by Francesca Leader

‘Come on, baby!’

He sidles up behind me to kiss my ear as I’m washing dishes.

I flinch away. That entitlement smell makes my clitoris shrivel like one of the worm-eaten crabapples on our neglected lawn. Other lawns, other houses (he imagines) take care of themselves. Like other families—each wife and child pert and vibrant as a blade of effortless evergreen fescue.

‘See that last pic I sent?’

‘Nope.’

He doesn’t sext me; he sends me house porn: cast-iron tubs evoking candle-lit bubble baths; Brazilian hardwoods gleaming like a supermodel’s thighs.

Stunning rockwork patio! he captions.

Amazing in-home movie theater!

As if we could move into that house—or any other house but the one we’re stuck with—and be the kind of family that roasts marshmallows and plays charades, watches movies in leather recliners with built-in cupholders.

‘You’d love the kitchen in this place,’ he says. ‘It’s gorgeous.’

‘I don’t want a gorgeous kitchen. I want no kitchen at all.’

‘What’s up with you tonight?’

He enjoys acting blindsided, as if my resentment popped up suddenly, like mushrooms, instead of spreading gradually, like black mold. As if a dank dripping of betrayal hadn’t fed it for years.

Most recently, the raunchy photos and ‘I miss you’ texts I found on his phone last week, which made me think, as I screenshotted, New Construction! Move-In Ready! The slinky brunette looked like the human analogue of glass and black marble, stainless steel sub-zero appliances, walk-in closets lined with cedar, Japanese toilets that wash and warm your ass.

‘Nothing’s ever good enough for you,’ I say, voicing a truth my mother saw after ten minutes, and I only after ten years.

‘Just want the best for our family, baby.’

He tries another kiss. I dodge away, dry a plate with shaking hands, because I don’t want to dry it—I want to smash it.

I think how he forces the kids to pose for pictures in front of other people’s better homes and gardens (the ones he thinks he wishes were his), smiling like their lives depended on it, the gun of or else at their backs. They still think they can please him, poor things. The sour sink steam burns my face like sadness. But it’s beyond me to grieve as I did when I first understood what I always was: a teardown he’d one day raze, if he could get away with it, making way for the palace of his dreams.

‘You wanna turn me on?’ I ask.

‘Of course, baby.’

Turns out it’s not just him getting off on the idea of starting over. My fantasies, though, are reductive. I crave not more, but less.

‘Find me a nice 500-square foot A-frame in the woods.’

He scoffs at me—the run-down house, the un-green grass, on his side of the fence.

‘How the hell would you expect us all to fit in there?’

‘Maybe we all wouldn’t,’ I say. And I let the plate fall to the floor.

oOo

Francesca Leader is a writer and artist whose fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Wigleaf, the J Journal, CutBank, Coffin Bell, and elsewhere. Her flash story “Like Baked Alaska” was selected as runner-up in the 2020 “Big Sky, Small Prose” flash fiction contest. You can connect with her on Instagram (@moon.in.a.bucket) and Twitter (@mooninabucket).