TILTED HOUSE
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Fiction

[ F I C T I O N ]

 
 
 
 

New Slippers

 

Maybe it will soon be time to elect a champion. I’ve always wanted to elect a champion. Mona tells me it’s a stupid dream. Champions aren’t elected, she says, they earn their title. Then she’ll add something snarky, like: Why don’t you earn something for a change? I suppose she’s right. But is it not also true that, election or not, champions are only champions because people have deemed it so? Because someone, at some point in time, decided this was what a champion would be? Why, without they who elect it, a champion is little more than a happy face in the mirror. And half the time they’re not even happy. Still, I can’t help thinking it’d be nice to elect one.

For a long time, Mona complained about creaks. This door, that door. “We’ve had creaks for weeks!” That’s what she said. Not even a smile. So I went from hinge to hinge with a can of WD-40. Now she complains that the bedroom door won’t stay open; it closes all on its own. Too much WD-40, she says. Can’t you do anything right? The men at work had a good laugh at this one. I mean, who’s ever heard of too much WD-40?

And then there are the chairs. We have fourteen times more chairs in the house than people. Seven times more chairs than people we have ever had in the house. Mona sits in one chair; it’s her chair. She says the rest are for guests. Reasonable. Except we moved in during COVID, and guests, these days, are obsolete. It’s lonely, and the chairs do little to make up for the loneliness. I’ve taken to sitting in a new one each day, just to ward off the desuetude.

I’m drinking too much coffee again. Mona tells me every cup over two a day is a day slashed off my life. At this rate, I’ll die in twenty-seven years. Besides, she says, it makes you limp. If I favor her in my bed and not my friend’s, she says, try something like eleuthero instead, it’s what the Russian astronauts used to take in space. I don’t say it, but, with the warm mug in my hands, I always think: It’s worth it. I’d much rather my heart pop before my brain turns to slop.

It’s winter, and my feet are cold. They’ve been cold for a month. I ordered a pair of Minnetonka slippers online. They arrived in the mail. Two weeks ago. But Mona says I can’t wear my new slippers until she cleans them. And she won’t clean them until she cleans the house. And when she cleans the house, it’s just not clean enough yet. I offer to clean them and the house, in whatever order she prefers. She says no. Won’t offer a reason. It’s like looking at the website of a ski resort when you want to hit the slopes, and every day the report reads: Mountain Closed, Conditions Unsuitable. You know it’s perfect out there, but the mountain is closed and the lifts are at a standstill. I wonder if I’ll ever get to wear my slippers. Perhaps by summer. When my feet begin to sweat.

Mona and I are no longer together. It came as a surprise to no one. In this house at least. Mona took the house, as was only natural; I took the rain and snow. I have no idea what became of the chairs. A few months later, I met someone else and set my pieces down to play the game anew. You can imagine what a bummer it was to discover that Bill runs his house the exact same way.

 
 

G. R. Bilodeau is a peripatetic peddler from the banks of the Ramapo River. Author of the chapbook Somewhere in Between (Charybdis Press, 2021), their work has appeared most recently or is forthcoming in Burrow Press Review, Twin Pies Literary, HASH Journal, SurVision, and As of Late, among other journals and anthologies.

 
G. R. Bilodeau