Pat wakes up early and sits down with her book. An hour later there is movement from the bedroom upstairs.
“Bro no way,” Pat’s husband Dan shouts. She hears him stomping around. “Babe do you know where my xbox controller is?” He calls down.
Pat doesn’t respond. There is more stomping and a crash.
“Fuck!” Dan yells. “I just wanted to play some fifa before work and now I’m late.”
There are loud bangs and screeches of furniture moving and Dan yelling “fuck,” over and over. Pat continues to read and eventually Dan runs out of the front door. “Love you babe,” he says and slams the door behind him.
The ensuing quiet in the house is complete. Light pours in through the window, shining on Pat. She stops reading and looks into the still air. It seems to fall on her. She can feel it. She takes a deep breath and keeps reading. She wears jeans and a white collared shirt under a loose dark brown crew neck. For Pat, putting on a clean, well-matched outfit is enough to feel like a productive person.
She reads comfortably all morning long. After a while she gets up and goes pee but then she sits back down and continues reading. Pat is a slow, diligent reader and after another hour or so she finishes her book and picks up another: an old, thick book by some German man whose name seems vaguely familiar and important. Pat reads every book with the same measured pace. Some she comprehends easily and others flee her understanding entirely. She lets them wash over her either way.
After a few more hours of reading she gets hungry and makes herself a BLT and then sits back down to read again, until the light starts to dim.
At around six, Dan gets home and throws his backpack on the landing, “Fuck yeah, what a baller day,” he says in a huff, breathing hard. He gives Pat a kiss and honks her boob and plops down next to her. “I’m rock hard babe,” he says. He picks up the remote. “Let’s watch Ratatouille again,” he says, but Pat doesn’t respond. She gets up and puts on a jacket and goes out for a walk.
“Babe,” Dan calls after her, “Ratatouille.” But again, she doesn’t respond.
Outside, it feels good to walk in the deserted nighttime streets. Her joints are loose and though her cheeks are cold and she can see her breath, she feels warm and vital. She walks unhurriedly, stopping sometimes to look at a house or at the underside of a tree, but never thinking much about what she sees. She just looks and moves along.
She feels like she could walk forever and thinks that maybe she will. But then, almost immediately, she notices that she is getting tired, totally drained in fact. So tired that she can hardly take another step. But luckily she sees that she has been unconsciously doing a big circle and is nearly home.
When she walks in, Dan is doing bicep curls in the living room, grunting loudly. “Check it babe,” he says. He puts the weights down and starts flexing, looking down at his muscles, “oh yeah,” he says. Pat is very tired so she goes upstairs.
“Babe my tits are bigger than yours,” Dan calls after her.
Pat brushes her teeth, hardly able to keep her eyes open and falls asleep as soon as her head hits the pillow.
When Pat wakes up, she puts on a pair of black jeans, a crisp white shirt, a purple crew neck and a thin gold necklace. Almost as soon as she sits down on her couch with her book and a coffee, she hears footsteps upstairs shuffling around, followed by the sound of an electric shaver. After a moment a muffled crash. “Fuuuck! Babe I cut my fucking dick!” Dan yells.
Pat turns to her book and picks up where she left off but then Dan comes downstairs and runs through the house with his bleeding dick out. “Fuck!” he yells, coming back into the living room. “My dick! Oh my god babe look at it! What do I do?” he asks, but then he runs back upstairs.
In the book Pat is reading, very little is happening. The German man is meeting people, Italian men and Turkish women, and there are whole scenes where they just talk and walk places and eat food quietly. The scenes seem important for some reason, but she doesn’t know why.
“Not enough vaseline in the world,” Dan yells from the bathroom. He stomps around some more and then runs out the front door with his pants around his ankles, trying to pull them up and tie his tie at the same time. He trips out the door, slamming it behind him, but then it opens a moment later and he sticks his head in. “I fuckin love you Pat,” he says and then slams it again.
Sitting once more in the stillness of her home, the air falls on her again, but today it feels wrong. Something is off. Pat tries to read but finds she can’t focus. The book has stopped making sense. Or perhaps her ability to bear its boring incomprehensibility has fled her. She puts the book on the coffee table and sits there, confused. In her clean outfit she feels like she is all dressed up with nowhere to go.
She gets up and wanders into the backyard. The day is gray and cold. She can see her breath but this fact now seems mundane and stupid. There is a bush and a fence between her yard and her neighbor’s. She looks at it for a moment and then gets down on all fours and crawls to the fence and hops over it.
Her neighbor is an older woman named Sheri who owns a landscaping company, so her yard is lush with deciduous shrubs and trees, still green and vibrant in the middle of winter. Everything is layered perfectly, with well-cut stones forming a path through the dense green wetness. It hasn’t rained in days but the plants suck up all the water they can and as Pat walks up the path her pants grow wet with dew.
When she gets to the top of the path she looks up at the house. She thinks about how when Sheri stands in that same spot and looks up at her house she must feel a sense of ownership, of contentedness and authority. Pat tries the back door and finds it open. She enters and wanders around the basement, looking at her gardening tools. She looks at the laundry, picking up the clean underwear and smelling them.
She goes upstairs. The walls are painted a salmon color. The surfaces are dusty and it smells odd. The house is incredibly foreign and the novelty is pleasing to Pat. In the main room there is an old purple couch, almost exactly the color of Pat’s sweatshirt, and there is a purple blanket there too. Pat picks up a book from the shelf and sits on the couch and reads. The book is about a young girl who just arrived in Paris. She meets an older man who turns out to be some type of sexual deviant and it goes on from there. Pat enjoys it so she takes the blanket, lies down and settles in.
She must have fallen asleep because when she wakes up, the light has changed and someone is putting keys in the front door. Sheri walks in. She is older and wears yellowed coke bottle glasses that hook behind her ears. She has her big red curly hair pinned under a faded green dad cap. She smells like dirt and sweat and Pat can see the brown under her fingernails from working all day.
As she puts her keys on the table Pat waits for her to notice her but she doesn’t. Sheri even scans the room and her eyes fall on Pat for a moment but there is no recognition. She walks into the kitchen and then goes upstairs to her room and Pat stays laying on the couch. She finds it interesting that this house, with all its smells and peculiarities, exists here like this all the time, so close to her own, yet so totally foreign. Pat closes her eyes and listens. She hears Sheri walk into different rooms, the noises of her movements growing louder and then dimmer again. Pat hears footsteps and clothes rustling, but then the noises stop. Pat opens her eyes and Sheri is stark naked, standing no more than 8 feet in front of her. Pat always thought Sheri was thin but she has a rather large belly, though her butt is still quite shapely for her age. Her skin is very pale and she has a large mole smeared on the back of her arm.
Pat’s throat itches. So badly that she has to do something about it. She clears it as softly as she can. Sheri’s small eyes dart right to her and Pat blushes, but apparently Sheri still doesn’t see her. She scans the area and then turns toward the door again. She shakes her hair back behind her shoulders and presses her chest out and suddenly the door opens and a man walks in. He has dark salt and pepper hair swept over his eyebrows, a thick beard and glasses.
He growls and shuffles his feet like a bull. “Oh baby,” he says, holding his arms out, pelvis forward.
“Oh Glenn,” Sheri says.
“I’ve missed you baby,” he says.
“I’ve been thinking about you all day,” she responds.
Still laying under the purple blanket, Pat watches as Glenn takes two handfuls of Sheri’s butt and hoists her up. Sheri wraps her legs around Glenn’s waist and they kiss deeply. Pat is impressed by how nimble Sheri is for her age and by Glenn’s strength. They shove their tongues in each other’s mouths and both of them moan with pleasure.
“I love the way you smell baby,” Glenn says and Sheri giggles.
Pat shifts her feet a little and Glenn looks over at her. At first he doesn’t seem to see her but then his gaze narrows and his brow furrows.
“Can I take your glasses off?” Sheri asks.
“Huh? Oh sure,” Glenn says. Sheri takes them and puts them on the table next to them and Glenn looks back toward Pat, but without his glasses he just squints confusedly.
“I want you so bad baby,” Sheri says and Glenn looks back at Sheri.
“Where do you want me?” He asks.
“Right here. On the carpet.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Glenn responds.
An hour later, when they are finally done, a thick smell hangs in the air and they are both glistening with sweat.
“I thought you were going to break my leg,” Glenn says.
“Next time,” Sheri responds, slapping him on the butt.
Glenn laughs. They lay there breathing heavily until Glenn says, “Hey, what’s up with that girl on your couch?”
“What girl?”
“Isn’t there a girl on your couch?”
Sheri laughs. “No.”
They look up at Pat for a long moment. Both of them squinting. Trying to see her. Trying to see anything. They are looking right at her face, but can’t see it. Sheri collapses back with a sigh and touches herself.
“I’ve never come so many times in my life,” she says. “Where is the white board?” Glenn asks.
“In the kitchen,” she says. He gets up and goes to the kitchen, his penis flapping against his thighs and comes back with a white board that reads, “Climax Tally,” at the top.
“Add 5 for you and 3 for me, we’re at 253 to 317,” he says. “You’re catching up.”
Just then a young man with red hair opens the door.
“Mom?” he says.
“Oh god Sean, what are you doing here?” Sheri asks grabbing for something to cover herself. There is nothing around but Glenn’s socks which she uses to cover her breasts.
“Why are you naked? And who is this? And what is the,” he pauses to read the board. “Climax tally?” Jesus Christ.”
“I can explain,” Sheri says.
“Why did I ever think you would change?” Sean says.
“Now son,” Glenn says, clapping Sean on the shoulder. “Your mom is a sexual creature.”
“Ew bro, get the fuck off me,” Sean says, squirming out of his grasp. “Mom why do you have to be fucking someone literally every time I come home?”
Glenn laughs, “your whole generation is repressed, son. You think you’re speaking out of anger, but really it’s jealousy.”
“Call me son one more time and I swear—and who the fuck is this?” Sean says, having caught a glimpse of Pat on the couch. Pat is holding the blanket up to her nose.
Both Sheri and Glenn look over at her again and squint.
“Oh I get it,” Sean says. “Is this some new fucked up thing you’re in to? Having some girl watch you fuck?”
Later that night Pat is on the couch reading when Dan comes home in a huff.
He throws his empty backpack on the landing. “I did it babe,” he says. He comes in and stands in front of her. “They gave it to me. Those fucking idiots finally gave it to me.”
He unbuttons his shirt, takes it off and starts flexing one pec at a time, looking down at himself. Pat sees that she won’t be able to keep reading so she puts down the book about the German man.
“You’re looking at Google’s new sales VP baby,” Dan says. “Three long years waiting and those douchebags finally wisened up. Those fucking losers finally did what’s right. God no one has ever been as hard as I am right now.”
He does ten pushups and some high knees and then sits down next to Pat, sighs and stretches his arms behind the back of the couch. “Babe do you know what this means?” he asks. He touches Pat’s chin. “Do you know what this means for us?” She looks at him, his shapely muscles and dark eyes. The room is warm from his body.
“It means one thing babe. It’s Ratatouille time,” he says. He puts on the movie, grabs Pat and pulls her into him. Without his shirt on Dan smells familiarly like Oldspice and BO. The movie opens on a rainy day, zooming into a farmhouse as Remy breaks out of the window.
“I love this movie,” she says.
Dan turns up the volume.
Tom Ianelli is a fiction writer and street bookseller in Brooklyn. He has written for Quartersnacks, Hobart, the Panacea Review and Animal Blood magazine.He runs PeterBooksPress and asks the questions for the Lit Chat instagram series at @peterbooksnyc.
High Horse 