flash fiction by Elle Enderlin
The coffee is brewed, the dishes done, the house silent, and you are in the zone. Finally, the words are flowing. It’s a story you’ve been meaning to write forever, but somehow you never do. Maybe it will get written today.
And then you hear a door closing—not slamming, just closing with a kind of blunt finality, announcing “I am home.” Footsteps pound through the kitchen and into the living room, where you have set up shop on the couch: laptop, coffee, notebook, pen, a blanket over your knees to cut the chill.
The man of the house has come home, and he is on the phone. He sits down in the chair across from you. He is talking in his outside voice. He is making deals, setting meetings, participating in the work of the world.
You pick up your laptop, your coffee cup, your pen, your notebook, and carry everything down the hall to the bedroom. You close the door and set up your makeshift office in bed. You try to return to the zone. It’s not easy, reentering the fictional dream after the dream is broken, so you write the first thing that comes to you, a title: “The Man of the House Comes Home.”
You begin this story, which is about him but not about him, which is about love and interruption, but mostly interruption. You love him, this man who comes home most days at seven in the evening but today at noon, en route to a different meeting. He is a kind man, a wise man, a man who, like so many men you have known, and possibly every man you have slept with, still quotes Apocalypse Now on occasion. It is the ultimate man’s movie, these men who have some inkling of the beast within them, but who are by no means beastly. These men who imagine the great escape. These men who are expected to behave heroically (and sometimes do) but who secretly long to be anti-hero instead, loved and lauded for all the wrong reasons.
You love him of course, that is not the issue. But sometimes the space he takes up is bigger than the space you have.
And then he is walking down the hallway, calling your name, and then he is opening the door to the bedroom, a second zone breached, the story ending before it began.
“Hey,” he says. “I hope I wasn’t too loud.”
He wants your intellectual opinion on a matter of some importance. You can say that about him: he is always seeking your opinion. He wants to bounce ideas off of you. He wants to know if you agree with his approach for the meeting he is heading off to, or if you would do it differently.
“Okay but I’m writing,” you say.
“Literature?” he asks, wryly but not unkindly, because it has been so long since you have written fiction, beset as you are by the labors of the home: which is not to say that you cook well or clean well or even take on the majority of the domestic duties, only that you have a teenager, which makes you feel exhausted, incompetent, physically necessary yet existentially unneeded.
“Not exactly,” you say.
His curiosity is piqued. He always wants to know what you are writing. He is, after all, your biggest fan, will always set aside what he is doing to talk about what you are writing, to read it, to praise it, to offer suggestions, most of which are excellent.
“What are you writing then?” he asks, the meeting of great importance momentarily forgotten.
“It’s called ‘The Man of the House Comes Home,’” you say.
He smiles. “I like it.” He turns to leave. “I’m sorry. You were working, it can wait.”
You close your laptop, slide it off of your lap, turn your focus on him. He is wearing good jeans and a button-down, the uniform of the mature modern male professional in the unwild west. You are wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt he bought you on one of his trips, bearing the name of a city you’ve never been to, in a country known for its bright blue waters and occasional terroristic bombings. The latest bombing happened in the very hotel he had stayed in, just days after he checked out. You live with the uncomfortable knowledge that his job is not quite safe, that one of his trips might well end in disaster. This may be, after all, why you tolerate his interruptions: you secretly fear any one of them could be the last.
“It’s okay. What were you saying?”
He comes to sit on the edge of the bed. A conversation will ensue. This is what you do together. This is marriage. You hate being interrupted, but if you must be interrupted you’re glad that he is the one to do it. And without these interruptions, what would get written anyway? You don’t really like to leave the house. You are not good at getting out there. He gets out there and participates vividly in the world and brings home this energy, these ideas. You will have the conversation and then you will write the story, cannibalizing the life he lives out there for the things you write in here, inside this domestic sphere, on the couch or on the bed or sometimes in the kitchen, where you sometimes stand—not to cook but to write, when your back is tired from sitting, when you are waiting for more coffee to brew.
The man of the house is home. In a few minutes he will leave, and you will take up where you left off.
Elle Enderlin lives and writes in bed in the Pacific Northwest.