We’re Fine

by Elizabeth Vignali

The house was only one story, so it was easy to see where it began, in the top corner of the living room above the potted schefflera. The little triangular patch right where two walls met the ceiling—not much bigger than both my hands splayed out—faded till it was as thin as parchment paper and we could see the yellow leaves of the neighbor’s birch tree through our own wall. You noticed it first. You saw the yellow shapes moving like coins on the ceiling and thought it was reflected light, that the baby was playing with some shining toy on the floor.

But the baby was on my lap. I was still trying to bond with him, get him to smile
at me the way he smiled at you.

“Ba-ba-ba-ba,” I said in that nonsense way people do when they’re talking to babies. He clung to my finger but he was still looking at you, your face turned away, toward the ceiling. We both watched you. He and I thinking the same thing. Look at me. Look at me.

“I think something’s wrong with the house,” you said.

I followed your gaze but I couldn’t see it then, couldn’t see anything but your
turned-away face.

The next morning, even I had to notice. On my way to the kitchen for coffee, sunlight striking my forehead, my right ear. A small corner of the house was gone. I walked over and looked up. It was a perfect circle. No saw could make edges so clean. You’d come up behind me, so quiet I didn’t know you were there until I felt your arms slip around my sides. Pressed your cheek to my back.

“It must be a prank,” I said. “Your brother.”
“No.”
“What, then?”
“I don’t know.”

After breakfast, I pulled the ladder around the side of the house and climbed up to take a look. “Be careful,” you said from below. Your boots on the fallen yellow leaves, the baby in your arms. I hadn’t been up here yet. There was moss on the roof, a few shingles missing. The gutters were choked with leaves.

“I should clean out your gutters for you,” I said.
“Our gutters,” you said.

Through the hole, I could see my plant in its mustard-colored pot. The coffee table. Your paperback spread-eagle facedown on the glass. The couch. Cushions indented from the previous weight of our bodies. The baby’s plastic giraffe tangled in your crocheted afghan.

The hole itself was just a hole.

“I don’t understand,” I said, too quiet for you to hear. But you did see me reach
for the edge, wanting to feel the cleanness of the cut, wanting to figure it out.

“Don’t touch it!” you said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”

I pulled my hand back. Grooves from the ladder stretched from where I’d dragged it to root against the house, black dirt tracks like a railroad curving around the corner, beyond where I could see. From here, I could see the roof of the coffee shop I used to go to every morning. The red-edged tower of the old theater. The spires of the church-turned-bar where I’d seen my favorite band last year. Had I been to the bar since then?

When was the last time I went to the coffee shop? I grasped the ladder, fingers aching on the cold aluminum, and tried to remember.

“What’s happening over here?” Your neighbor propped his mug on the fence
separating the yards. “Do you guys need help with something?”
“No,” I said. Too quickly. Your reproachful look. “I’m just looking at the gutters.
Our gutters. I need to clean them out.” I don’t know why I lied; there was a hole in the
house, and small as it was it was plain to see. I watched his eyes travel from the hole to
your face.
“You sure?” he asked you.
“Yes,” you said. Shifted the baby from one hip to the other. “We’re fine.”

We couldn’t see it happening, but by late afternoon we were sure the hole was a little bigger than it had been that morning. The edges weren’t as clean, either. They were blurred, almost. The walls and ceiling around the hole were thin and faded, as if the house was a pencil drawing slowly being erased. By evening, the translucence had crept down the wall. The top of the schefflera was vanishing. The leaves nearest the empty spot were curled up.

We kept an eye on the baby, but he wasn’t interested in the corner anyway. He grasped the edge of the coffee table and pulled himself up on chubby legs, wobbly but determined. He lost his grip and sat down hard. Pulled up again. His open smile, only for you.

“He’ll be walking soon,” you said.
The plant bothered me. I stood and walked closer to the corner, studying it.
“Do you think it’s too late to move it?” I asked.
You weren’t listening.
“Want a beer?” you asked. “I’m getting one.”

While you were in the kitchen, I got down on the floor and army-crawled toward the plant. It felt ridiculous, ducking to avoid a hole, but the thought of getting to my feet beneath it made the hair on my neck stand up. I grasped the heavy ceramic pot and tugged it toward me, grunting and awkward with the lack of leverage. Still, managed to move it a couple feet, enough that it was out of the way of danger. I stood again and looked at the plant, half expecting the disappeared section to be back, but it was still gone. I passed my hand through the air where the top of the plant used to be.

You returned from the kitchen, a beer in each hand. You gave me one bottle and drank from the other, your lips wrapped around the neck in a way that took my attention from the hole in the house.

“It’s actually kind of nice in a weird way, isn’t it?” you said, looking at the stars
through the wall.

We retreated to the bedroom sooner than we had to, in retrospect. The rest of the house sort of seemed superfluous, anyway. We’d always preferred the bedroom. For a
while, we could still get to the kitchen when we needed to, laughing at each other as we absurdly hugged the wall in order to avoid nothing.

You had the foresight to bring food to the bedroom, paper bags stuffed with crackers and carrots and cheese, grocery shopping in our own house. You even remembered to grab the remote before it was too late, to turn the television so it was facing the hallway to the bedrooms, so we could sit in the doorway to what used to be your living room and watch baseball until the television vanished too. Then the baby used the remote as a teether, pressed the hard plastic against his sore gums, drool all over the power button.

The plates began to pile up in the bathroom, crusted with food, but neither of us felt like doing the dishes with hand soap and washcloths in the bathroom sink. “Watch,” I said. Balled up my paper towel and threw it toward the emptiness. It disappeared. We got a little carried away then, fetched the dirty dishes from the bathroom and flung them like frisbees and watched them vanish into thin air. It was fun at the time, but we didn’t have any plates to eat on after that.

No one came by, except once, when your neighbor’s teenage son knocked on our
bedroom window. I slid it open.

“You want your lawn mowed?” he asked.
I turned to you.
“Sure,” you said. “Hang on.” You had on underwear and a threadbare tank top,
and I watched his eyes track your progress across the room until I moved to stand in the way. His eyes slid the other direction. You found your purse under a pile of dirty
laundry. Pulled a twenty from your wallet. You handed it to me. I handed it to him.

“Thanks,” I said, and shut the window.

Every day—sometimes twice a day—I pulled the schefflera a little further away from the growing erased area. I waited for you to tell me to just go ahead and move the plant all the way into the bedroom, where it would be safe, but you never did.

Then one day, the schefflera vanished. I’d moved it bit by bit into the hallway, where it blocked our view of the disappearing house. But the erasing was happening faster than I realized, and one morning when I filled an empty yogurt container from the bathroom faucet and went to water the plant, it was gone. I stood in the remaining half of the hallway and looked out. It was raining out there in the rest of the world, a rain so cold it was nearly snow. There were no leaves left on the neighbor’s birch. The naked branches black against the clouds.

I heard your bare feet come up behind me.

“It’s gone,” I said.
“I know, honey,” you said.
I put my arm around you and pulled you close. We watched the freezing rain till
you started to shiver. I rubbed your arms, pulled you close.
“Come on,” I said and slid my hands to your hips. “May as well go back to bed.”

You were sleeping when the bedroom wall began to fade. I woke you up.
“The baby,” I said.

You got up and walked naked to the doorway, peeked across what remained of
the hall toward where the baby’s room was. You came back, your skin prickled with cold. Lifted the covers and burrowed against me.

“It’s too late,” you said.
I sat up, wanting to see for myself. If there was anything to be done. You pulled
me back down, your skin warm again already.
“It’s okay. I’m sure my mother got him.”

I didn’t ask how your mother would have known, how she would have reached him. Easier to run my hands down your back, pull you on top of me, push your head gently into my neck so you wouldn’t see the encroaching eraser, the slow disappearance of the door to the bathroom, your grandmother’s old oak bureau, our pile of crumpled laundry.

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Elizabeth Vignali is the author of three poetry chapbooks, the latest of which is Endangered [Animal] (Floating Bridge Press 2019), and the full-length collection House of the Silverfish (forthcoming from Unsolicited Press). Her work has received special notice from the Pushcart Prize anthology and appeared in Willow Springs, Cincinnati Review, Mid-American Review, Tinderbox, The Literary Review, and others. She lives in the Pacific Northwest, where she works as an optician, coproduces the Bellingham Kitchen Session reading series, and serves as poetry editor of Sweet Tree Review.