Dishes Dearest

A lonely ghost is finally united with his love when she dies.

My name is dishes. She calls me so, most times, but one day I was laundry. She didn't like that. She does like the dishes, though, and she likes to look at them. I sit in front of them, on the bottom shelf of the cabinet, and pretend she is gazing into my eyes.

This is weeknight. She is in the kitchen and I smell beans and burnt rye bread. There are two clocks in the living room and Wheel of Fortune is either started or on in twenty-four minutes. I put my feet on the coffee table and hope the show hasn't started yet and the coffee table is mounded in laundry and Sudoku books and the table is blue plastic milk crates that cut into my ankles. She comes in and turns on the television. Babycookies and gingerale sit at her socked feet as she scribbles furiously in "Sudoku: for beginners", her lose skin waggling angrily in a curtain below her arm. Liver spots like nighttime country looking up, or the city from above, dot-to-dot her age in rings and loop-dee-loops up her exposed arms and neck. I trace the air above her skin. She reaches for a blanket.

After jeopardy we go to the dishes. I take my spot on the bottom shelf and she takes hers in front of blue dish. This is where she starts. Blue dish is easy because its on the middle shelf, right behind my head. Red dish, on the top, is harder because I have to hang from the top of the cabinet and angle my head to find her line of sight. Then when she gets to the bottom shelf where all the little dishes and China figurines are, I stand beside her and say,"Whichever you adore, my sweet. Tiffany's is yours, as far as I'm concerned."

On the day I was laundry, she was in the bathtub. A week before she had split the sole of her foot on a glass swan she found in the dumpster behind the apartment a while ago. It had been added to the pile of stuff mounding the table and forgotten until the hillock crumbled, cascading the floor in waves of trash and depositing the glass bird directly beneath her foot. She didn't get all the glass out the first time. I sat on the couch, listening to the tinkle of glass on porcelain and the rush of water pouring into the tub from gurgling pipes, sinking into layers of linens and clothing on the seat. I drifted into a daze of musty fabric softener and shopping-bag braziers. 

I swam into a school of needles and their pointed snouts shivered through me as I pushed harder to get through them. Ink ran from my skin into a cloud below me. I stopped, dead tired, and sank into the ink soaked mud. Coral arms reached from below the mud and pulled me deeper. I knew it was her; no other knife could ever cut me as she did. I wanted to turn to see her face one last time before her claws cleaved me in two, but I could scarce move for lack of blood.

Blood. There was blood. It was around me, enveloping, clothing, plastering me in a membrane of black amidst the mud. It was in me. Her coral claws had stopped just before my spine, and instead crawled up the rungs of my ribs, fingertip after fingertip popping through my flesh and sawing at my bones. 

"I'm so happy here."

Sobbing pulled me back. I crawled across the floor to the bathroom door and listened to her cry. I raise one fist and knock three times. After a moment she steps to the door, tiny steps, I know, because the bathroom is small and she took nine steps. I stood. 

Her face was only there for a moment, between the jam and the door. Brand new, like she had never broken the tape on her box, and ethereal, her skin glowed and burned. I could see the heat, almost feel myself burning under her doe's eyes. 

She closed the door. She must have fell, because she shrieked as if her very soul was in a vice. And she cried. I sat against the door. Jeopardy came on three times. I thought of what to saw. Jeopardy came on once more.

"Hello? Are you OK?" She was silent.

"I suppose I should start with my name. Name. Um, I guess you can call me..." I looked back at the couch.

"Laundry. It is laundry. I've liv- been here a while. Your eyes are grey. You don't have any mirrors, so I don't know if you knew." I listened a moment, but heard nothing save the murmur of the TV. "I found you next to the peanut butter in the grocer's. I thought you saw me. Nobody had seen me for a long time. There was one, closer to the start, but he told me... Well, he told me something I didn't want to know. I thought I was invisible. But when I saw you, I knew: even if you couldn't see me, I couldn't go another moment without seeing you.

 

"I saved your modesty, of course. I would never do something like that, and especially not to you. I should apologise, still. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to intrude into your life. I just couldn't walk away. Not after seeing you, not after feeling. You did it. You made me feel. How could I walk away? How could I do anything but stay with you for all time?"

She began crying again. I stayed at the door as jeopardy played once more.

She stayed in the bathroom until next weekday. At six, she appeared in the kitchen cooking beans and toast. At seven she sat at the T.V. with cookies, ginger ale, and book in hand. I stayed seated at the dishes through dinner and jeopardy. At half past she stood. She walked to the dishes. And she stared straight through me at blue dish.

Author's Note

Around 5th paragraph/dream sequence most readers say they get lost.