A Story Start.

“I have something I need to tell you,” she said.

Oh no. Not one of these conversations, he thought. There was something slightly rumpled-looking about her today, and this was unlike her. I should have known.

This here was the woman who cut the crusts off sandwiches, followed by cutting them in diagonals. She liked making food with right angles in it. She liked A-seam skirts rummaged about for in the 1980s clothing piles found in basements and at estate sales. He had never even been to an estate sale. There was something so straight and so upright about her. So to have the same woman appear before him, flushed red in the face, hair done up in a ponytail stuck straight on top of her head—he didn’t know what to do with her. She even looked sweaty, wearing an oversized sweatshirt and black leggings..

I really want to bat at her ponytail, he secretly wished. It was the kind of ponytail that belongs to a two-year old girl with thin hair, scraped up by her hopeful mother and put in a scrunchie. The rest of the body did not belong to a little girl, Janie with her curvy figure standing barely below his height. But Peter decided that now would not be the time to joke around with Janie, or play with her hair. Instead he began to do the dishes; scrub, rinse, dry. Repeat.

In between the time when a bomb is dropped, there is a grand pause. There is a breath that is taken, sucked in, and held. Blood vessels begin to pulse and ears ring. Because it was far easier to feel nothing at all, Peter coped with the bombs that Janie dropped on him by keeping his thoughts to himself. He preferred a surprise attack. That way, when it came time for war, he couldn’t feel the anticipatory stress that came along with it. Janie was hot or cold, black or white, sobbing or ecstatic. And because of this, Peter remained an ever-constant, ever-steady lukewarm human being.