Beware of False Profits

The apartment was a small collection of rooms she knew only too well. It was not just that it was limited. She had spent so much of the past eight years in here that each skeletal skelf standing upright between its floorboards had grown as familiar as the fingers on one hand.

"Fuck," she said. "You need to get out of here. We need to get out of here."

He looked up at her and nodded. Lit another cigarette and exhaled a plume of acrid smoke. He thought it covered his sigh. She heard it all the same.

She had grown sick of his sighing. He, in turn, was weary of her constant protests; interruptions; and dismissals. He was just plain tired.

"Yeah. You said that earlier," he said.

He neglected to add that not five minutes before, he had given up the same response. He watched a larder beetle drop into a gap between the floorboards to escape a shaft of paling sunlight. It wasn't that they were everywhere. It was that the actuality of their cohabitation was tacit which aggravated him more than just a little. And their deftness in eluding rent. They scurried while he squatted.

She looked at him in disgust and hurried into the kitchen. He overheard the sound of crockery scraping and knocking against the taps. The sound of running water and plumbing groaning. He wondered how many cups might survive the tea making ritual on this occasion ? If he would be prompted to go outside and grudgingly purchase some more.

"You know, " she said, her colour rising in spite of her determination to remain unperturbed. "You really ought to do something."

He belched out more smoke, and rose to his feet irritably as the coughing started up again.

He could hear the children fighting in the next room.

"Yeah, " he said. "You said that earlier."

Ib Sibling

addendum:

She was right, he needed to do something. He picked up the pair of shears lying beside the chair & walked quietly into the kitchen. He felt the tiredness drain from his being.

NØ