|
 |
Last Legs
(excerpt)
The chair didn’t belong on the curb. By the first morning of Bulky Collection Week, the halfway decent items were long gone. All that remained was junk. Gutted couches and rusted barbeque pits with coal spilling out. Bent wires and twisted metal nobody could imagine a use for. It rained the night before and the once restorable furniture was beginning to decompose like an abandoned body. The bookshelves warped into sad, wooden smiles. The dining sets collapsed into each other, metal limbs bending with the force of gravity. The mattress springs popped out like arteries. None of this was the case with the chair Dora Chandler decided to throw away. Its stocky wooden legs bowed out firmly and flowed up into the seat. It was low to the ground and Scandinavian in style, blonde and curvy. If you asked her, she’d say it looked like a Picasso. She knew a little about the old Spaniard and it seemed like this chair would’ve fit in one of his paintings, maybe as a charging bull. The chair did not belong on the street, but it didn’t have a place in her house either. Dora had come to a point where she couldn’t stand to think about it any longer, where selling or giving it away wasn’t an option. She didn’t want to imagine the chair in a happy home, resting comfortably in the middle of someone else’s living room. Knowing its destination would prolong an agony that was sinking roots into all her memories, including the seemingly trivial recollection of a night several months earlier. On that evening, her husband Carl had come home with the chair after work.
“I think it’s a Herman Miller,” he said, turning the chair over in the living room and examining its underbelly.
“Herman who?” she asked, a little tipsy from the wine she poured herself before dinner. Carl wasn’t an expert on furniture, as far she knew. He said he found the chair lying in the middle of the sidewalk, outside a downtown loft near his work.
“It’s crazy, but it looked like someone threw the damn thing out a window.” There was a small red stain on the seat. “I can’t believe it withstood the fall. Just some scrapes is all.”
“Is that blood?” Dora asked.
“It’ll come off,” Carl said, scratching it with his thumbnail. He liked fixing things up. Or he liked the pretense of fixing things up. Their garage was filled with his unfinished projects.
“Oh, you’re just an old garbage collector,” Dora said, laughing. Carl sat on the chair and pulled her down onto his lap, pinching her side.
“Garbage?” he said. “I’ll have you know this is ART, baby. ART!”
Now, every time she looked at the chair or sat down on it, she felt the sharp pinch digging into her skin - her face, warm from the wine as he stuck his thick fingers into her hair and pulled at the gray tangles.
That evening stood as one of the last carefree moments they would share. Two weeks later, a drunk slammed into the guardrail on the east side of the 360 Bridge, twisted up in the air over oncoming traffic and landed directly on top of Carl’s Buick Le Sabre. The doctors said he was killed on impact, but that’s what you pay doctors to say. While pretending to sleep in the waiting room, Dora overheard two residents talking about the accident as if it were a science experiment. The likely cause of death was an explosion from the combusted gasoline. After all, they found him under the steering wheel, hunched over and brittle from the fire. There were no cranial fractures and his chest cavity appeared intact. His body wasn’t so much crushed as it was burned. They continued talking in this fashion, happy to be free from the constraints of human tragedy. She closed her eyes tight, trying not to think about how many minutes it took for the car to explode, how many minutes he hunkered down, all but a shell, and waited. What could he have been thinking? Would he have been aware at all?
|
|