Still Life
Kathy is in the bedroom reading Bring Up the Bodies. I ought to be in bed with her, a mask over my eyes so I can sleep despite the lamplight, because morning—and dog walking and breakfast making and kid ushering—will come early. But I resent that ought. Buried in it are all the things I might do to ease the burden of time; it steals the hour or so I have at the end of the day to compose myself. It steals solitude. I ought to be ironing my clothes. I ought to be researching how to keep a two-year-old from dumping his scrambled eggs in his juice or to get him to own to his own meanness. Instead, I am here in the kitchen, at a pine Ikea table so light it skitters across the linoleum if I breathe on it, writing a still life.
On the table is a straw basket of hard-boiled eggs, dyed turquoise and green and orange and yellow and purple on Easter morning in lieu of attending Easter services, on a bed of pink and yellow plastic “grass.” The light from the lamp above the table passes through holes in the straw, making the basket’s shadow equaly holey. A pair of headphones and a USB cord lie beside my computer. A box of tissues is just on the other side of my laptop’s monitor. The pattern on the box is a gray and pink spirograph tessellated on five of the box’s sides. A bottle of Bean-O. A pile of unclipped coupons. Two cloth napkins, patterned in stripes of orange and yellow and green, used at supper and to be used again at breakfast, are strewn about as though tossed on the table in a rush after eating. The background is a doorway with the side of a sofa just visible behind a floor lamp, still in its box. A box of crayons and markers sits atop the box. A toy Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner sits beside it. (It is the only vacuum we can run in the house at any time without setting off child, dog, and cat alarms.)
Somewhere, out of sight and out of the still life, lies a dog. The cats both went to sleep with Kathy, who closed her book probably after Anne Boleyn was beheaded, and nodded off to sleep as I was writing this.
