ST2.6 | "A Process"

PROMPT: Home is where the noir is. This month, we’re looking for stories set at home, wherever that is. Apartments. The suburbs. A townhouse. An RV. Under an overpass. We all need to lay our head somewhere, and while we imagine it to always be safe, sometimes that’s just wishful thinking.

A PROCESS

by Maggie Nerz Iribarne

On her way through the familiar lobby, Margaret passed Superintendent Kevin, or K-man, as Phil used to call him. He twisted in his swivel chair, his legs spread, knees loose, flowing with the rolling movement. He looked her right in the eye, said, Good morning, but did not produce her name. She forced one confident glance before moving with purpose to the stairwell. No worries about K-man, she thought. K-man didn’t remember or notice anything special about her. K-man hadn’t moved from his perch in all the twenty years she’d lived in the building, except to plod across the lobby to shovel doughnut holes down his throat at the occasional coffee social.

It had been a year since she’d entered this stairwell, but the flesh-colored paint still caused a slight anxiety creep. Margaret tilted her head, scanning the zigzag of railings to the rooftop seventh floor, remembering how as a young graduate student, a newlywed, this building had stood as a brick symbol of hope and promise, straight and steady like a bookmark holding a page in a favorite novel. It said, I’ll keep you safe, far away from your silly drunken mother and distant father and perverse brother. In the beginning she believed herself safe within this building. She believed herself safe with Phil.

On the first floor, the lingering scent of some unknown person’s body odor overcame the space. Phil’s smell, Margaret thought. In the beginning, he was a firefighter, hunky in his black boots and flame-resistant jacket. He’d responded to another of her mother’s small fires, holding court in their linoleum nightmare kitchen and smiling at the sweet sadness of the scene. On their fourth date, he shared how impressed he was with Margaret’s smarts. He held her thin body in his powerful arms, whispered into her hair, I’ll take care of you, protect you, forever. His smell wasn’t repellent then. It was juicy, real, a comfort.

The crater Phil punched in the second-floor stairwell wall remained, a spiderweb of cracks emerging from a dented center.

That first time, the time Margaret said she’d like to make Thanksgiving herself to avoid their respective families, she’d been shocked by Phil’s eruption of anger. As though there was no choice but to knock her senseless if she remained near his rising fist, he pushed on her shoulder with his left hand and punched the wall with his right. Later, after apologizing and enveloping her in a stifling hug, he asked her to read to him from his high school copy of Romeo and Juliet, which she did, although she was a nineteenth century gothic person, not a Shakespeare person, but it was all the same to Phil. At the end of their plodding, plundering sex, she gazed past him, feeling a numbing sadness at the sight of their wedding photo propped on the television stand.

On their old floor, the third, she slowed, her legs growing heavy as she remembered those final years living in the building, all the times she didn’t want to return home. She’d dragged her feet each day, finding one more thing to research at the library, walking one more circle around the block, running one more errand. Phil grew a beard, finished his degree, and became a science teacher. His scent turned sour. At four o’clock each day, he held court at the dining room table, a constant, marmoreal presence, his blood red pen hovering above quizzes and tests. At dinner he’d regale her with stories of his prowess in the classroom, how the kids adored him, how someone of his caliber was so necessary. Watching Jeopardy, he’d sit tense and upright in his chair, yelling over Margaret’s answers and saying that’s what I meant when the correct answer was called. He’d developed opinions, commented on the wastefulness of Margaret’s endless research compared to his useful profession. After dinner he rose behind her at the kitchen sink, a thick horny tree, bare and breathing, his limbs scratching, entrapping her.

On a whim, Margaret opened the sixth-floor door to check for the black cat, but a look to the right and left proved fruitless. Its owner, Mrs. Oponski, was dead.

Margaret had grown close to her elderly neighbor, visited her every day, enjoying her offers of sweet wine, homemade soups, stews, and salads. Mrs. Oponski possessed quite an indoor garden and had a way in the kitchen.

Mrs. Oponski makes things taste good! she said with her thick Polish accent. Why don’t you leave him? she said.

I’ll never finish my dissertation if I leave, Margaret said. I can’t support myself. Not yet.

Why can’t you finish?

I don’t know. I want to. I just—

Mrs. Oponski held both Margaret’s hands in hers and recited the Hail Mary in Polish.

Zdrowaś Maryjo . . .

It was Mrs. Oponski’s idea, what happened to Phil.

Margaret burst through the seventh-floor door, out of the confining stairwell into the fresh May air. Phil had teased her about her fear of heights. He was a fireman, after all.
I’m used to putting myself in harm’s way, he often bragged.

Little did he know, Margaret thought, Mrs. Oponski’s soup would prove more harmful than any tall, fiery building.

She pushed the rush of memories of that last day, of gasps and gags, flailing hands, a spilled bowl of borscht, a gaping mouth, dead Phil’s dead weight.

Planes careened overhead, cars zigzagged on the ground below, voices lifted up on the wind, but Margaret ignored it all, moving decisively to the rooftop’s silent center, the sagging symbol of her once-beleaguered heart.

She unlocked the defunct greenhouse door with the key Mrs. Oponski gave her, of which she had promised there was only one. The door whined as she pushed it open, exposing a grey, muffled light, a heavy musty smell. Inside, cracked clay pots, rusted rakes and spades were scattered about, abandoned, forgotten, remnants of the building’s better days.

She approached the corner table, pulled back the tarp laid one year before.

There he was, blue-gray Phil, smelling no different than the rest of the place, of must, of dust.

He had said he wanted to donate his body to science. Yes, he is coming along nicely, Margaret thought, the skeletonization stage well underway.

She needed to share this day with him.

At the worst moments of their marriage, she believed he would never change, she could never change him, their circumstances. Look at us both, utterly transformed, she thought. She’d put on a few pounds, colored her hair red, had a new skeleton tattoo etched on her right shoulder.

“I’m finished with you now, Phil. I’m useful, and you’re useless.”

She removed her graduation cap from her purse, leaned it against Phil’s diminishing skull, shading his hollowed eyes. She tucked the tarp around him. Then, she moved away, locked the door behind her, leaving Phil there, forever.

Margaret’s graduation gown fluttered as she flew down the stairs, spiraling down the building’s weathered spine, like vertebrae bulging, bursting beneath her hurried steps.

Maggie Nerz Iribarne is 54, lives in Syracuse, NY, bakes up sometimes crispy, sometimes dense, sometimes fluffy cakes of curious people and places, recurring thoughts of dread, haunting memories, and the occasional sugar cookie. She keeps a portfolio of her published work at https://www.maggienerziribarne.com.