Member-only story
A Sunday of Rest and Relaxation
And the thin meaning it carries
It was Sunday. The house was empty, as it’d been for the past six weeks, wood floor stretching with horizontal loneliness inconceivable to vertical walls, and through the windows, a row of trash cans which he knew to be full and now could not recall what with. He’d spent his whole savings here, which was intended for his parents or a new life, and there was no sign of it anywhere.
Instead it had dropped off into a moment, hidden somewhere in the skin of this house. In its cabinetry. Where nothing was right. It was going to be a full circle but instead was only a dot. This life downtown. Now he found himself on an old couch from Costco, blinds down to block out tomorrow, and a few restless kids drag racing the street outside.
A moment beyond the definition of color gone to something else. Char. The way a sirloin looks after it has been burnt. A kind of sadness. A performativeness. He was in there but he was part of a framing.
If he took a photo you might see a television or bookcase filled with books that told a nice story, but outside the frame, a stack of boxes and rubber bins, things you would never see, told a more true story. And outside all that, someone else took a photo of him. Yes. He was in a photo. He was a story belonging to someone else.
