The Green Room

She comes into the green room at one in the afternoon balancing a tray in her left hand stacked with two china saucers and two china teacups and one small blue china teapot and she sets the tray down in the middle of the room before drawing the shade.
"Why do that?" the blonde-haired child asks as he pokes around the soil of a large, low-hanging rhododendron pot with a branch he has broken from the same dwarf tree. "The sun is so very white and long."
"Because, Simon, this room is green," she says as she pours out the steaming tea. "These plants would brown and wilt if I left them out in the sunlight for too long a time."
"No, that’s not right."
"Actually," she sips carefully, "The sun can hurt these plants as much as it helps them."
"But then how did these plants live before you came along to draw down the shade for them?"
"Well."
"They had to be outside."
"Well, they’re from another part of the world. A part where the sun doesn’t shine so very white and long."
"Oh," the child says and he snaps the twig between his pale hands. "May I have some tea?"
"Yes, certainly. Sugar?"
"Five spoons."
She sifts out five spoons.
"That’s too much for a boy your age."
"No. It isn’t," Simon says as he drags the old mauve armchair around to face the shaded window. Its varnished wooden feet moan against the varnished wooden floor.
"You know, when I was young, we weren’t allowed more than two," handing him his saucer. "Usually we took one or none. That’s how our parents drank it. Strong black tea is more rich and better for the body."
"It’s not the body that concerns me."
"Well, it stimulates the mind as well."
Simon looks down through the slant blinds on the window and out into the yard across the street where the grass is clipped and brown and the trees are tall and brown and the house is grey and still.
"It’s not right of you to keep these plants in here," he says. "They’re shrinking at the roots and they’ll never grow up."
"But they’d die if I didn’t."
"So what," he says and pauses to consider.
"It’s better to live and die tall and brown than to hide and be small and green."
Mrs. Basu thinks about this for a time and sips her tea and Simon looks away through the window. The tilted shadows from the blinds and the sun spill in across the green walls and across the middle of the room where they settle upon her bare forearms and lap. The white light lingers long over her skin and it feels very sharp. Mrs. Basu tries to rub the heat away but stops and quietly decides then that Simon is absolutely right, but that she would never tell him this. Her plants are healthy, perfectly healthy.

Anniversary

It is eleven o’clock and Bride’s dress is torn and she knows that if she does not mend the shoulder tonight she will be unable to do so in the morning. She will be unable to wear the garment ever again and the sight of it on her sewing chair, frayed and decumbent, will only depress her. It will remind her, when she would like nothing better than to entirely forget the consummation of this tear and go about pretending that the sleeve had not been pulled from the shoulder. Better now to patch and stitch at night before the whole dress unravels; a heap of loose thread will never do. Things seem so utterly irreparable in the light of day.
Groom snores and the chop of his snore sounds as though he is choking on his soft palate. It is a girding and returnless sound and it fills each part of the bedroom without prejudice. If the noise were to give out, Bride will know that either Groom is buoying infirmly between sleep and cognition, or that his breathing has stopped completely. She does not consider former or latter and hopes instead for the droning to continue on through the night and most of the day and that when he finally surfaces he will be resplendent and new.
Bride wonders if Groom dreams.
As she works the dress down over her mid-section, Bride watches herself in the mirror hanging on the door of her chiffonier. The light is thin but there enough, coming naked from a streetlight through the blinds. When she peels the fabric back along the widest part of her hip, she stops. She sees. Floating in the airless silver circle of the mirror, a plainness; the walls and the windows bending in and a face as muted as her breath. The eyes are dark spangles, unrecognizable, and she cannot move them into something familiar. She blinks and they do not change, arresting her with the feeling of untried discovery. They are deeper than her other two dimensions and where they bottom out she does not know. The back of the room. The back of her mind. The bed. The. Bride rakes wispy fingers through her tired hair, folding it behind her ears and smoothing it above her shoulders. Bits of it pull loose, and in the dim glow of the streetlight the wiry strands are the same tincture as her black, colorless eyes. Bride draws the hairs out and wonders where the years have gone and mutters under her breath, Mercy.
She steps free and the dress rumples quickly and quietly to the floor. Bride flicks on a small brassy light and clambers through the top drawer of her chiffonier until she finds the proper thread and needle. Groom rolls onto his back and snores with more force. From her sewing chair, Bride looks over her lap and over the room and into his mouth as it gapes and maws before she puts a basting stitch to the fabric. It is cooling fast, the warmth from her body no longer working to preserve it, and before long the dress will be a vague, heatless nap to her hands. Bride works nimbly now, but the lavender and white oleander pattern of the cloth makes the process slow going and soon she loses focus. As she bobs the needle through the ragged shoulder, Bride does not think about the long and circular motion that she weaves. She does not yet realize that the seam will not hold. All she can see is her husband’s breath moving in and out, in and out, and when she closes her eyes she hears his stale, fetid voice whisper, I do, I really do, and then him coming down heavy upon her.