacks from his library lost their structure. There he would sit, holding his breath, the room very blue and her hair dancing like coral, and he would last as long as he could. But eventually, his lungs would kick out, and he’d let the liquid find a home within him, and those memories- her dinging phone as she slept, that hairy present from the sushi chef, the way glass bullets over hardwood after landing flat on its face- were what Mark believed to be the slowest of deaths.

There seemed to be something different today, however. He glanced around, and found that in his trance, he’d retrieved the photo from the floor. His fingers gripped it with the special intensity of a starving man, one with no hope or resolution. He wondered why that was and studied it some more.

As Portia pulled okra and overpriced kale and mung beans from her den, Mark leaned into the picture, and he learned things. He learned that the girls were standing outside, which accounted for the porch light and the buzzy quality. He learned it was something candid, for he could notice an outstretched hand from the girl on the left, an attempt to swat the lens away. But most impactful was the lines of their faces. He traced them, the gray parts and the dark parts and the sort-of light parts. He traced them until he was absolutely sure that the girls were sisters.

Portia had a sister. And she had never told him.

The water had been drained from the room, and Mark felt very strong. He was a forensic accountant in the daytime, and in the night he dreamed of taking his skills against a more personal enemy- a cashier who snuffed him out of a quarter, maybe, or an abusive car salesman. But this, he could tell, would be his magnum opus. The red line had become a thread, and Mark prepared to wrap his fingers around it.

There was chopping from the kitchen, and the purr of a boiling kettle. Mark stood up without excitement and moved to the liquor cart which hung ten feet from Portia’s back. It always seemed to him that, even after the fallout, they still carried that sixth sense between them- that feeling of knowing where Portia was in the house without seeing her, her movement as intrinsic as breath and sleep. So Mark was confident that the announcement of his words wouldn’t shock her.

“How long have you had this picture?”

The chopping ceased, but Portia didn’t turn around. Instead, she looked over towards the windowsill as if expecting to see something. Mark had foreseen this feint and brought his drink over to interrupt her gaze. He sipped on it, and it tasted good and bitter. It was distilled in Segovia, gifted to him when things were sweeter between them. Mark pulled from its strength and history and calcified into a harder man.

“It should say on there. I think it has a timestamp.”

“September of 2009. What were you then, ten?”

“Eleven.” Portia went back to chopping, her hands fast and elevated like a pro. Her hair was fire and embalmed her white flesh so that nothing could be seen of her face. Mark took a step closer. The mung beans had sprouted and interloped with the steam from the kettle, turning his kitchen into rot, into a squashed possum on a ninety degree highway. The smell was necessary as all hell. The smell was what they had always been.

“Eleven. OK.” Mark took another drink, and his fingers shook imperceptibly on the glass. It always came down to finding that receipt, that little scrap of financial holiness that ripped all the curtains from conversation. This photo was no different. “And this is your sister.”

The tide of Portia’s chopping picked up, as if attempting to drown out the statement. But it was in the kitchen now, and it had become as immovable as the mallard and the umbrella and the things that defined their life together. Portia knew it, so she nodded, her face still tucked from view.

Mark slammed the drink down against the tile, and the ball of ice clinked at wild angles. The look on his face did not sting or curse or hurt. It was the look of the judicial, of the uncaring. “Four years together and not a word. Why wouldn’t you tell me that? Why hasn’t she visited?”

Portia finally turned, her hair pulling off her face like an old bandage, and inside was cured hatred, sparkling in a very pretty way. The skin on her face burned red all the way to her pupils, and a black mole on her neck looked close to ignition. Mark quieted a whisper of fear, for he seriously believed her to be aflame.

“You SHOULD know why,” Portia said. “You SHOULD understand by now.” And then a smile, a wicked endearment which he forgot existed, graced her lips. “But you’ll never get it, will you?”

Mark could feel the receipt slipping away, her coaxing words a lubricant between his fingers. He was desperate, and that hunger was very loud within him, scratching in his chest. With his left hand, he smashed the picture frame against the counter. It screamed a song of dissolution, of splintered wood and glass and freedom. Clear shards nested between the mung beans and under Portia’s knife. His palm became a warm liquid.

Mark wrestled the photo from the debris and pushed it face-out to Portia. “Then MAKE me understand. TELL me what this is.”

Portia had stopped smiling, but the expression still hung there, radiating from her soul. She spoke again.

“Think back. Think back to how this all started.”

“Oh, I know how.” The impartiality had run from Mark’s face. He now wore the look of both victim and defendant. “I caught you taking a pork roll from a fucking sushi chef!”

Portia laughed this time, and the sound gave Mark a strange thrill. The photo was still outstretched, and red dripped down his arm and onto the counter.  “That was nothing. Think back further.”

Mark didn’t enjoy these games. They were variable and messy, a combination he never faced during work hours. He was used to paper trails and loose lips- those were his currency, his clues to the crime. Memory was something else altogether, a medium he’d never been one to trust.

“Think about Bermuda. About the Poconos. About the kitchen we’re standing in right now.”

Portia looked into Mark’s eyes. There was hate and lust, sure, but behind that was the true action of his mind- the search for a needle. A pattern for his receipt.

“Let me remind you, then.” Portia told him. And then, with all the might and fury her 135-pound body could muster, Portia punched Mark across the face.

It was a punch like no other, fueled by something more powerful than muscle. It was a punch that, in her last moments, she would never regret throwing. Mark thought about its form and its perfect arc as he collapsed. His chin had been split from her engagement ring, and his knees rung sweet on the hardwood. The photo fluttered a foot in front of him.

Portia did not stop. She began kicking, her bare heel beating into Mark’s side. Behind the scalding kettle and the ringing in his corneas, he could hear no words. But he didn’t have to. He remembered everything now.

“How could you?” Portia yelled. “How could you call that love?” The fire had fled her face now, finding an outlet in her limbs and her throat. She wanted it all to burn. “My FATHER had to nurse her black eyes! My own FATHER!”

Pain blossomed in curious places. Mark felt he might deserve it, but part of him hadn’t forgotten the water in his lungs, the act of not breathing. That was enough to live on, Mark decided. With his sliced hand, he grabbed for the corner of the photo, praying he wouldn’t get stomped on, and pulled it closer.

“You never DESERVED her.” Portia began panting, and the interval between kicks decreased. “She gave you her future and you took it for GRANTED.”

Mark scooched the photo beneath him, and as he scrunched up, it gave him a second to analyze. The back of the photo was smeared with blood, but in the middle were two words. Side by side, the names were “Portia” and “Mallory.”

A kick catapulted against his groin, and Mark moaned, a sound he was not used to making in pain nor pleasure. Portia stopped as Mark toiled on the ground, his body wriggling as a lame dog might moments before being put down. The kettle quieted its whistle, and there was the smell of char and carbon and decay.

“She couldn’t stay here. I think you knew that, at the end of the day. She had to leave, but she wanted the apartment, too. The one you two co-signed ownership on- that was a stupid idea in the first place.”

Mark, in his anguish, started to crawl away, back to the living room. This was the price for falling curtains, for the unraveling of a thread. Mark wouldn’t have it any other way. “The mole…” he moaned as he scooted. The assault had knocked something clear in his skull- everything seemed very clear now. “Portia never had that mole…”

She scoffed. “And you call yourself a husband.” Mark was almost out of the kitchen now. She followed him. “Cheating was the least of your problems. Which Portia would have never done, by the way. She was loyal like that.” The woman Mark used to know walked in front of him and leaned against the wall. “But I’m nothing like my sister. I came to take everything. The apartment. Portia’s freedom. My revenge.”

Mark had made his way to the shoes, and to another object with forgotten utility. The black mallard stared at him, face to face, its yellow wooden beak holding a secret shared only between them. Mark suspected the duck had always known what role it would play in his life. He was just too near-sighted to notice. Mark grabbed the duck by the face.

With his last bit of strength, Mark smashed the duck against the woman’s open toes. He felt them crush and imagined the red ball of yarn within her, the spindly thing he’d been chasing all his life. Mark wanted it so bad that when she fell, he didn’t doubt his decision to strike her again, this time at the temple. And a third time in the teeth, just for good measure.

The apartment had become a quiet place, a place good for a drink and a pondering of things. As he wobbled up from the floor, blood streaked and staring at a dead woman, he realized what he could really use was a cigarette. He smiled and retreated to the blender, where a lucky pack was waiting for him. “The ultimate expression of humanity,” Mark whispered as he found himself a light.