The Desk

a short story | fiction

The first thing Guy looked at in the mornings was the pond. Whether or not it was white capping was a crucial indicator of how the rest of his day would unfold. He had been walking nearly seven miles a day since arriving in Tiverton a month and a half ago. He’d lost weight and was already a slender man, so now he looked vaguely ill. Rhode Island was only a four-hour drive north of New York City, but the winters in Tiverton felt substantially rawer due to the wind chill coming off the Atlantic. On the blustery days—when it was gusting upwards of twenty knots—his walking mileage plummeted. He hated the wind, cruel and unrelenting—the way it made his one-bedroom rental cottage shake. When cold air whistled through the house, he could hear his wife, Abigail, in her stern, patronizing voice, dissuading him from ever buying coastal property. “The upkeep would be unending,” she would say. Not that it mattered—even if he wanted to, Abigail would never transfer the necessary funds into their account for a down payment to be possible.

Guy’s rental cottage sat at the top of a one-way road that wrapped around the pond. On calm days, the swans’ sloping necks reflected off the brown, glassy water. The dignified birds would take turns rotating bottoms up, plunging their heads under the surface. When they tipped back over, slimy green weed clung to their electric orange beaks.

The swans almost always floated in pairs, which Guy noticed immediately. On his third day at the cottage, he spent the afternoon researching the birds, googling things like: “do swans practice monogamy?” and “how do swans have sex?” and “male versus female swan” and, because he suddenly became aware of the heteronormative nature of his inquiries (his nineteen-year-old daughter, Maddie, would be sure to modify this with “toxic”—he was being toxically heteronormative), Guy also searched: “swans gay?”.

He subsequently read an article in UK Mail titled, Gay Swans Deeply in Love as They Make a Nest and learned that nearly a quarter of swan couples consist of two males, who mate with a female and then chase her away once she lays the egg. Guy knew what Abigail would say if she read this, something like, “See? Even swans hate women.”

Guy found the remoteness thrilling, a dramatic change from Brooklyn. The nearest grocery to the cottage was thirty-seven minutes away—thirty-four if Guy sped, which he sometimes liked to do on those rural backroads, like a teenager riddled with careless angst. He could play the part easily—aside from his loosening skin and expanding bald spot, he didn’t feel like he had changed much since he was seventeen. But when he looked in the mirror, he saw the unavoidable truth: he was a middle-aged man. There was nothing wrong with middle aged men; Guy just thought he’d never be one. When he drove, the fields of dead grass and leafless brush elapsed into a single brown blur of barren New England winter.

Guy and Abigail—but mostly Abigail—had decided they needed space. A little bit. Just to remember what it was like to miss each other, she’d said. No more than a week or two, she’d promised. Abigail would join Guy in his bucolic Rhode Island life soon. Six weeks had passed since he had arrived in Tiverton, and Abigail always seemed to have a reason to stay in the city. Usually, it was work. Abigail started on Credit Suisse's trading team twenty-three years ago. Back then, she was young and eager, always coming home with stories of money and misogyny—obscene amounts of both. There were a handful of times when Guy, appalled by her anecdotes, urged her to quit. This advice eventually annoyed Abigail. She claimed such a response suggested Guy didn’t actually support her career, and that he was therefore just as bad as the chauvinists at work. Guy, of course, vehemently denied such accusations—he was her biggest champion, and she was being unfair. Eventually, after days of mutual silence, they made up. Abigail reassured Guy that once she became more senior, the hours and workplace respect would significantly improve.

None of it changed. Now, she held a fancy, authoritative title—Managing Director of Securitized Mortgage something or other, but still, she was seldom home. This weekend, however, it was her older sister, a deeply unpleasant shrew who Guy stopped pretending to like years ago, keeping Abigail in the city. The sister wanted to get lunch on Saturday.

“This isn’t forever,” Abigail told him on their last phone call a few days ago. “I want to give you space. For your writing.” Forever hadn’t even crossed Guy’s mind until she mentioned it. That made Guy depressed for the rest of the day as he suspected when Abigail imagined it all as permanent—a divorce, final, signed, photocopied, saved onto lawyers’ computers—part of her enjoyed that hypothetical. Nineteen years of marriage: thrown away. Done. Maybe she’d finally go to Milan.

“Then go!” Guy said the last time they got into this reoccurring tiff.  

“I want to go with someone!” She responded, peering over her round reading glasses, eyeing him from across their mid-century decorated Park Slope apartment. Guy didn’t have time to be a wonderlusting tourist in Milan. His writing needed comfort, silence, and routine.

Maddie, their only child, was a freshman at Yale. She called Guy every fifteen days to tell him how busy she was. She had a boyfriend—her first relationship. When she was fifteen, Maddie announced to Guy and Abigail that she was queer, and Guy assumed this meant she was a lesbian. When Maddie first asked if she could bring her new partner home for Thanksgiving, Guy was imagining a blue-haired chick with eye bags and combat boots. Instead, she showed up with a hypermasculine Australian mastodon named—get this—Shane. The guy was a full foot taller than Guy.

While they were alone in the kitchen, Guy whispered to Abigail, “I thought she liked girls?”

Abigail was bent over, peaking into the oven where the potato gratin was bubbling. She looked up at Guy, her eyes squinted with impatience, disgust, pity—or some combination of it all. She was always looking at Guy this way. “She likes both,” Abigail hissed.

For the first time since his early twenties, Guy's five foot, six inch stature felt humiliating. What a douche, Guy thought, as he watched Shane drown his entire meal with gravy. He had a heap of food on his plate, more than Guy could ever imagine eating, and was talking about how he had two older sisters who both still lived in Melbourne. One has a kid. Who cares? Guy bristled at his baritone accent and bulging biceps. He was the captain of some varsity sports team. Lacrosse. Or was it crew? Something that involved wielding sticks.

After dinner, while cleaning up in the kitchen, Guy saw Shane tenderly touch the small of Maddie’s back. That was strange. Guy didn’t even want to think of the size of Shane’s cock— undoubtedly long and girthy, given the dimensions of the rest of his body. Why was Guy even thinking about this? Oh god, he was becoming his father: an old pervert.

A few days later, after Maddie and Shane left for New Haven, Abigail couldn't stop talking about how "wonderful" the guy was. Sometimes she'd switch it up and say "fabulous" instead. Wonderful and fabulous, wonderful and fabulous, wonderful and fabulous. She'd said it so many times that finally, Guy snapped and told her wonderful and fabulous were horribly mundane and uncreative descriptors.

“Jesus, Abigail,” he said, “What did you actually think of him?”

“Get off your high horse, Guy,” she said. “You can critique my vocabulary after you've sold that book you're never going to write.”

Even for Abigail, that was a low blow. They didn't talk for the rest of the night, and Guy fell asleep on their custom upholstered velvet couch in the television room. Tryptophan from the leftovers he’d eaten that night pulsed through his veins. He dreamt that he walked in on Maddie, Abigail, and Shane licking each other on his and Abigail's bed. All those fleshy limbs twisted up in organic cotton sheets. Confirmed: cock was colossal.

When was the last time he and Abigail made love? God, it must've been at least nine months ago. And even then, it wasn't really love making, rather a perfunctory, dry coitus. When people talk about meaningless sex, it's always in the context of sloppy, drunken one-night stands with a stranger they’ll never see again. But no, that's not meaningless sex. Meaningless sex happens in the depths of marital life. It's the sex you have after a few glasses of red wine, when you think, yeah, maybe I could get into it tonight. And then you start, and you're moving inside of her (like a hopeful idiot, you think moisture is imminent). You’re trying to find a rhythm, and she's also trying to find a rhythm, and your rhythms aren't aligning because neither of you are thinking about the other because you never think about each other anymore and have forgotten how. You're merely inanimate fixtures in each other's lives—like the refrigerator—but, no, worse, you're a finicky refrigerator that sometimes she has to begrudgingly tend to because the ice machine keeps breaking. And she hates that: when she has to recognize that you actually exist and that you're a little bit broken.

Guy looked around the old, dark, wooden cottage and felt like a fool. He'd been there for almost two months and hadn't written a single sentence. He knew the problem: he needed a desk. A big, wooden, flat desk. The dwelling had other relevant furniture: a faded pink linen couch, an oak chest in front of the sofa, and a small Formica laminate table tucked into the corner of the kitchenette. But no desk! No designated place to create, to be a storyteller.

If he could just get the vibe right—a solid, large surface, a comfortable chair, a strong cup of black coffee, Hell! Maybe a bit of blow. No, no. He doesn’t do that anymore. But a desk, yes, a desk. Then, finally, he'd be able to write. Good writing, too. The type you read in the New Yorker. He'd finally write his novel. And then, at Abigail's friends' cocktail parties, he wouldn't have to deal with another person trying to connect him with their friend’s cousin who works in publishing. He would write his book, and then he would grip Maddie's boyfriend's hand with the type of firmness that communicates: yeah, buddy, you might be bigger, but you don't know the first thing about being a man—a real man—a grown man, who provides for his family, a man who sits at his big wooden desk and produces literature that the world goes crazy for, but, most importantly, sends his wife into a lecherous craze that eventually fizzles into a sustained, warm sense of content so that every day, at least twice a day, she’ll ruminate on how lucky she is to have landed a man like her genius, hunky husband, Guy.

*

Grace O'Sullivan stared into the black, caper-sized eyes of her faded beanie babies: Eleanor the Elephant, Tod the Tiger, Douglas the Duck, Sophia the Skunk. Their once vibrant colors had faded: Tod's burnt orange now the dull hue of miso paste; Eleanor's blues now truer to a real elephant's cool grey. Sophia's white tail had honeyed with age. They sat in a militant line on top of her dresser, which directly faced her twin sized bed, so that when she woke up in the mornings, they greeted her. They’d done so for years. Above them, hanging on her wall, were her ribbons—a few yellows, a lot of reds, two cherished blues—all of which she’d won last summer when she first started competing. 

“Sorry,” Grace whispered to her stuffed animals as she swept them with her forearm off her bureau and into a large trash bag. It was one of the scented kinds, and as she synched the plastic, a waft of Beachside Breeze puffed in her face. She shoved the sack of stuffed animals under her bed, something she should’ve done years ago.

Hadley Carpenter was coming over in less than an hour. The plan was that she would spend the night. The thought of the two of them sharing a bed made Grace’s stomach tingle. Hadley also rode at Rainbow Acres. She wore black eyeliner that flicked up in the corners, and tight shirts that showed off her large breasts, which bounced rhythmically when she trotted her horse, a humungous Hanoverian named Dante, in circles around the ring.

Hadley moved to Tiverton from Sacramento three months ago. Apparently, back in California, Hadley had trained at an elite barn that churned out junior Olympians. Grace was immediately struck by her—her elegant riding, her seventeen-hand horse that required a martingale. Dante was the biggest gelding at the barn by far. Hadley was fifteen, a year older than Grace.

At first, Grace—with her naturally shy disposition—avoided interaction with Hadley altogether. A week ago, Emily, their instructor, put the girls in lessons together. Gingerbread Girl spooked and bucked Grace off as soon as they started trotting. Grace was embarrassed to cry in front of Hadley, but the fall was painful. Hadley was, surprisingly, kind and pretended not to notice the tears trickling down Grace’s cheeks as they practiced flying lead changes for the rest of the hour. Afterwards, Hadley offered Grace a Twizzler from her tack box.

“It was probably the cold air,” Hadley had said, “that made Gingerbread Girl so fresh.” She slipped the slobbery bit out of Dante’s mouth and replaced his bridal with a halter.

From her bedroom, Grace could hear the motor of her mother's juicer—an archaic machine from the nineties made of brittle, yellowing plastic—in the kitchen, reverberating through the wood floors of their house. She put her slippers on and bounced downstairs. As Grace rounded the corner to the kitchen, she found her mother chopping off the white, dirt-speckled ends of celery stalks.

"When is Hadley getting here, honey?” Grace's mother asked, shoving more vegetables down the chute. The celery crunched and churned. Out one spigot came a fecal log of fiber and from the other spout, a crisp liquid, bright green like extraterrestrial blood.

“Soon I think.” 

“The guy is coming at four by the way.”

“Which guy?”

“The one who wants to buy grandma’s desk. Does Hadley like pizza?”

“I think.”

Grace’s grandmother died last year, and her parents were determined to sell off all her antiques. “This is great stuff!” Grace’s mom insisted. “People would pay a lot of money for it.”

They’d listed all the things—a floral patterned love seat, Christmas ornaments, a few fishing rods, an oak desk—on Facebook Marketplace. Two days ago, Grace’s mom received a message from a man interested in buying the desk. “He must be rich,” her mom said. “He’s willing to pay $550. Didn’t even try to negotiate down.”

Yesterday, in the musty basement, Grace had helped her mom take apart the desk. The legs came off, and the only drawer was removable. They carried the top of the desk upstairs together and rested it against the wall. Grace put all the screws, nuts, and bolts into a white plastic grocery bag that she knotted tightly.

Grace looked out the window and saw a minivan pull up. “Hadley’s here,” she said. Her mom flipped off the juicer and its rumbling motor ceased.

*

Guy drove east, away from the ocean, towards the center of Tiverton. It was thirteen degrees outside, but he had the windows down as he smoked a cigarette. He felt the nicotine enter his bloodstream, giving him a fleeting buzz. He wasn't even a smoker, and usually, after the brief pleasant head rush, the cigarettes left him mildly anxious. He bought a pack of Camels when he first arrived in Tiverton and figured he might as well finish the damn thing.

Times have changed, Guy thought to himself. People online just hand out their addresses like candy. He had no idea what this person looked like—their Facebook profile was entirely anonymous. Their profile name was: "Virtual Yard Sale in Tiverton RI". It gave him a little bit of pause—showing up to a stranger’s house in the woods—but the desk they were selling looked perfect, exactly what he needed.

*

In Grace’s bedroom, Hadley sat cross legged on the bed, scrolling on Grace’s laptop.

“Have you ever seen a penis?”

“Yeah,” Grace said.

Hadley looked at her and rolled her eyes. “Not a horse’s penis.”

“Oh,” Grace said. “I guess not, then”

“I bet we’ll see one on here,” Hadley said, typing a URL into the browser.

Hadley navigated to a website that she told Grace would pair them with random, one-on-one video chats with strangers. Hadley tapped her finger on the laptop while the video loaded.

“Hey,” a large, pixilated woman said. She was lying, down with her computer resting on her bosom. She squinted at the girls; the folds of her chin layered on top of each other. 

“What’s your name?” Hadley asked. The video went black, and a loading symbol appeared. Hadley looked at Grace. “We’ll just get paired with someone else,” she said.

Next was a wispy, white-haired man who asked a lot questions. He kept glancing down, as he rattled off his inquiries in a monotone.

“What’s your name?”

“Hadley.”

“How old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

“What color are your eyes?”

“Brown but my left has flecks of green.”

“Where do you live?”

Hadley quit out. She looked at Grace. “He was fucking creepy,” she said. Grace nodded. Three girls in Disney Princess costumes came next. They were hard to hear on account of their high-pitched, incessant giggles. They all wore wigs. Hadley hit ‘next’ for them as well.

When the penis appeared, Hadley slapped her mouth and said, “Oh my god look, look, look!” It was so much smaller than those Grace had seen at the barn. At least once a week, Grace had to clean sheaths at Rainbow Acres. Hadley’s pointer hovered over the ‘next’ button, but she didn’t hit it right away. Stubby fingers fondled the fleshy extremity.

“Gross,” Hadley muttered as she clicked down. “Did you like that?” she asked once it was replaced with the loading symbol.

“Not really,” Grace said.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know…” Grace tried to think of something to say, something that would impress Hadley. “I liked it a little bit I guess.”

Hadley didn’t respond and stared at the screen, waiting for their next match. Grace studied her expression. She looked angry. Did Grace say the wrong thing?

Next: a woman smoking cigarettes in a dimly lit kitchen where a large brown dog lay on the floor behind her. “A chocolate lab,” she told them. “Purebred. I’ve got a litter of puppies in the garage. six of them. You interested?” Next: another penis—the internet connection was poor, so it was harder to see this time. Not as exciting. Next: a person with a ski mask who didn’t say a word. Next: a group of five teenage boys, older than Hadley and Grace—probably seventeen—huddling around the computer.

“Hi,” Hadley said.

“What’s up,” one of them wearing a hat said.

Hadley giggled.

“What’s your name?” another boy said.

“This is my friend, Grace,” Hadley said, shifting the camera so that Grace was momentarily in frame before switching it back to her.

“Sup, Grace,” one of the boys said.

“So, what’s up?” another asked.

Hadley leaned into Grace’s ear and whispered, “Do you dare me to flash them?” She pulled back so that their faces were only an inch apart. Grace nodded. Hadley smirked, pushed the computer back to create a wider frame, quickly lifted up her shirt to show her bare, lemon-sized breasts. The boys screamed, and one of them said, “She’s showing us her titties!” Then Hadley lunged for the computer and exited out of the browser so that they were left staring at Grace’s cluttered desktop.  

Hadley fell back onto the bed, giggling. Her shirt still wasn’t pulled all the way down, and Grace could see her bellybutton, an outie, and the pale crescents of the bottom of her boobs. Her skin looked smooth, and Grace wanted to reach out and touch Hadley’s abdomen. She didn’t. Instead, she started laughing, too. She was relieved it was over. Headlights flooded through her bedroom window. Both girls fell silent. Hadley sat up. They looked outside where a black sedan crept forward in the driveway.

*

Guy drove slowly along the gravel. It was only 4 p.m., but dusk was settling in, and the sky was darkening into a cool, pale indigo. At the end of the driveway was a small, single-family home, with several shingles missing on various parts of the exterior. Warm, yellow light spilled out of the windows. It looked cozy inside. Guy put his car in park, took out his phone, and messaged the seller: I'm here. He noticed a dingy shed on the far end of the property. Guy imagined that if he was about to get slaughtered, that's where it would happen. Maybe inside the structure there were already the dismembered quadriceps and cleaved torsos of previous Facebook Marketplace victims hanging from the ceiling, dry aging in the cold like a fancy ribeye. Abigail loved steak, but Guy had never been crazy about it. She had once ridiculed him for ordering the truffle macaroni at Smith & Wollensky. “Seriously? We're at a freaking steak house, Guy.”

He waited, watching the front door. A minute later, a woman in a pink turtleneck emerged. Guy relaxed; images of brute force faded.

"Guy?" the woman asked.

"Yeah. Hi."

"Do you want to take a look at the desk before we bring it out?"

"Sure," he said, turning off the ignition. He stepped out of his car.

"I already took it apart so it would be easier to fit," she said, the sound of their footsteps crunching under the gravel.

“Thanks.”

When he entered the house, he noticed it smelled like pizza. There were two girls standing at the base of the stairs, studying him.

“My daughter, Grace” the woman said nodding at the teens, “and her friend, Hadley.”

Guy nodded. “Hi there,” he said.

They both waved silently.

“Peter!” the woman shouted.

“In the kitchen!” A man’s voice boomed back.

The woman led him down the hallway, and the girls followed. In the kitchen, the desk was disassembled and leaning against the wall. A husky, bearded man, introduced himself as “the husband” with a firm shake. Everyone watched silently as Guy inspected the desk. He felt like a performer as he crouched and ran his hands long the wood, back and forth.

“It’s in great condition,” the woman said.

“Yeah,” Guy agreed, nodding. And after what he presumed was an adequate amount of rubbing, he stood up and said, “Looks great. I’ll buy it.”

*

Grace immediately noticed that the man stank of cigarettes. She could smell it over the aroma of the pepperoni pies cooking in the oven. He had bags under his eyes and, even though he wore a big, oversized jacket, she could tell he was skinny.

“Who’s that?” Hadley whispered into Grace’s ear as they watched him touch the desk.

“A stranger. He’s here to buy my grandma’s desk.”

“Where’s your grandma?”

“Dead.”

Grace's mother and father made small talk with Guy. He told them he was from New York City but spending a few months—maybe more—in Tiverton. He said he'd love to see what the town was like in the summertime, and Grace's mom said it got a lot busier but was beautiful. “A lot of people have vacation homes here,” she said.

"My wife," he said, tilting the top of the desk away from the wall so he could inspect the other side. "She's still in the city. She wants to visit at some point.” He paused and then said, “But we’re taking some time apart right now."

"Oh," Grace's mother said. "I'm sorry to hear that."

Guy looked up, surprised, as if he’d just remembered he wasn’t speaking to himself. "Oh, it's fine. We'll be fine."

Grace's mother nodded encouragingly, and Guy scratched the back of his head, hair greasy, underneath his grey beanie. “She'll probably join me soon,” he added. “I'm a writer, so it's actually nice to have a bit of time alone so I can focus on my work.”

“And those are the legs to the desk,” Grace’s dad said, pointing him towards them.

Guy walked over, knelt, and examined.

"So, $550, right?"

"Yes," Grace’s mom said. "And it’s very easy to put back together. The screws and bolts are right over here—" She looked around. "Oh," she said. "I must've forgotten them downstairs. Grace, honey, will you go get the bag with the screws?"

Grace nodded, and spun on her heels towards the basement door. Hadley followed her. As they trotted down the steps, Grace heard Guy ask if Venmo was okay. She found the bag of parts near the washer and dryer. A heap of her mother’s dirty laundry sat near the white machine. She’d already separated out her delicates, which lay in a small pile next to the rest of her soiled garments. Grace grabbed the bag, and the metal pieces inside clanked against each other.

“Wait,” Hadley said. “I get to dare you now.”

“What?” Grace said.

“You dared me to flash those boys. So now it’s my turn. You have to do whatever I say.”

“What do you want me to do?”

Hadley brought her pointer finger to her philtrum and her eyes surveyed the basement. “Hmmm,” she said. “I dare you to…” Her eyes landed on something behind Grace.

*

As Guy drove back to the cottage, he didn’t feel like writing. He suddenly felt entirely exhausted and ready for bed. He glanced at the time on the dash. 5:23 P.M.

The husband told him he'd need a Philips Head to assemble the desk and offered to lend him one. Guy happily declined. He had one back at the cottage. The last thing he wanted was to see that family again. Nothing against them; Guy was just utterly embarrassed. Why had he blabbed about his and Abigail's situation? He's not even sure why he started talking about it in the first place, and he could tell they thought it was bizarre. A stranger in their home, a grown man, talking about how his wife had temporarily broken up with him.

His phone lit up and began buzzing. Abigail was calling. He tapped the green button and the phone automatically connected to the Bluetooth of his car.

“Hi,” Guy said.

“How are you?”

“Fine.”

“Are you driving?” Abigail asked.

“Yeah.”

“From where?”

“I bought a desk.”

“A desk?”

“Used. From Facebook Marketplace. Amazing deal.”

“How much?”

“Five something.”

“You can’t remember?”

“We negotiated a lot. Can’t remember exactly where we landed. I think $520.”

“Jesus, Guy. That’s not cheap.” Abigail sighed, and her pique crackled through his car’s speakers. “Why?” she asked.

“Did I buy it? For my writing.”

“Is there not a desk already in the cottage?”

“There’s a table. But that’s where I eat.”

“Ah,” Abigail said, “I see.”

“There are studies about it, Abigail. You shouldn’t mix the places where you eat with where you work. It messes with your hormones.”

“So, the writing hasn’t been going well then?”

“I just haven’t found the perfect set up, is all.”

“I don’t want to get in a fight.”

“We’re not in a fight.”

“Guy, I want to work this out,” she said as if she were on a business call, negotiating a bond price. Her voice was cool. 

“I love you, Abigail,” he blurted. 

“I’m on my way. My sister has the stomach bug.”

“You’re driving here? To Rhode Island?”

“Yes.”

“No lunch with Ingrid tomorrow?”

“She has the bug.”

“How far are you?”

“GPS says an hour and a half.”

“Oh.” Guy was in disbelief. “That’s fantastic.”

“It will be good.”

“It’s beautiful here. We’ll go on walks.”

“I need to call Maddie. She texted today that Shane broke up with her.”

“Oh darn.” Guy tried to quell the excitement in his voice.

“She’s upset, Guy.”

“Terrible.”

“I’ll see you soon,” she said. She paused and then added,“I love you, too.” 

With a sense of hope percolating in his chest, Guy pulled into the cottage driveway and began unloading the desk. The trunk hissed open. He pulled the largest part—the top—out and heaved it inside. The freezing wind stung his cheeks, forcing him to take breaks as he carried it the short distance from his car into the cottage living room. He returned for the legs, all four of which he cradled in his arms, looping the plastic bag of screws around his forearm.

Inside, Guy placed the legs down and fiddled with the bag, trying to unknot it. Eventually, he decided to just rip it open. The metal parts spilled to the floor, along with a piece of fabric. “Fantastic,” Guy muttered to himself as he got onto his knees to pick up the scattered parts. He plucked the swath of blush silk, his brows furrowing.

Stretching it in front of him, he saw the shape—a thong. Guy dropped the underwear and stared at them, crumpled on the floor. They had fallen in such a way that the crotch, streaked and unwashed, looked directly back at him. He felt heat rising from his neck to his cheeks and suddenly glanced over both shoulders, ensuring he was actually alone. He’d need to get rid of them, but decided he’d do that later, after assembling the desk. 

In the kitchen, he prepared a Moka Pot of espresso. The gas stove clicked four times before the blue flame billowed. The faint scent of sulfur was soon overtaken by an acidic, earthy aroma that filled the entire cottage. When it was ready, he made himself a strong cup, mixing in a generous pour of the whiskey he’d brought from New York. Abigail was always getting gifted fancy liquor from clients. He took the first few sips in the kitchen, exhaling after each interval. He leaned against the counter, one leg crossed over the other, the arm that wasn’t holding the mug hugging his trunk. He watched the underwear from across the room. It was as if they were another living being, unpredictable, one that he should keep an eye on at all times.

Back on his knees in the living room, he collected the nuts, bolts, and washers still scattered on the floor. He attached the first leg, then the second, but when he got to the third, he realized he’d run out of parts. He checked the plastic bag: empty. “Shit,” Guy said, his eyes scanning the corners of the cottage. “Shit, shit, shit.” He glanced at his watch. Abigail would be there in forty-five minutes—not enough time to go to the store.

He’d barely eaten anything all day and Guy began to feel drunk. The desk leaned against the wall of the cottage, its two attached legs. He had to get rid of the panties. No more delaying. The garbage was too risky. Abigail could discover them buried under lemon wedges, slimy spinach, coffee grounds.

A strong gust of wind rattled through the house. Momentarily, Guy’s mind slipped away to the pond. He wondered where the swans, obscured in winter darkness, went on cold, windy nights like this—if they huddled together behind the phragmites, sheltering one another. White plumage against white plumage; maybe they wrapped their necks around each other in a tangled embrace. It was the worst of conditions, but they had each other.

*

“He’ll be back,” Hadley whispered to Grace. They were sitting at the dining table, crumbs and sauce smears dirtying their paper plates. “Just wait.”

“Do you girls want any more?” Grace’s mom asked from the kitchen, gesturing toward the pizza, the cheese now cooled and dull. “Or I’ll put it away.”

“I’m full,” Hadley said, smiling, ever so polite. “Thank you.”

“Me too,” Grace said.

Grace’s mom reached into the drawer for the tin foil.

“He’ll probably call your mom before he comes back over,” Hadley whispered.

Grace glanced at her mom to make sure she wasn’t listening. “I don’t think he has her number. They were talking on Facebook.”

“I can’t wait to see his face when he shows up,” Hadley said, stifling laughter. “He’s gonna be all, ‘You didn’t give me all the parts,’ but I bet he won’t even mention the thong.”

“He might,” Grace said, playing with her crust.

“You scared?” Hadley asked, a smear of sauce on her cheek.

“No,” Grace said. “I just think he might say something.”

“I mean, it was your mom’s underwear. He’ll assume she wanted him to have them.”

Grace looked at her mother, now filling the kettle for her nightly peppermint.

*

Abigail smelled smoke before she saw the fire. At first, it felt almost comforting, a rustic scent blending with the darkness of the country roads. But as she neared the address, the aroma turned sharp and acrid. “In five hundred feet, turn left,” her GPS instructed. She could hear sirens in the distance, steadily approaching. She turned into the driveway. Flames leapt from the cottage violently, shifting erratically in the wind.

##