by a 3rd floor citizen

The incident, as do most incidents of apparently little importance, occurred a little after five o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon.  Mrs. Donovan, just home from work, found herself vacuuming a beige carpet most afflicted by a rainy autumn.  Simultaneously, she mentally cited several examples of her husband’s recent inadequacies on the housekeeping front.

They had been married not more than six months, and his involvement in these domestic matters was already on the decline.  His cooking, consisting of the addition of water and heat to some pre-existing packaged meal, now seldom graced the family table with its simple yet well-intentioned presence.  Last week she had yelled at him for burning a pot of rice.  The smoke had filled up the kitchen (her new kitchen) and started making its way into the living room (also hers and new) before she came home and noticed the mess.  She banished him from the room and mixed the shells and cheese herself that night.  To further her suspicion was the transformation of all their white textiles into mottled pink monstrosities.  She knew that he knew better than to put a new red towel into a load of whites.  She continued to form a list of “convenient screw-ups” (she coined this phrase herself and it was a great source of pride for her) that seemed to incriminate her husband as a domestic slacker.  She couldn’t help but think his clumsiness had been motivated by some scheme for self-liberation, and this latest trend did nothing but intensify the suspicion.  She decided she would confront him with these accusations upon his return.

“Cleanliness is next to godliness.”  She often tried to make herself feel better when stuck with menial labor.  Suddenly, she was jarred out of thought, as she always was by this thing which stood between her and godliness, by the atrocity she saw before her.  It was about a foot and a half tall and painted brown with large, obtruding teeth.  This was her husband’s squirrel coin bank that he had spent his whole youth developing an affinity for.  She had conversely spent the last few months developing an intensifying hatred for the thing.  It had an expression of joy on its face too fake to exist and seemed somewhat malevolent.  In her mind, it was a demon specially chosen to foil her housekeeping crusades.

She decided to examine the pagan idol.  This was the first time she had done so, and in retrospect, it was against her better judgment.  She removed it from the fireplace mantle and turned it over in her hands to check for a plug.  It slipped from her hands and decapitated itself on the brick edge of the hearth.  Both panic and happiness ran through her heart.  It was entirely possible that her husband would be devastated by the loss, but it was completely certain that she would not be.  She decided to glue the head back on in order to avoid domestic turmoil.  She also decided to give the beast a new, more stable home on the hearth.

It was becoming late, as was her husband.  She decided it best to start dinner, much to her dismay.  The top of the refrigerator was populated by many mason jars of Amish friendship bread batter that she had received from various persons willing to express their care and involvement by giving her a jar of brown goo.  Her next door neighbor, Mrs. Poston (who, by the way, was quite a gossip, if Mrs. Donovan did say so herself), had started the Amish bread movement only a few months before.  The little jars of goo had since taken over the town as they divide daily like any pathogenic bacterium.  As a side note, Mr. Poston sold autonomous bread-making machines of which the Donovan couple was a proud owner.  One only need insert the raw materials and the device would turn out a loaf without any labor or skill on the part of the working class American.  In this way, it was as autonomous as any third world nation.

Dinner was almost done when the telephone rang, and Mrs. Donovan snatched it off the hook as a hungry fish would.

“Hello.”  There was a pause; she suspected the worst.  “Hello.”  It then happened.

“Hello, may I speak to Mrs. Donovan.”  It was one of those nasaled voices that seemed to have been specially engineered for telemarketing.

“No.”  Mrs. Donovan valued her own time and for this reason hung up.  It immediately rang again.  She picked it up reluctantly.

“Yes.”  She thought it the best balance between a polite hello and an all out tirade against modern commercialism.  There was a pause; she almost cursed.  It was her husband.

“It’s me.  Sorry I’m so late but it was a really bad day in the office.  I’m closing up here, so I’ll be home in a little while.”  She expressed her concern in as limited a way as possible, and they said their good-byes.  She realized that this would put a significant damper on the rather poignant speech she had planned to deliver.  Ruining a good mood is always better than making a bad one worse.

It was a quarter until eight when Mr. Donovan reached the driveway.  He was careful to push the remote-controlled garage door opener button when passing the third fire hydrant on Greenbriar Street.  He knew he would be rewarded for this cleverness by having the door complete its process of opening just as he pulled into the garage.  Much to his annoyance, his wife had forgotten (or, rather, had not forgotten) to turn on the garage light.  This seemed to all but ruin his moment of self-contentment.  It was the same sort of disappointment that he felt when he realized that the glob of poster tack that he had found next to the phone and fidgeted with throughout the day was more than likely a wad of someone’s used gum.   The memory distorted his face as he formulated how best to reprimand her for this infraction while he braved the perilous journey to the darkened back door.

He almost tripped on something the dog must have brought up.  “She must have left the garage door open, too,” he murmured.  The dog’s discovery looked like bones from some sort of strange animal.  They were the same as the others that Peeples, the dog, had been digging up for the past two months.  He had almost mentioned them to his neighbor a few days before but decided against it.  It would have the effect of placing an ad in the town newspaper, and he remembered a conversation he had with one of his co-workers.  The man’s uncle had found some broken pottery on his property.  Soon after showing the fragments to a few people, he received a notice to the effect that his yard would be excavated at his expense.  It was really a great find for the archeologists-- hundreds of civil-war era chamber pots buried in neat little piles all over the man’s backyard.  Who would have thought?

Mr. Donovan pushed the bones off the steps with the side of his shoe.  The hollow clatter prompted Mrs. Donovan to take her spot where the view would be best.  It took him nearly half a minute to unlock the door in the dark.  Inside, Mrs. Donovan sat quietly sipping tea and watching the ordeal through the motions of the doorknob.  It was great fun, really.

When he finally came to a settlement with the door, he found his wife coming toward him as if to help him in.  He had not seen her nearly laughing a moment before.  She saw no reason why she shouldn’t improve her own mood by making his worse so long as she did not incriminate herself while doing so. 

“Oh, I’m sorry.  I must have forgotten to leave the light on.”  It was a brilliant defense--one that made the argument he had planned unnecessary.

Peeples came in behind him.  He used to have to stay outside and this was much to Mrs. Donovan’s displeasure, for Peeples was her dog and had been for two years.  Mr. Donovan agreed to allow the family pet to remain inside after dark only after he began to fear what would be on his doorstep in the morning. 

In the beginning, the Donovans had a few disagreements regarding the proper placement of Peeples in the domestic scheme of things.  This was especially true with regard to his placement within the house.  But, as has been said, Mr. Donovan quickly warmed up to the idea and the animal.  The house-life of Peeples included sofa privileges, table scraps, and his very own sleeping mat in the warmest corner of the laundry room.  Mrs. Donovan made sure that Peeples always had access to the best food as well as a daily doggy treat for good behavior.  For bad behavior, which in her eyes seldom was the case with Peeples, treats were withheld and, if the matter pertained to some mistreatment of furniture privileges, the dog would have to content himself with the floor until things settled down a bit.  For similar behavior, Mr. Donovan could expect the same treatment--sofa privileges retained.

“Dinner’s in the oven.”  She answered his imploring glances.  It was a slight blow but not as bad as the following “There’s Jello in the frige.”  He hated Jello.  “It’s lime.”  Oh, she was merciless tonight.  For some reason, he remembered his displeasure over the darkened garage and, forgetting the issue had already been addressed, almost said something about it.  He remembered the defense just before swallowing in disappointment.  After opening the oven door, he knew the previous action would be repeated several times as a process he loosely regarded as eating.

Mrs. Donovan went to bed early that night.  Mr. Donovan, who never went to bed early, stayed up working out new schedules and routes for work.  It seemed he was always behind in work and so it seemed a nearly endless duty.  He was an administrator in the department of rural sanitation.  Although, when asked what he did for a living, he usually stopped with “administrator.”  The name didn’t pay well, and for this reason the job did; it was all the same to Mr. Donovan.  His life began every Friday at five pm and ended abruptly at eight o’clock every Monday morning.  In this way, happiness was always but a moment removed from the present.  That is to say, he could always remember happiness and he could always sense it looming about the horizon.  Few knew of his unending toil and his maddening rush to get there.  He lived out the American dream as an administrator in the department of rural sanitation.  “Go west, young man.”  And so, he did and desperately awaited the dawn that he so ceaselessly outran to seek.

A cold rain was heavy on the roof when Mr. Donovan's life ended.  It was Monday morning.  It had been nearly two weeks since his wife had forgotten to leave the garage light on, nearly two weeks without animal remains turning up on the doorstep, and most importantly, nearly two weeks since his wife made lime Jello.  He left early that morning to account for the rain that fell in frigid beads on the windshield.  This would be the end of him for another workweek.

 It was during this two week period that Mrs. Donovan’s life had also adopted a particular tone—the regularity of such was incessant.  She often looked back on these days wondering what had so bothered her.  As much as she tried to attribute this feeling to her husband’s negligence, it seemed he was now less blundering than ever before.  One might even suggest she had finally domesticated the fellow.  A few months prior, he had discovered meat, and a dish of baked pork chops (for to bake is to make nutritious) and mashed potatoes now graced the table perhaps four days out of seven in the Donovan household.  This was significantly increased from his previous one to two pork chop days a week.  It was the sort of blatant misuse that can only occur following the discovery of something new and novel (for instance, color in the 1970’s).  In this case, the redundant wonder was that of the pork chop. The dried flakes of mashed potatoes instilled too a great sense of wonder in Mr. Donovan.  It seemed such a technological miracle to convert a root into a flake.  This so intrigued him that he quite often nearly initiated a conversation on the matter with his wife, but it seemed something made him back away from the discussion every time. On those days that were unofficially designated pork chop and mashed potato days, Mrs. Donovan learned that she could eat somewhere before going home and give the remaining (and there were always leftovers) chops to Peeples.   In spite of this, she had noted with regret his active role in vacuuming and his ability to do the laundry without catastrophic effects.  She desired so desperately to chastise without purpose.  There was a redundancy to all of this that Mrs. Donovan could not quite name.  It was not that her husband was discarding his responsibilities.  No, no it wasn’t this at all; she could only hope for such luck.  It was something else altogether different this time.  To her, it was as if the same dull wave crashed thoughtlessly upon the same unchanging shore.  The reliability of it frightened her, and she longed for anything, a storm perhaps, to remove the monotony. 

During the week that followed, something had quite changed in Mr. Donovan.  He paced back and forth at all hours of the night.  He knew something was different, but if asked he could not tell what.  Indeed, he was the only person to notice this change which irked him even more.  Something wanted out but what and where to he did not know.  So, every night he paced about a darkened house well after midnight.  Meanwhile, Mrs. Donovan was experiencing her own personal set of curiosities.  It was on that Wednesday morning that she awoke lodged between the sofa and the wall in their living room.  She dare not mention this to her husband for he would ask stupid questions about the event that she could not answer.  Luckily she awoke well before him and wrote the incident off as kindness.  That is to say, she used the extra time she had that morning to make a large breakfast and thus produce a logical excuse for having awoken so early.

The clouds had been building on the horizon for quite some time, but the first clap of thunder came later that Wednesday in the afternoon.  It was the desecration of Mrs. Donovan’s grandmother.  Or rather a less than careful handling of her antique gravy boat.  It seemed a perfect idea to have gravy to go along with their mashed potatoes and what better way to serve gravy than with a gravy boat.  It seemed so brilliant to Mr. Donovan at the time.  He removed the piece of china from the cupboard where it had been so comfortably displayed since their arrival in the house.  As one might imagine, it was rather dusty from misuse, so of course Mr. Donovan rinsed the piece in very warm, soapy water.  He thought of how proud his wife would be of this new, domestic undertaking.  She came home early and entered the kitchen with some alarm over the object that Mr. Donovan was holding.

“Hi, honey.” He greeted her as he ran the ceramic under a stream of cold water to rise away the suds.  This was a mistake.  The gravy boat along with the look on Mrs. Donovan’s face shattered with a rather pathetic crackling sound.  A look of terror spread slowly across his face.  He was not sure of what he had done; she would soon tell him.

“Oh, my god.  What are doing?  That was Grandma’s china.”  She rushed over to the sink and looked dreadfully down upon the derelict.

“I was just trying… gravy.  It was dusty, you see and…” It was clear enough what he had done.  It was this that made the question she posed all the more challenging.  “…I just wanted gravy.”

“What?”  This rhetorical response was delivered nearly well enough to make him reconsider his own words.

“Yeah, gravy.  Ya’ know.  Gravy.” Yes, it had been nearly enough to make him reconsider.

What followed was a torrent of words that the author of this story has neither the time nor the stomach to share.  What is communicable is that Mr. Donovan’s feelings were very deeply hurt by all of this.  So much so that he remorsefully offered to take his wife out to dinner.  She nearly turned him down, but after looking at the almost infinite supply of pork in their freezer, she reluctantly took him up on his offer.  She had never so desired to inflict physical injury upon anyone in her life.  What’s more, she was certain that he had instituted retaliatory measures for a crime against a particular graven image.  To her, it was clear that he knew of these transgressions.  Why else would he do something so terrible to her?  For the next day, they both ate, slept, and lived in uneasiness—she in mistrust and he in penitence.

The next twenty-four hour period in the lives of the Donovan’s would induce in them confusion, shame, and perhaps even (when they are both too old to possess any control over their senses) humor.  The workday for Mr. Donovan was a typical Thursday in his office, but he could not help but feel badly about what had come to pass the day before.  For Mrs. Donovan, on the other hand, things were quite a bit different.  She worked for a company whose chief job it was to manufacture and distribute mannequins.  She worked primarily with the taking and shipping of orders.  Today, she felt particularly dangerous, and woe was certain to befall the one who got in her way.  It was the new girl.  She had made the mistake of putting twelve arms to a box instead of ten and ten heads to a box instead of twelve.  Of course, it must be said that Mrs. Donovan had implicitly suggested almost to the point of explicitly stating the rule of ten arms and twelve heads.  By the end of the day, she had made the new girl cry, and this gave Mrs. Donovan a renewed sense of power—one that she was determined to demonstrate to her husband when she got home.

On the way home from work, a brief moment of alarm overtook her as she remembered that she had forgotten to let Peeples’ out.  This alarm was soon dissolved by this newly invoked power of hers.  That is to say, she knew that this would only irk her husband slightly and nothing else.  Besides, what would he dare say to her about it?  She was completely disrobed of this confidence, however, by what she found upon entering the house.  Mr. Donovan, who had apparently only entered the house a few moments prior, was all but enraged and devastated as he stood staring vacantly before the fireplace.  It was quite a sight, really.  Mrs. Donovan could never bring herself to forget it.  There was her husband and in front of him, there was the fallen torso of the squirrel.  Pennies were strewn about the living room giving the place a fresh air of chaotic disorder.  If it was none of this that so terrified Mrs. Donovan, it was what caught her eye next.  Peeples was standing rather triumphantly on the hearth with the detached head of the defeated effigy held firmly in his mouth.  Also, it didn’t help matters that he wagged his tail profusely.  It was clear that neither of the two knew what to say.  First, Mr. Donovan felt a sense of anger, then a sense of regret because of what he himself had recently done, then again a sense of anger after remembering how his wife had made him feel because of it.  Meanwhile, Mrs. Donovan did all she could to entertain a sense of regret herself; however, she was more struck by the fact that he had not known until now, which heightened her confusion almost to the point of anger.

“Look what your stupid dog did.”  He said this with all the anger he could muster as he grabbed Peeples by the collar and dragged him toward the door.

“What do you think you’re doing with him?” She rushed to the defense of her beloved.  “You can’t leave him outside tonight, it’s supposed to rain all night.”

“Really?”  He delivered this very effectively while brandishing a smile.  Peeples was forced to the edge of the door and practically flung to the bottom of the steps.  What ensued was a den of verbal assaults that lasted for nearly an hour.  Each accused the other of being the spring from which all evil in the world flowed (their accusations were slightly less general, though).  When the altercation ended, Mrs. Donovan made her own dinner and Mr. Donovan devised a later meal of mashed potatoes.  When one would enter the room, the other would leave, and so things continued like this until both tired and headed for bed.

Mrs. Donovan ensured that she was the first to lodge herself into the bed and turn out the lights before her husband even had a chance to enter the room.  Mr. Donovan ignored this clear signal and shoved himself into the bed anyway.  By this time, the rain fell heavily on the roof, and this made her even more embittered toward him.  This was demonstrated by a sudden snatching away of the covers, but Mr. Donovan, who had foreseen this move, had already established a stronghold on outermost edge of the bedspread.  And so, they lay there in silence—both far from sleep.  It was a horrid time in the dark, and one must be human to understand these things.  For two people still and awake, what was once a great cause for happiness was now this—their profoundest hell.

Her eyes opened sometime after midnight and before morning.  She could see the room around her clearly but found herself firmly fastened to her bed.  She could not move and fear weighed heavily upon her.  She had the sense that someone was laughing at her—someone from which she could not escape.  Beside her head, there on the pillow, snarled and hissed a hideous creature.  It had a body that was either like a watermelon or a cucumber from which extended hairy claws, and atop a thick neck stood a head with voracious teeth that formed an expression of terrible joy too fake to exist.  She saw none of this, but all of it she sensed.  It drew closer to her, and she did all she could to force a scream.  Her body did nothing.  Her heart beat faster and faster.  The thing was coming closer.  Finally, she managed to awaken her body to action, and her screams escaped from what had gagged her.  She jumped up to her feet screaming and flailing her arms about while recklessly knocking objects to the floor.  Her husband all but fell out of the bed with confusion. 

“What’s going…”  She shushed him and pointed to the spot where the thing had been a moment before.  She fancied she could almost hear it hissing.  “Where’s Peeples,” she added with an alarmed concern for her pet.  The thought occurred to her that perhaps the thing was now somewhere on the darkened floor crawling ruthlessly toward her.  This made her scream once more with the anticipation of agony.  She jumped wildly about the room and made her way toward the door.  Mr. Donovan grabbed her by the arm and once again asked what was going on.  It was clear to her that he wanted out first.  Indeed, he even placed himself between her and the door and was speaking some nonsense.  Her aimless terror turned to rage and she shoved him violently into a bookcase and rushed out of the house.

She awoke a few moments later standing in the front yard and staring at a moon passing behind some broken clouds.  Her husband had followed her and was now leaning over the hood of their car with blood flowing out of a gash on his forehead.  Neither understood and both were speechless.

The ride to the emergency room was long.  He refused to let her drive even though blood poured profusely down his face.  Then, it was very difficult to explain what had happened.  This undertaking became even more challenging when they arrived at the hospital.  In fact, quite a few words were exchanged among the emergency room workers when they left.  They laughed heartily; it was a good break for a long night.

When they returned, Mrs. Donovan apologized and said that she wasn’t sure what happened.  Mr. Donovan grumbled something and left the room.  She went back to bed and could hear her husband moving around their house.  At one point, she heard him open the back door and yell something that she couldn’t quite make out.  He soon returned to bed and both fell into a class of deep sleep that is reserved for those who have been so dumbfounded by their recent experiences that they have no other recourse but to sleep.

It was a quarter after eight when the sun fell full on Mr. Donovan’s purple, swollen face.  He would have to go to work at some point and face more than just a Friday.  It is often the penalty of the man who has harmed his wife to be removed from society.  However, it is more often the penalty of the man who has received harm from his wife not to be removed from society.  He had made up his mind to say as little as he could about what had happened.  Now, however, he remained asleep, and his wife rose and made her way to the living room.  What she saw there did not alarm or confuse her.  No, it did not faze her in light of what had gone on the past few days. There were hundreds of animal bones strewn about the floor amidst dirt and mud and a dog named Peeples.  She recognized them as pig bones.  The door had been left open the night before when Peeples had not answered Mr. Donovan’s calls.  It had taken the dog all night to uncover what it had taken months for him to store, and this was the final product of his labor.  Overseeing it all was the ghastly, headless torso of a ceramic squirrel.  She promptly returned to bed.  She lay there for the longest time looking at the discolored, slightly misshapen face of her husband.  She foresaw with dread the questions from neighbors and the long stare her husband’s abused countenance would elicit from their church’s congregation.  She also saw Mrs. Poston turning to the woman next to her and flinging a few well-chosen words into her ear.  Mrs. Donovan could almost see the orange glow in the eyes of Mrs. Poston—like that of an arsonist standing back to admire her work.  She turned over and looked once more at the face in question.  “This is the man I love.”  She said it at the time without any particular meaning, and indeed, it would take her years to find one that fit appropriately.  Yes, that would come later.  But as for now, they had been married not more than six months.