“I’d pay to be the first,” he said, a commitment to an inconceivable sum, given the impossibility.

“I know,” she said, and they slept.

In the morning it was all the bells of mornings, and before long it was nighttime, again.

“Sometimes,” she said, “the water in the sink seems to want me to cut my wrists. You ever feel like that? I can hear the drip, you know, and it’s like the perfect frequency to tell me something terrible…or sweet. I can never tell.”

He said nothing on the subject, although certain suspect words were whispered later as he dreamed. She heard three such words and assembled a monologue in his voice. “Better for the both of us—you ending it. It’s not that I don’t love you; it’s just, well…”

He opened his eyes, saw hers in the darkness, and said, “Hey,” with a smile. “Watcha lookin at?”

She smiled and said, “Just you, baby.”

Then sleep came, and, before long, morning; then night. They brushed their teeth in silence. She: staring disdainfully at the slowly draining sink. He: considering the phrases opt-out and opt-in. The sheets were clean, welcoming.

In his journal, he wrote, “Watch as the flint scrapes the stone. Amazement follows. Like an early Eskar Sween story, but without all the spiderwebs. The spiderwebs are in his head, is the problem. I will draw two lines; pick a favorite.” After which he tossed the journal across the room and said, “I quit.”

“You always quit,” she said without looking up from her book. “Try not quitting, tonight. That may help.”

“You’re being facetious.”

“And you’re being melodramatic.”

“Fair enough,” he said, retrieving the discarded journal.

The house had begun to speak some time ago—a code in the clicks of the water heater and the aging wood and in the moan of the slumping foundation.

“Did you hear that,” he said.

“I been hearing it all night.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You were busy.”

They’d taken to a game of interpretation over time, taught themselves its secret language. Like most languages, though, it had evolved to describe the sinister as well as the benign. Harmless additions like end and look, attached to a growing selection of determiners, had given birth to proclamations ranging from the subtly eerie to the overtly gruesome. Despite knowing the selection and arrangement of the words used by the house had been fairly arbitrary in the early stages of their study, they’d each, individually, begun to wonder what was said toward their personal qualities as the house’s random statements with these random words took on increasingly cogent and competent structure, always with a growing bent toward the malicious or cruel.

In this case of, “Why didn’t you tell me?” the words that had been repeated since dinner (albeit in low tones, best heard in the dim light of approaching sleep) were, “He simple, therefore small, therefore poor. I happy he not alive. I wish he gone.”

“You still should’ve told me.”

She lowered her book. “It’s a game,” she said. “Chill out.”

“You wouldn’t be saying that if it was talking about you.”

“How do you know it’s talking about you?” she asked.

After some consideration, he relented. “Fair enough,” he said.

Then came sleep, and, with it, another day. There was a dinner. There was some television.

Her face was slack when she came from the bathroom, pale. She was holding her left wrist, but he didn’t notice. “I was reading this article about designer shoes just now, and then I realized that I didn’t care about designer shoes, but I kept reading, anyway,” he said, but she didn’t hear. “What’s wrong?” he said.

Slowly, she answered, “Nothing. Just thinking.”

“With your wrist,” he said. “What’s wrong with your wrist?”

Blood had begun to bead below the hand that held it. “I cut it a little,” she said.

“Accidently or intentionally?”

“Same, same, same. I chickened out, anyhow.”

Calm, he took her wrist and examined it. “You’ll live,” he said, “but this isn’t good.”

“It’s the goddamn water,” she said, her voice monotone and distant. “If you don’t fix that sink I’ll die.”

“Not if you don’t cut yourself. If you don’t cut yourself you’ll be just fine. Now, do we need to go to the hospital? I can’t tell how deep this is.”

“It’s getting on the sheets.”

“Fuck the sheets. Let’s go to the hospital. You might’ve hit a vein or something. Where’s that bandage from my knee thing?”

She blinked. She looked down at the sheets, at her arm. She looked at him, and then again at the sheets. “I’m fine,” she said, “I’ll patch it up.”

Sunrise. Sunset. There was talk in the news of a massacre in Virginia, and it served well for table talk at dinner.

The lights doused, they lay awake beside one another.

“It’s not the sink,” she said after staring up for an hour at the pattern created by the blinds and the streetlamps on the bedroom ceiling.

“I know,” he said, having rolled away. “Can you hear this clock? It’s humming. Why would a clock hum like this?”

She was slow to respond. “I think I want out.”

“Me, too,” he said, “but I don’t know how.”

“I can’t tell if this place wants me dead or if I do.”

“It’s the same. It’s this clock. It’s the sink. It’s the furnace. They mean something or they don’t. They just seem to mean something, lately.”

She stared on for another stretch. “You don’t write anymore,” she said.

“Don’t,” he said. “That makes it cheap.”

“I know.”

“Sorry. You can say it if it helps.”

“Helps what?”

“You,” he said. “To leave.”

In the silence that followed, they listened. There may have been a hum. The clicks and groans of the many unhappy things may have said, “Marmalade, if you will,” or somesuch nonsense. A drip in the sink may have called for blood.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Me, either,” he said.

“Do you know anything, anymore?”

“Not a thing.”

“About me?”

“No.”

They met hands in the void of fresh sheets between them.

“I take that back,” he said. “I know we’re dying, will die. It might not be this, but we are.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know.”

Sleep came soon after, but in the drift she whispered, “I don’t know if I’ve ever loved you.”

Having heard or having not heard, he said, “Goodnight, baby.”

Morning came with breakfast; night with dinner.

Timestamp: 04.16.07 at 07:29 PM. Filed under: Fiction.