Postcard Story II: The Kitchen Sink

The dishwater has gone from hot to lukewarm to cold. Her fingers are dimpled and when she holds them up to the light, it seems as if she is about to slough off an unnecessary layer of skin. She detects the odour of pork fat and cooking grease mixed with the lemon whiff of dish soap. It is such an awful smell. It is the smell of yesterday’s deceased dinner. The lemon smell is clinical, like the odour of embalming.

Outside, a magpie has landed on the fragile branch of the poplar sapling that her husband planted three years ago. It is April, and the snow has melted from all but the very deepest corners of the yard. She watches the magpie open its beak and squawk. They stay all winter long, these cruel-looking birds with ugly voices.

She cannot finish the dishes. The magpie keeps up its screeching. What the hell’s your problem? It is too bad that there is a pane of glass between her and the yard, otherwise she’d throw something at the critter. She looks down into the sink, trying to ignore the magpie. An archipelago of pork-fat islands is adrift in the water. She feels a little unwell. Maybe she should lie down and deal with the dishes later.

But then she hears the car in the driveway. Her husband is coming home. He didn’t stay at work as late as she had hoped. She thrusts her hands into the water again. She jabs her thumb on the end of a knife. The pain is short, clean, and precise. She sucks in a half-second of air.

Even with an inky cloud of blood spreading, she suddenly goes back to her work with renewed vigour. Her husband is unlocking the front door. He will call out her name, take off his shoes with a shoe horn, take off his coat, carefully hang it up in the closet, and then creep up the hallway stealthily in his socks, like a burglar. She won’t show him the wound. He overreacts to such things and tries to baby her, because he is in all other ways, impotent.

The wound is hers and hers alone.