The Sink

A thought struck me today. Not a spectacularly clever one really, so perhaps it didn't strike, but rather bonked or doffed. But, what if I were to run a cleansing exercise (for personal reasons... I am finding a possessive crest rising along my spine. I am becoming a reptile. I need to inspect this closely...) at the same time as writing a story LIVE as it were (unedited, unfermented, unmediated by time. Though it is an story that occured to me 3 or so years ago because of a vision abnormality I had. It's since disappeared). So I tied up the odd email, bought a coffee, went outside for a smoke, pinched and ate a half gram of mushrooms (dear roommate: the little beggars were asking for it. i swear its not for [purely] recreational reasons), sat back down feeling as if EVERYBODY knew what I'd been outside for, fired up Amon Tobin... and here we go (see if you can catch their onset):

The Sink

If she hadn't taken the mallet to the sink, she could've bought that dishwasher they'd always talked about. Instead, that money went straight down the drain: plumbing fees (emergency, if only for the dire need to have someone see her wringing her hands), the two-basin steel replacement, the superficial damages from the ensuing flood and inexact method of the actual extraction. Now, there she was, always there but never there, suds deep, cutlery clunking dully like someone climbing up a pool ladder, staring at this tinkered remembrance. A brand new waste receptical. This sink would never be clean. How portentous, an old thought for Judith, but not yet old enough. And how boring! The day the ring had swirled down the drain was the day he'd not returned. That evening, eyes slanted, she'd watched Paul Jr., only 4 then, eating his lasagne, straining at the words with which she'd tell Paul about the sunk ring. Casually, of course, as if pointing out PJ's new haircut or fingerworming a hole in somebody's sock. How too to entwine the statement with the obvious question. Put PJ to bed with a book and a few coos to his questions. And sat longer, head in her forearm crook, staring at the plate. Damned if she was going to clear up after Paul this time. Ran to the phone. Called the cops. No ma'am. One sleepless night later, now knowing, she'd strode, nightgown flowing, past the plate of hideous lasagne into the kitchen with a fucking sledgehammer. First strike glanced off the counter to smash a floortile. But the next folded forward the lip of steel, took the door off the cabinet and felt orderly. Felt right. Boom. Boom. Anvil to her anger. Splinters of a size she'd not imagined fell off the head of the mallet on her upswing. And the downswing! A carribean steel-drum band of singular intent; all the marriage bands in the world in a cosmic bag hitting the face of the sun; the last curseword of a doomed jumbojet; it was a sound that only the clutch she had on that handle could produce. Eventually, her breathing actually becalmed through all that effort, she rolled up her sleeves and bent into that hissing, spluttering wound and plucked up the ring. Turning on one foot and popping open the wastebin with the other, she dangled the delicate morsel over the maw, inspecting the sapphire for only the briefest of moments, and let go.

And here was Judith. At the sink.

MERCY! here's perhaps the moment I need to reflect. the story i had in my head IS SO VERY DIFFERENT. i'll print this and start again. poor Judith and PJ are actually supposed to be in a much worse predicament than this.