This Was a Home Once & Other Stories

this was a home once

I'm not wearing my wedding ring today.

You don't notice at first. Your wrists are tense when you open the door, but it's not the ring. It's the clack of the FOR SALE sign caught in the bitter October wind. It's the too-clean house. It's the sleek calico glaring at me from under her brow, a reproachful hiss between her teeth.

"Hey," I say quietly.

"Hey," you echo.

There used to be more. Sometimes I wish I could remember what it felt like.

I smile at the calico. "Hi, Princess."

She tucks her neck back into a white-and-auburn ruff, but I'm patient. Her anger has a short memory. She lets me press my knuckles to her soft brow with a diminutive mrow.

"Can you help me move the piano into the upstairs bedroom?" you ask. "I thought we could stage it a little. Make it look less empty."

My parents' old piano is heavy. We pant, heaving it up the narrow staircase from the basement. With a lot of grunting, we manage to settle the instrument beneath the wide window in the small front bedroom. The aged wood looks dark against sunny green walls. We chose that colour because it's happy. Pleasant for kids to wake up to.

My rocking chair is in the corner. It's been years since I sat there knitting a toque for your brother's first baby, ribbed bright purple and green like a sweet-and-sour candy. They're pregnant with their third now, who I'll never get to meet.

Even with the piano, the small room feels too big. Too empty. We were talking about kids of our own, before I left.

Pale light falls in when I pull the glossy curtains back. Outside stands the tree that we planted last spring, its leaves as yellow now as the pears it never produced. Overhead, grey clouds belly dense as grief.

Autumn is the right time for endings.

"I'm gonna finish cleaning the kitchen," you tell me.

"What else needs to be done?" I ask, like the stranger I am now.

In the dining room, I fold the single placemat and napkin into the cupboard. You've switched to the autumn linens: bronze and gold leaves, fat orange pumpkins. We bought these for all the dinner parties we never had. Even small dreams were too big for us.

The dark iron chairs are dusty with disuse. I wipe them, dark streaks following wet cloth.

This is where we sat when I told you I was asexual. You asked me if I was only saying that to convince myself all our other problems were okay. As if I hadn't already spent so long invalidating my own feelings. As if my own mind isn't the first to sow doubt, always.

I tuck the chairs under the table.

The living room looks like a show home--pristine, lifeless. The clutter used to be mine: my laptop on the coffee table, half-empty water glass on the floor beside it, a novel left face-down on the hearth because I never could find my bookmarks. The worn couch is where we used to cuddle, legs tangled as we read our books and took turns flipping the records.