The Petty Couple

Short story that i've been working on. I would really appreciate feedback on style. The plot concerns two characters who have both grown tired of one another, but one who cannot live without the other

It was a wet fall afternoon. In the distance a sheet of fog obscured the view of a tall mountain, but was not nearly as resounding as the fog that pervaded the man's conscience. He had spent the better part of his day pondering the meaning of a note that was left to him that morning on the kitchen counter. He had taken the note with him into the study and he was now sitting there with it in front of him on his desk, and having been crumpled and unraveled about a dozen times, the paper had become soft and fibrous. She had decided to leave him; she felt that he was an impediment to her career and was no good at socializing with her friends from the ballet, and he, not knowing what to do, sat there for a while wallowing in his predicament. His knuckles rapped against the hard desk in quick succession. He was defeated. “I'll be back for my things on Tuesday,” the note read. Her gestures were always small and peculiar: leaving the coffee maker turned on, forgetting the eggs at the grocery store, she carved an awkward heart onto the bathroom door with the rusty blade of a swiss army knife, and he thought it strange that she would do this instead of ever revealing that she loved him. They were not always at opposition. Sometimes in bed at night she would move close to him and put her small head on his bare chest, and he would breathe deeply, and she would ask him if he really loved her. “Yes.” he would reply, but he really wasn't certain, and the next morning they would sit quietly and eat breakfast without saying much of anything. There was something that coursed through his body when she spoke a few certain words; something that made him feel alive and his skin rough with gooseflesh, but at the same time caused him to reminisce on some hopeless and ineffable sadness: Don't go to bed without me, I'll be home in a few hours, I won't ever leave you. Most of all about her he remembered the smell of her perfume and the light crimson shade of gloss that she rolled onto her pursed lips; there was something about her memory that was relentless, and he couldn't bring himself to forget her or the way she tied her hair in the morning. He remembered all this while sitting there on that cold day. His knuckles were insistent upon the wooden desk. Outside the fog was still thick, and the sky grey and heavy.

Later that day, he found himself at the kitchen table looking through the sliding glass door out into the still fog. A light rain had begun to descend upon the small house. A vase above the windowsill held a single sunflower. The note was now crumpled into a ball and waited to be unraveled again from across the kitchen table. In his long fingers, he held a stubby glass of liquor. He swirled it and took a hard sip, waiting for something.

She had moved in two years earlier, and they had soon after talked about marriage but never committed. They were still young. They lived only within the radius of one another; he would sit at the kitchen table and watch her shadow stumble across the walls of the corridor, and sometimes when she was filing her nails she would find him in her periphery pouring himself a drink or organizing his record collection. She would whisper soft questions into his ear: “Do you think that there is a God? What color was your mother's hair? Did you remember to pick up my birth control from the pharmacy?” The man found her prerogative of things to be strange and unusual, even for a member of the ballet. He remembers her coming home with bloody and mangled feet, and he insisted his help upon her, but she would always nod her head and say “You may not always be here.” She always talked about how time moved slower in that house, and sitting there in the cold room, he noticed how she was right.

It was Monday morning, and the fog had dissipated. The man walked down the front steps of his home and onto the wet lawn. The peaks of the tall mountain now left a bold impression on the canvas blue sky. He felt better, and he engendered himself to the world in front of him: the trees that stood tall as soldiers in the distance, the wisp of a white cloud overhead, the brittle visage of the cold horizon. He held a steaming mug of coffee, from which he would take sips every thirty seconds or so as if it were prescribed. The note had been thrown away, and although he was now feeling stronger, he couldn't help but to remember a few scrambled lines: “There is something that we do to one another….Your feet are always cold in the morning when they touch mine….You always sit on the decorative pillows….I'm not sure if I love you.” He felt a soft breeze pass him, and he looked once more upon the horizon before going inside to call her.

She answered on the fourth ring:

“Where are you?” he calmly asked her.

“I'm at a friends house for now” she replied.

“Whose house is it?”

“No, I won't tell you.”

“Whose house?” the man asked now raising his voice.

“I won't tell you.”

“Why did you leave?” he asked.

“I left you a note. Did you not read the note?”

“I read your note, but it all seemed petty.”

“Yes, it was all very petty and that is the problem. That is why I left.”

He could hear a piano concerto play in the background, and besides that there was a momentary silence on the line. The man held the phone away from his face while he pondered a response. He remembered her flower bed.

“I'm not going to water your flowers,” he said.

“If you don't water my flowers then that's just another thing that's dying in that house.”

“Are you talking about me when you say that?”

“Yes,” she said.

The man's face was blank.

“Tell me where you are.”

“No”

“I love you,” he said.

“You only want to hear me say that back,” she replied.

He slammed the phone, went into the cupboard, fetched a box of salt, went out the front door and to the side of the house where he poured salt over all of her flowers.

Months prior, she had convinced him to let her have a cat. The cat always patted around the house with a slow and encumbered look about it. It was an old cat, and he wondered why she had the compulsion to have the animal. One morning, she was walking slowly and deliberately around the house in her black thong and a tight fitting white t shirt. She had short black hair that fell down like daggers around her small face, and a slender frame with an endearing birthmark on the small of her back. He was still in bed, and woke to her pursed lips and darting eyes standing still and resolutely over him.

“Where is the cat food?” she asked him.

“I'm not sure where the cat food is. It's not my cat,” he said, still groggy.

“I know it's not your cat, but I keep the cat food in the same place all the time and it's not there.”

“Where do you keep it then?”

“Next to my antidepressants in a container in the cabinet in the laundry room,” she said quite sure of it.

“Well then that is where it must be,” he said, wanting to fall back into his pillow.

“I already checked there. I just said that.”

He sighed.

“Why don't you come back to bed? The cat can eat later.”

“No, the cat has to eat now ” she said blankly.

The cat walked into the room and jumped onto the dresser, watching the event unfold, her half nude, and he half awake, both contending over something.

“Well maybe you should have got some f*****g goldfish!”

“I can't get goldfish because the mold from the fishtanks! Don't you ever listen to me?”

“Yes, too often,” he quipped.

She turned back and rushed out the door, the man followed the curve of her long legs all the way up as she walked away.

It was later on that Monday. He lay on his too big of a bed watching the ceiling fan slowly spin, not thinking much about anything. Her ballet shoes were still in the corner of the closet, and he could see them in the corner of his eye. He was still for a while before sitting up and opening her bedside drawer after realizing that he had never seen what was inside of it. The drawer opened smoothly over the rails, and he was startled to see at first a revolver, he cocked the chamber out, 1 bullet inside of the gun. His eyes widened. He removed the gun from the drawer and placed it on the bed. In the drawer there were a few scattered objects: a ziploc bag filled with dried mushroom caps, a few acorns, the necklace that he gave her on a previous Christmas. “My god,” he thought to himself. “What the hell does she need a gun for? Was she going to kill me?” He picked the gun up, cocked the chamber out the side, spun it once. The metal was cold and dense, had hard ridges in the handle that conformed perfectly to the man's fingers. Windows open. He was standing there in the half-light of mid day. The gun now in his grip, he pointing it around the room in all directions, feeling brave. Slowly a look of madness came across his face. Once more he cocked the chamber out and spun it once before putting the gun to his temple. “This is probably what she wanted,” he thought. His hands were steady, and the barrel lay pressed against the ridges in his skull. Finger on the trigger. He pulled it. Nothing. He fell to his knees and sobbed.

There was something about the man that was usually circumspect and even he knew that his actions had been strange and irregular, but he couldn't pin-point the exact source of his malady and so he remained with that sense of despair and muddled confusion. He was now back at the kitchen table, the revolver in front of him, pallid against the smooth and radiant oak. He had lit a cigarette. He spun the revolver around on the table once, and then again after it had stopped, took a long drag of his cigarette, and looked out the window in the laundry room, below which her flowers now lay dead. It was no secret, even to the man, that his sanity was slipping and he imagined that perhaps he might go insane. He spun the gun once more, and sat still for a while before going into the laundry room and opening a cabinet. In the cabinet were her anti-depressants. There was no cat food. He shrugged. There was the urge inside of him to bend, to feel something that would make him lethargic, euphoric, or unlike himself, and his fingers now trembled at his side as he contemplated which delusion he might prefer. He took the pills from the cabinet, went to get his whiskey, sat back down at the kitchen table, and poured his glass. He poured quickly, and the whiskey splashed onto the oak and onto the cold metal of the revolver. He spun it once more, threw four pills into his mouth and washed it down hard. She would be there tomorrow morning.

Four wheels pulled up to a small house after making the trek up a long gravel driveway, She had known the feel of the road up, every bump and twist, and now the only thing she didn't know was what lay ahead for her. Certainly she wouldn't be able to easily pack her things and go back out into the morning light, and into town to get breakfast. About breakfast, she remembered that he liked his toast burnt with no jam or anything else; how formidable of a thing to ingest, she thought. She got out of the car and took a long look around at the bright morning. The mountain tops were bold in the distance, and she could see clearly down the mountain upon which the house was situated. It was actually a tremendously long way down, but the view was usually obscured by a fog. He lay nude atop his bed, the revolver loosely held around his fingertips, his arms limp, spread outward. The spilled bottle of pills were on her bedside table. There were a few left. Suddenly came four hard knocks on the door, and his head bobbled from one side to the other while she yelled. “I know that you're awake! I just want my things!” He jerked upward suddenly as if he were compelled by God to answer the door. His head was foggy. He was consumed by the feeling that was many things rolled into one, but most of all a languid and all encompassing sadness. He felt it in all his pores as he walked down the corridor and into the kitchen where she stood in tight jeans and a t shirt at the sliding glass door. The revolver in his hand. She put a hand to her mouth when she saw him stumbling naked with the revolver in his hand, and for a moment she had an ostensible look of concern that was actually pity. She stepped back still with her hand covering her mouth, the sun was high, it was nearly noon. Birds were chirping in the early afternoon light. He managed to slide the door open after some difficulty.

“What are you doing with my gun?!”

“Your gun!? Why do you have the gun?! I bet you were going to kill me!”

A look of disbelief came across her face, and she suddenly disregarded the situation as being serious.

“Don't be ridiculous. It's for self-defense,” she said, now angry at the man's brazen tone.

“Self-defense! You must be a good shot because there is only one bullet in this gun!”

“I am a good shot! You would know if you ever listened to me! And I told you I had the gun!”

He threw his arms in the air: “I listened to you all the time! You were all I had!”

“You didn't want me, you were more concerned with the way my hair looked, or which earrings I wore! You wanted to imagine me. You never knew me. I bet you don't even know my birthday!”

“That's ridiculous!” the man said.

There was a silence that was filled with their fast and heavy breaths. They looked at each other with incredulity.

“I killed your flowers!”

“Well I guess I could expect that from you. You always did act like a child.”

“A child! You're the child!” he said now raising the gun to her face.

“You won't shoot me! You can't even make the bed up right in the morning!”

“Shut up!”

“You're hardly even a man!”

A gunshot echoed through the mountains. Blackbirds flew off the branch of a nearby tree. She lay dead in the light of the sun. The gun fell to the ground. He went inside.

The closest neighbors lived a mile away, and they testified to having heard a loud bang permeate the sky on that morning. The press was immediate with their coverage, having been such a long time since something like that had happened in the quaint and small town. He buried her next to her dead flowers, and she was recovered on account of the police corpse sniffing dogs. Her friend that she had stayed with first notified the police, and they were there the day after he had killed her. The man was sentenced to life in prison, and on some mornings he lay on his stiff mattress looking around the cell, thinking to himself that she had a silly look on her face before he pulled the trigger.

Author's Note

I really appreciate all the views on the story. Any kind of impression is helpful. Thank you!