The First Floor
by Adin Dobkin
*Wake Up
The mornings are cold, but the sky gives little away.
I unlatch the door and step outside. Today, I think, is the day I can sit at the glass-topped table out back, elbows akimbo around a borrowed coffee mug, is the day I can watch one of the local squirrels run along the wires laundry-lined across the neighbor’s backyard. I cross two, three wooden planks and realize my mistake, but a quick retreat doesn’t feel right, either.
I bear it, but the bold voice agrees with myself it’s too chilly for sitting. I’m no Cold Hand Luke. Instead, I loop around the brick surface just beyond. Grass might have been here once. I don’t know whether it would inflate or collapse the laps taken around the urn-topped plinth. A few rosemary sprigs just sprout from its base.
It’s not an urn in that it holds no ashes, but a harried mortician could use it in a pinch. Some soil clumps sit in its bowl, as if the cold cook wanted to see what ashes might look like in the same position, or attempted to place a potted plant within, then realized the thick sides and lack of drainage would deaden all but the hardiest greens.
When we arrived it had been suffocated by a grey trash bag, secured with a knot around the not-urn’s base.
A few days later the bag was torn off. Patio chairs and a table came out then, too. Without the cramped grey veil, however, the not-urn appeared all the more unfinished, disappointed or -ing.
! Sit at the Table
Sawn pine at least keeps my back straight. It’s far from any electrical plug, though, so I retreat to the couch every few hours when my laptop’s charge goes. I return to the chair and write in my notebook for thirty minutes, an hour, or sit in the couch when I can bear it, setting my laptop on a pillow to distance myself from its heat. At three or four in the afternoon, I don’t know why three or four, I no longer want to sit in the chair. I’m offended by its staticity.
? Walk to the Fridge
The English muffin had sat toasting as I made a percolator of coffee. The pair aren’t enough to stave off hunger till lunch time, so I walk to the refrigerator—
@ Walk into the Living Room
How many asses have sat in this crease, I wonder, my laptop propped up on the pillow cushion, materialled with what would otherwise support a gifted Pinot Gris, a farmer’s market wine bag. I sit straighter thanks to the pillow but my back finds a collapsed strip of foam on which to rest.
Fiberglass splinters from the cactus squatting next to the door embed themselves in me. The hairs are invisible, perpetually in motion. Like sticker burrs on pant legs they carry themselves wordlessly across the room. I rub my hand on my shirt’s back and pick up a few in the palm flesh, but even under examination they hide. I think maybe my nerves have instead given up.
+ Go Upstairs
I walk up the stairs to brush my teeth when it feels right, before or after lunch. I finish work and bring my laptop to the third-floor master bedroom—dormant—to play a yoga class recording on the tv, but the internet stalls. I hold downward-facing dog, corpse pose, savasana, for a minute or more before the buffering completes. I give up and sit on the ground with my phone
~ The Nights
A glass or two of wine or beer no earlier than five. I wait in the living room after having cooked and eaten.
We’ve watched movies or tv shows four or five days in a row now. I find myself uninterested in those I otherwise enjoy.
The crafting supplies haven’t arrived. We spend an hour, maybe more, looking for an activity. Reading has felt less urgent, and when it doesn’t, I only attempt it in the half hour before bed. The wine or beer otherwise fells me after reclining for the twelfth hour that day.
More crafting supplies are ordered, to arrive on Thursday. I download an audiobook app, too, and remember my card number. We pick one book I’ve read and one I haven’t.
Then it’s close to bedtime. I try reading for a few minutes but find my eyes slipping from the page. The crease of my ass that had sat in the crease of the couch prickles. I turn off the lights until morning, fixed.
Adin Dobkin is a writer and journalist in New York City. His book about the 1919 Tour de France is forthcoming from Little A. His Cities: Skylines quarantine save file has reached the size of a colossal city.
