It started out as a conversation about curtains, and ended up as a conversation about everything he’d ever done wrong.

She didn’t know what business he had opining on curtains, anyway. She’d only asked as a sort of rhetorical silence-filler, more to hear herself thinking out loud than really elicit his judgment. Who knew he’d have anything to say about anything?

For his part, he just didn’t like the god-damned curtains, considering them not only ugly, but somehow oppressive and stifling. If part of the money going to purchase them was his, he’d go ahead and say if he didn’t like the fucking things.

“It’s not as if you ever gave a damn about this place until five minutes ago.” she bit out spitefully, wrapping fistfuls of fabric into great messy wads and shoving them back into the plastic packaging.

“Excuse me for not wanting to live in some kind of crazy funeral parlor-slash-funhouse, all right?” He stood with his arms folded, a bit concerned with where this conversation was suddenly heading, but semi-determined to see it through now that he’d started it.

“This is just like you.”

Oh shit. She was hissing the words out now. And it was never good when things were just like him. Or he was just like things. Neither of those were good. Maybe he should back off.

“Look all I said was that maybe…”

“Oh I HEARD what you SAID.” White and red plastic bags crackled violently under her hands as she finished packing the offensive curtains away; and then he watched her stalk out to the hallway, heard the closet door being yanked open, the bags thrown inside, the door slam shut. It couldn’t really slam because of the carpet in there, but he heard how she intended to slam it, all the same.

“What you seem to not consider, what you seem to never consider as you spout your opinions about the things I do, is that perhaps home decorating is not your fucking forte, and you should stick with picking out gatefold LPs or Japanese-only pressings of CDs no one ever wanted to listen to, or overpriced television sets that take up half the motherfucking wall. So why don’t you confine your opinions to the type of goofy game console we need to buy, or what new version of some other time-wasting piece of crap we need to invest money in this week? Maybe those things can be your areas of expertise, hmm?”

She was back in the room and doing some kind of self-righteous straightening up now. Pillows were being forcefully fluffed, this morning’s paper was being viciously tidied into a rigid, angry pile. How could she make newsprint rigid? He couldn’t even square it up again after he read it.

“…and maybe you can leave the curtains to me? Since apparently you were only happy enough to live here with bare fucking windows for more than a year? Letting the neighbors look in? Making it impossible to even sit in this room in the morning?”

Now every sentence sounded like a question, but he knew better than to answer.

“But no. No. Even though you can’t get off your ass to do a damn thing, you can certainly talk some shit about what I take the initiative to do. Although when you’re sitting there in the dirtiest jeans I have ever seen, because you haven’t done laundry in more than a month, I really would suppose you might have something more important to think about. Really.”

Now it was her turned for crossed arms, and they faced off at each other across the room like wary gladiators.

Heh. Wary Gladiators. That would be a good band name. His mind wandered pleasantly away from this angry little room.

“You inconsiderate ass, were you listening to a word I just said?”

Whoops.

“Yes, I heard you. I shouldn’t be doing… things. I should do other things, and leave these things to you.”

“Are you being a fucking smart ass?”

He shrugged ruefully “Not on purpose?”

“Look.” She was quiet and calm now.

Calm was very bad, and set all his skin to prickling.

“I just don’t think this is working.”

Wait, how did we get here? His heart was beating furiously now, his attention laser-focused as all of the blood went rushing either into or out of his head – he couldn’t tell which direction it was going.

“No… sweetheart no. It’s just curtains. They weren’t so bad. I didn’t really look that closely. Let me see them again.” He was all flop sweat and appeasement now. This wasn’t right. This was some weird nightmare argument. Where was the morning alarm? He wanted to roll over and cuddle against her back, to inhale that warm smell at the base of her neck and plan a lazy Saturday in bed together. This was definitely not right.

“It’s more than that. It’s everything. It’s the things you do.” She looked away now, her eyes inspecting the carpet, which he suddenly remembered her asking him to vacuum. A few weeks ago.

“It’s the things you don’t do.”

She looked back at him and he saw a terrifying thing on her face. He thought it might be resignation.

“I’m unhappy here. Being with you makes me unhappy.”

He sat down heavily on the sofa, stunned.

He’d always thought all conversations should have an emergency reset. It seemed he was a little too late to put that plan into action.

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This work by superBadGirl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at thegrandconspiracy.org.