FICTION? yes, fiction.

The Obvious Child

A single window, double-paned, is brimming with exhalations of yesterday, and vivid yolks of the morning crack and release through its open blinds. Sonny’s mouth is open, a last cavern of the night evaporating out into the direct glare of the sunlight as he jolts awake from his oversized grey office swivel-chair. It is Sunday.
Years ago, a Sunday morning would have yielded for Sonny a slow, down-comforter steam from the sun of the bedroom windows. It would have been probably ten in the morning or so before its release, when his wife would gingerly walk to the front door, her hot feet making steam footprints on the tile floor along the way.
For some reason, he now recalls the tender, delicate places where the comforter always wore away near the top edges, how little feathers that were supposed to be bad for your lungs would escape into the golden dust of the air. His wife would always lie with him until she was sure she wouldn’t wake him by getting up, and would dance away and back with a newspaper, a needle and thread. There was never any rushing, not on Sunday. These were the years before the ticking alarm of shelved items near the bed, pulsing with every child’s footstep down the stairs for seven a.m. cartoons. This was before the birthday that Angie, Sonny’s wife, had started using that damned hairspray with it’s caustic, tongue violating fumes that ever after would render the bedroom unsuitable for crosswords during the morning hours. This was before discount, bulk supermarkets, before Rogaine.
In good morning tradition, Sonny stretches his legs out, his back. He tightens his muscles from his legs up, his butt, his shoulders and fists. He exhales heavily, his mouth a torn seam of night, a purgatory for the restless coffee fumes, sugar-loaf leftovers, dormant enzymes. This morning, he thinks he can almost see bed feathers issue into the bedroom air. That is, he hasn’t found where his glasses must have fallen the night before. He slides off the last remaining piece of furniture as his knee crinkles onto the newspaper classifieds. Pawing the carpets, his hand is banded with thin shadows from the blinds. His fingers trickle into the pockets of depressed carpet circles: the dresser had been here. He leans to the side, more circles: the bed corner here, the fern stand here. He has forgotten the search for his glasses. His eyes close into little convex circles and he wants to say to someone that some rooms are like cages.
A crack. Just when he tries to stand. The pricking give of hard plastic end eye lense pierces Sonny’s elbow. His shoulders slump forward and he resigns again to sit inside himself, looking out with blurry vision, blurry now not only because of his impaired eyesight. It pierces the thick air, the bare walls, the furnace of Sonny’s chest, and more crackling issues forth. Thin whimpers lean on the slants of sunlight as Sonny’s head rocks in his hands. The illuminated morning dust now like sparks moving into ash.
And he recalls the comforter. The little feather bits exhaling into the golden light of the morning, how the little holes became slowly instead little stitches of thread, strong and steadfast in comparison to the brittle fabric surrounding them. How eventually, that comforter became more a dappled collection of mended holes than comforter. Sonny remembers how, when asked why it had to be thrown away, his wife had said, “Well dear, because I can’t fix the whole thing, now can I?”