Matt’s Basement
by Leonora Desar
I ask Matt if we can move into his basement. Technically, it's his father's basement. Technically, Matt still lives in it. Technically, Matt is 32 years old. But what is technicality? I present the following cost-benefit analysis.
Costs: Nothing!
We're living in his father's basement.
Benefits:
Free food
Free pizza
Free donuts
Free sex (that would be from each other)
The feeling of utter privacy/cloisterization coupled with parental care. Whenever we are not getting enough love (from each other) we retreat to the Kingdom of Upstairs, where we can watch football with Matt's dad. Problem of emptiness and unsupervision solved! What do you think?
Matt tells me he'll have to think about it. In the meantime can we hang out?
Where?
In the basement.
We hang out. He smells like pineapple. This was a smell that he was born with, I'm convinced of this. For the rest of his life he's been in serious denial. No, I do not smell like pineapple. I smell like used condoms and sex on the beach and Marlboro cigarettes, and sometimes a wistful sadness, a melancholy, like James Dean from the grave. It's why the basement smells. Not like James Dean though, Fruit Roll-Ups. Also our disintegration—
He lies with his arms around me. They seem to say, we can stay like this forever. We do not have to be Old. We do not have to get jobs that we'll then be fired from and go Upstairs (where Matt’s dad will ask us when we're getting new ones)—
We can stay like this. We can even have Children. They will have skipped the Basement Gene. We'll raise them here, and when they're ready we'll tell them about the bad place—Outside. They will be responsible citizens and get jobs and provide for their ailing parents. They’ll go Upstairs and then to the Upstairs Beyond, otherwise known as The Office. They will Succeed. We will read about them in the papers, which Matt’s dad will deliver, very old now and very feeble. They will bring Grandchildren. We will dote on them, and remark how they smell like pineapple. How they do nothing to get in its way.
Leonora Desar's writing has appeared in places such as River Styx, Passages North, The Cincinnati Review, Black Warrior Review, and Columbia Journal, where she was chosen as a finalist by Ottessa Moshfegh. Her work has been selected for The Best Small Fictions 2019, the Wigleaf Top 50 (2019 and 2020), and Best Microfiction 2019 and 2020. She won third place in River Styx's 2018 microfiction contest, and was a runner-up/finalist in Quarter After Eight's Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest, judged by Stuart Dybek, and Crazyhorse’s Crazyshorts! contest. She is fiction editor of Pidgeonholes.
