Free Nightwork: Stories by Christine Schutt

have done much damage.
    “I told whoever called for you that you were dead,” the dying man says, home early and sitting on the bed.
    I ask, “How are you now?”
    He says, “What do you care?”
    Everything in the bedroom is purely itself, doorknobs, windows, dishes of loose change—and I am afraid. I am afraid the dying man will always be here, picking at his scabs, sniffing at his farts, wiping at his face with this day’s dress shirt, leaving smudge and oil and threaded juices of himself on what surfaces he passes as he goes about his dying.
    This is no place for children, I am thinking when I hear my son call out, “I’m home.”

TO HAVE AND TO HOLD
    I have accidents in the Fifth Avenue kitchen—cuts, falls, scaldings. What could I be thinking of when I scissor through a plugged cord? My sleeve catches fire on the burner, and all I do is watch its crinkling into nothing. Fast as paper, it burns, filling the kitchen with a stink of burnt hair, my hair, and that is what finally makes me run for the salt, the smell of me catching fire.
    Worse things happen in the kitchen—my husband tells me he is in love with someone else, and what do I do? I go out and buy he and she gerbils to make us feel more like a family.
    I hate the gerbils. Nothing about them is cute; they twitch and gnaw. The animals live in a plastic ight-glow cage set next to the stove, because this kitchen is small, even if it is on Fifth Avenue, and here theyscrabble and play and shred their tray paper—dirty animals that eat their own tails.
    The girl was the first at it. One morning I found her dragging her rump through the shavings, scooting around the cage, past the boy. His tail was whole; hers was stubbed, pink, wet-looking. I saw her giddy chase of it. I thought. Maybe this is a mating ritual; maybe this is natural. What do I know? Except a few days later, some of the boy’s tail was missing; now both of these cannibals are nearly tailless.
    This eating has nothing to do with making baby gerbils. I don’t think the two of them even like each other. When the gerbils escape from their cage—and they escape every night, squiggling through a gnawed-away part—I never find them huddling. I might find the boy under the sink, the girl near the warm and coiled back of the refrigerator. I catch them up with a dishcloth; I can’t stand to touch these addled savages—who could?—especially since they’ve started eating themselves.
    I want to know why my husband picked this woman to love, this woman who has been in my kitchen, who once helped me dry the silverware. This woman my husband loves is always, always on my mind here in the kitchen, where she once hugged me good-bye in her fur and pearls. I split open the coals of feeling to feel the buckle on her belt heat up in my hand. I touch her skirt and the stitched spine of her high heels. I am in a kind of hurry. I snatch at her nylons, her bag. Her bag is the color of toffee; I could eat it; I could gnaw off the clip to where the liningriffles with the scent of her perfume and pennies and lipstick. Would she want to trade her clothes for my kitchen? Does she want babies?
    The Fifth Avenue kitchen is so bright and clean. My husband says the counters are still gritty with cleanser. He says the food is ashamed to be seen.
    I admit it, I am driven. Last thing I do each night is wash my floor. One of the reasons the gerbils are such a problem is that they are so ridiculously dirty.
    I should get out of the kitchen.
    I should set the gerbils free.
    I should let the scrub pads rust and the inky vouchers stain the counters. I should mess up.
    My husband says the fridge door reads like advertisement. He says the door is not a bulletin board. He says, “Why don’t you get a date book, act like other people?”
    I thought that’s what I was doing: acting like other people. So much space glinting off the white dune of Fifth Avenue: I thought. Other people must want this, but not, it seems, the woman my