The Nightstand

A short story about how a relationship can change in a flash...

And there was a place for him at the bedside, where the picture frame sat and the Zippo lighter leaned on the desk lamp’s post. She was busy cleaning the top of the table, leaving the small knick-knacky things on the bed—the dust particles transferred from the lamp’s cover and metal coating onto the clean comforter and pillow casings. All he noticed was that she had moved his brown slippers to her side of the bed, rather than the usual spot next to his dresser where he left them every day and night. It had been a long day and he wasn't going to use their few minutes together as an excuse to start a meaningless argument. To be fair, that had not stopped his feeble mind before. So the slippers had moved, and she was squeezing the spray bottle onto the wooden slat that made the top of the nightstand. It had been her idea to pick it up after a late lunch one March somehow ended up on the wrong side of town; and the houses were rough-looking. There was a collection of wooden furniture planted against the mailbox of a smaller looking house—it was, though, one of the larger houses on the block. There were cinder blocks stacked messily around the mailbox’s rotting wood beam. Evidently, it had been the victim (on several occasions) to a few swift innings of “mailbox baseball.” Next to the pile of furniture was a cardboard sign, withered from a few rainy afternoons, then the sun evaporating the water back out of it. FREE was spray-painted on the sign in bright neon purple. Before we traded in the four-seater for a two-seater, there was still room in my car for something besides two people and the occasional plastic bag of leftovers from an inexpensive restaurant. She had kicked her feet down from the dashboard and slapped at the window lightly—there was a shallow ticking sound that her ring made on the glass. Sometimes, she would switch the wedding ring from her left hand to her right when she was thinking about something enough to forget; he thinks it’s her envisioning her life if she had married that wad of paper from Terre Haute that she went steady with for a while. He meant to bring up the ring habit from time to time, but regardless of it being on his mind for long periods of time, He’d always forget to say something.

“Hey…hey!” she yelped, tapping and pointing at the mound of wood furniture. He was purposefully going slow because the roads were bad and he wasn't sure what kind of kids were raised around those parts. Whether it be the type that throws broken nails and rock clippings under their neighbor’s tires or the type that have parents that let their kids get hit by a long Cadillac. Always the babies that wander off down the stairs, grabbing onto the railing like their mothers did out of habit, and graciously work their way down to the concrete footpath. Their onesie’s grippy feet were grinded slowly as the baby shuffled its feet. A minute walking, a minute leaning forward to crawl and rest, and then back up to work again. Fortunately enough, the baby’s hands were made of the same stuff that Jell-O came from—at least that was what the baby’s older brother thought. And he told his friends such on the school playground when they inquisitively asked about the new kid brother responsibilities. Naturally, the metal gate was propped open from earlier in the day when the father had come home, half asleep, half drunk, and stumbled up the stairs, forgetting to latch the gate shut. Ironically, the baby had more stability from less than a year of walking than the father did from an unstable, disgusting forty-three years. The baby would make a cooing sound like that of a raccoon scratching a tree’s post for something to fall from it. And worse yet, the car would stop a few feet after impact so the baby would be pushed into the clear sky, making contact with the ground seconds later. And the onesie was no longer one piece of clothing.

So he reluctantly flashed his hazard lights a few yards away from the cinder blocked mailbox. Getting out of their four-seater, she was ecstatic placing her flattened wedges against the road’s rough patches. She could tell a car had been parked on that side of the road for a while because a few spots were sunken in and blackened from the skid marks. It was a miracle weeds hadn’t latched themselves onto the tires through the asphalt. Along with the battered nightstand, there was what appeared to be the top and bottom half of a china cabinet, a chair and its severed legs, pieces of an extendable dining room table, and a few wooden slats that had screws in their sides, so he assumed they were bedroom shelves. The pile looked more like a scrap heap for firewood rather than a petty charity giveaway. He wasn’t impressed and tried to visibly show it with his hands in his pockets, sticking out his thumbs like the orange flags in cones when you’re trying to find a parking space at a football game. The collar on his furry brown jacket was pointed forward, with the smoothness of the inner circumference hugging his neck hair. He swayed his head from one side to the other while his neck slowly popped in and out of place; it was one of those hollow cracks that breaks the tension inside, but can easily make someone’s head turn around to make sure your head has all of its wires still attached. However, she was uninterested with her husband’s bodily functions at the moment. Forgetting his manners of opening her door, and also because she practically shoved the door’s latch open, he traipsed behind her while she galloped to the mound, stopping as her shadow provided an overcasted shade to the wood pile. The pile was as dilapidated as the house looked from the end of the street. It was a one story house that was longer than it was wide. A window each flanking the glass screen door and a smaller, rectangular window tucked close to the rain gutter pipe: a bathroom window with the uncleaned frosted glass filtering the sunbeams hitting the ceramic tile. She leaned forward, almost with her knees scraping the concrete curb, and examined the pile: she went back and forth to the nightstand because [a] it was seemingly the only piece of furniture that was completely intact and [b] it was the only cleaner looking piece. There used to be rubber feet on the bottom to keep it from sliding too much and there were also drawers missing because the metal tracks were still drilled in the sides. The husband and the wife glanced a bit for the drawers but were greeted with no luck; and the wife was upset, but she put it past her and began to pick up the nightstand on her own. She felt that the back of the nightstand was held together with a microscopically thin slice of plywood, while the two pieces on the sides were thicker than any of the pieces of wood there. It was definitely handmade, with some chips on the top and sides.

“It needs a home, Chris,” the wife said to her husband. She looked at him as if he would miraculously just say no and walk back to the car. What he really wanted to say is that he didn’t want a trashy piece of termite-infested wood in his new house, much less her keeping those Neanderthalic ideas of taking old things and making them old things taking up new spaces. She talked about it like it was a lost puppy smothered in caked mud and didn’t have a tail anymore. It was lighter than she thought, but she still wanted to pick it up without either stepping on the wood, nor the grass. The grass was yellowed: there was a sprinkler next to the spigot on the side of the house, but from the naked eye, it was rusted closed. The sprinkler was over a foot long, but all of the rubber-ended holes were faced down in the ground and smushed closed, preventing any water from coming out. It was a new sprinkler from the hardware store, but all it knew was the dry dirt of a shady side of town and the cold reticence of the house’s shadow. Chris could also see long streaks in the grass from where a lawn mower had begun to cut the grass, but stopped in the middle, leaving it to grow unevenly. He pictured the entire lawn like a body covered in ingrown hairs: the cells just bubbling at the surface, putting pressure on the hair to just sprout out of the follicles.

“Don’t you think we ought to come back with some towels or something?” Chris said, “I mean who knows where and for how long this junk has been sitting here? And I don’t want dirt in my car, Grace.”

Out of all of his reasoning he attempted to do, all his wife, Grace, heard was him complaining about his car…all about his car, his car, his car.

“And that’s different from the containers of old drink cups and McDonald’s wrappers, how?”

A diabolic shot in the dark, and Chris was flattened and called out by his own wife. He thought it was a bit unfair, but he wasn’t going to argue with logic. She motioned him over, claiming that it really wasn’t that dirty, just dusty from the pollen in the grass. She smacked the back of it lightly to get a feel of the amount of pressure it could handle. He actually walked in the grass, around the dining room table pieces, and helped his wife take the nightstand to the car. It felt inhumane to just take it and leave, but the sign said for him to feel otherwise. Briefly stuck in a piece of wood, Chris unhooked his foot that was too close to the pile and managed to lift the drawerless nightstand to the right side of the car, hazards still flashing. The rigid corners of the nightstand slid, with inches to spare, in the car. They tipped it over on its left side, careful to not let it rock back and forth when they turned corners. As a safety precaution, and because Grace was a month pregnant, she got into the habit of buckling the seatbelts when something was in the back. Chris remarked on her doing that with the bags of groceries, talking to them like they had spit out their pacifiers and she had to clean the cat hair off of them. She buckled the passenger side and middle seat belts inward and secured the nightstand tightly. Chris managed to grab Grace’s hand as she began to make her way back over the pile for a possible round of seconds. He casually guided her to her door and closed it for her, remembering his taught manners at the opportune moment, drifting further away from a bad sense of disposition.

And there was Chris, acknowledging that his slippers were in the wrong place, and his wife cleaning the top of the nightstand promptly before they went to bed. He moved the slippers back, brushed his teeth, and exited the bathroom while his wife put the knick-knacky things back on. She kissed the picture frame, hoping her husband wasn’t looking, and placed it under the lamp’s light—it was a picture of their son, John. He was a baby in that picture: a curious, mindless baby that liked to walk more than crawl when he wanted to. The reflection made her grimace, noticing how blue his eyes had been early on. Once the lights were off, she was there, cradling her warmth in the fetal position, wanting to reach out and hold the picture to her heart until one day she would be in that picture with him. Chris was there to wrap his arm around her waist, feeling her heated pulse beating…beating…beating through her thin clothes. And as the people who were like clouds without rain gave away that free wood on that day with the clear sky, they were there to watch. A half dozen figures were watching in the dark while she rocked herself to sleep, making her body numb and her head spin like a colorful mobile above John’s crib. It played the music, whistling through the stillness of the house, breathing that dry, wooden air from the nightstand. The nightstand breathed right along with them, feeling and seeing things. And John was there with it, keeping an eye on his parents for a while…until things passed over. But how could he truly watch them when they were the ones that were twice dead. They would have been more careful had John given them a second chance to be.

(February 2024)