The Rotary guy [...] gives me a look he reserves for shirkers, layabouts, vandals and those destroying the social fabric by refusing to pull their weight.
“Every sheep and cow, every adoring shepherd, broken. Only the baby Jesus in his crib, one leg raised in that classic nappy-changing pose, remains miraculously unscathed.”
That motion, swinging and lifting my arm to full stretch, feels like someone has taken a big ceramic shard out of the box—a remnant bit of shepherd, maybe, or a shattered piece of camel—and is stabbing it into the base of my spine.
Some days it feels like that's my entire identity focused there in one single space between two injured segments of a bone puzzle, shrunk down to one locus of existence, and seized there.
Footsteps, muttering, the sound of fingers stirring through ceramic debris. A tightly constrained hiss of frustration and fury. You get good at listening to sounds in a household when you're prone; it gets so you can almost hear a head shaking in pained disbelief, or distant teeth grinding in the silence.
A long while has passed since we'd made jokes […] I can't remember the last time my wife touched me with hands that were anything except neutral and businesslike […] It was a side to her I was seeing for the first time, this professional, acquired distance. At our house, in our script, Claire was the slapdash one.
“Look,' she says, 'either tell Sam to get it out, or forget about it. Just give the martyrdom and control freakery a rest.”
Listening to the two of us, you'd never believe that we used to get on like a house on fire, that even after we had the kids, occasionally we'd stay up late, just talking. But now that I think of it, a house on fire is a perfect description for what seems to be happening now: these flickering small resentments licking their way up into the wall cavities; this faint, acrid smell of smoke. And suddenly, before you know it, everything threatening to go roaring out of control […] And what am I? The guy who can't get the firetruck started? The one turning and turning the creaking tap, knowing the tank is draining empty, the one with the taste of ash in his mouth and all this black and brittle aftermath?
I look at her, feeling that small heat build between us. Our breaths fuelling it, close to the ground. This is how you do it, I think, stick by careful stick over the ashes, oxygen and fuel, a controlled burn.
