When His Window Frosts Over
Z.T. Gwynn
I’m not supposed to know about the friend of his who crashed on his couch every Sunday night and fucked him once on a Tuesday morning when roses bloomed in the sunken bowl beyond his grimy window. This friend of his cooked pasta with butter, beans out of a can, tomato soup with baby carrots cut lengthwise dropped in halfway through the boiling. He was annoyed by their habit of leaving spatulas in the pan, the pan on the burner, and the burner set to medium heat.
Smoke from the melting spatula set off the fire alarm, waking him early in the morning to pull the knob off the oven in bleary panic and wave his favorite sequin cushion beneath the alarm until the shrieking ceased. This was the pillow which his friend had fallen asleep on, but neither the yanking nor the alarm was disruptive enough to rouse them from the couch where they snored with a bowl of spaghetti balanced on their naked chest. He was more upset that his friend slept through the emergency than that they’d caused the emergency in the first place.
He has never admitted that this is why they are no longer friends.
I’ve been leaving the pizza cutter on a cookie sheet and placing that cookie sheet into the oven and setting the oven to three hundred and fifty degrees. He has not yet asked after the beeping in the kitchen or the banging that old ovens sometimes make or the unanticipated increase in heat which has encouraged him twice to turn on the AC in February. If he never asks, he will never know. If he never wants frozen pizza, he will never discover that half of the plastic handle has melted away.
I am fucking him with this anxious energy I have created. I’m bending him over the couch and giving him what he needs more often than his old friend ever did, and when it ends I will already know what I’ve done to cause it.
On a Tuesday in October his window will frost over with the cold, which will make him feel unsettled in the balls of his feet. He will decide to make a batch of cranberry scones to lighten his mood. He will sort through the baking sheet stack and hold the ruined cast-iron above his head to ask without words what has happened.
Z.T. Gwynn (he/him) currently lives in Reno but misses the Midwest. He has one partner, two cats, three defective work laptops he has forgotten to return, and four or more books in his TBR pile.