Her Furniture

There are three people in this story. First is the lover. He paces in the dark outside the house, waiting for the girl to emerge. He keeps pulling out his phone, and the light attracts flying beetles that thump against him, hook their barbed feet into his sweater, and swing from his chest like beads. The lover does not mind. He has patience, the girl’s promise, this yellow moon. He fills himself up with the night, and he waits.

Second is the girl. She used to love the man in the house, but no longer. It’s all done between them; he knows it and she knows it. She waits for him to go to bed so she can leave, walk into the lover’s arms outside, and drive far, far away. But the furniture makes her linger. She spent years buying it used, sanding it smooth, repairing joints, layering on milky coats of paint and acrid varnishes. She has book cases so high she needs a ladder to reach the top, reupholstered couches in turquoises and greens, spindly lamps with stained glass shades. She runs her hands over the mirror-dark dining room table. She put years of her life into the furniture. But she will leave it all, if that means being with the lover.

Third is the man who lost the girl. She doesn’t want him anymore. He doesn’t want her anymore. But most of all, he doesn’t want anyone else to have her. He pleads with her to stay. “What about the credenza,” he says, “the one you restored as a gift to me? What about the recliner you searched for through fifty garage sales, that you laid me down in the night you found it?” But he can see it in her face, how the lover inhabits her sorrowful smile, the weight of her love in the bags under her eyes. She hasn’t slept well in weeks, not with the man next to her. Even with every scrap of wood and cloth she treasures on his side of the scales, the man has lost. While the lover stalks the windows outside, the man covers their old four-poster bed, intricately carved with vines that creep up to the ceiling, with books and urban legends printed from the Internet, pages and pages of girls, furniture, lovers, stories like a horrible quilt. The man has read fairy tales before. He knows about glass coffins, enchanted sleep, towers with no doors. He knows that there are many ways to trap a girl.

The man walks triumphant into the living room, pale and hollow among the golden warm furniture. She cleans her table with a rag, saying goodbye. He sees her narrow neck, the black curls lying on her shoulders, the indentation of her spine in the back of her dress. Her legs are muscular, her shoulders and arms tensing as she cleans. He hates her so much, it makes his teeth sting.

The man tells her, “Sit down with me on the couch one last time. As friends.”

She is not sure she wants to be his friend anymore. Outside, the lover paces up and down the street, staring at his phone covered in Junebugs. The lover walks as fast as he can around the neighborhood, crushing time under his sneakers minute by minute. But the girl has hurt the man inside, and she feels bad about it. So she sits.

“Put your left hand on the arm, your right arm along the back,” he says.

It thrills the girl, this attention to her, and she catches herself remembering laying him down in that recliner she found for him, the way his fingers tightened over the arms as she straddled him. For the sake of who they could have been in that kind of story, she obeys. She feels herself mold to the shape of the couch.

Then the man startles her when he leaps up. He turns and sits on the girl. He crushes her into the couch with his bulk, puts his feet on the table, and reads.

The girl...