By G. Fufakis
Kleenex is to your fingers, if they’re dry, what Styrofoam is to your ears, if they work. Merry’s holding a cube of the stuff, packaging from the gift that was delivered earlier in the day.
I’m holding my Kleenex because I have a head cold. There’s warmth from our black box space heater that’s built for barns, I’d figure — you feel parched and small when it’s in the room, but I have a head cold and needed it.
It’s some weeks after her January birthday. I hadn’t forgotten it. UPS or Amazon had messed something up. It wasn’t my fault that the package arrived so late.
In the package is a new coffee table. A fine-looking one that requires some assembly. She enjoys assembling things, as do I. (It wasn’t until we realized that two, if not all of our kids are on the Spectrum that I began to suspect that Merry probably is as well. A surprise, in a way, but one that changed nothing at all for us. If anything, my love for her is of a new volume.)
Glancing at the Styrofoam, feeling my Kleenex, I feel what what the French call existential, but when she smiles with her lovely crooked teeth at the table — at the darkness of it, probably the texture, the cool Walnut smoothness — I smile too and it’s sincere.
