Mute
by Desiree Parker
January 6, 2009 — Published in Pithy Tales
His was a good house, by most standards, though perhaps he could have painted the shutters and trim more often, and weeded the garden, and replaced the rusting mailbox that never closed anymore.
The kitchen was an out-dated shade of blue with an overwhelming fruit motif: large apples and cherries on the wallpaper border, a ceramic spoon rest shaped like a banana, and over the table in the breakfast nook hung a picture of a fruit bowl that was a poor quality print, a copy of a stale copy of a painting that was in every art student’s textbook, though no one bothered remembering it after the exam. The outlines of the fruit were wispy, made with broad strokes that merely suggested something edible, and he often wondered as he sat down with his morning cereal what made this a famous painting. It followed the motif, though, and this had been reason enough for him to hang the thing over the table.
He finished his cup of coffee on this particular morning at the same time he always did, just before eight o’clock.
The baby and the wife made a ruckus in the living room. Just like every other morning, he heard the tinkling of television shows with dancing puppets that were overly cheerful and the rattle of endless toys with plastic trinkets inside and out, their shapes and colors always intact no matter how often they were smashed on the lip of the coffee table.
He heard the wife cooing and fussing and preening; she was a fluttering bird there in her favorite room full of dust-catchers and pictures in frames and with the large flat-screen television in its new, faux-mahogany cabinet that loomed over the room like a proud cock over his hens. She had found the cabinet on sale. It almost matched the coffee table and end tables, just a shade off, but it provided shelter for the daily parade of bobbing, singing characters that entranced the baby as he sat in his drool-stained plastic play station.
The man saw this bit of the routine in his mind’s eye without having to divert his gaze from the sink where he stood with the carafe in hand, pouring the extra cups of brewed coffee down the drain. He always made extra cups just in case he might want a refill. He rarely did. The brown liquid steamed over stray cheerios and swirled crumbs and debris down the sink and into his new garbage disposal that could grind the toughest leftovers into a slimy goop that slid easily down the pipes and out of his way. On Saturdays he would grind eggshells in it to keep the blades sharp, though he wasn’t certain that this helped or whether the idea was just a myth.
The fish hovered in its tiny bowl beside the sink and watched the man with an impassive expression. Fishes’ faces were not made for expression, only for filtering water, capturing food, and blowing bubbles, though sometimes the man watched as the wife peered closely at that scaly countenance as though she expected something more.
The fish was a betta named Charlie. Charlie tirelessly made bubble sculptures above the scummy water that the wife would scoop out every Friday because she swore that the bubble-scum smelled especially fishy. Charlie didn’t like company; he had killed the goldfish that the wife had picked up at the fair over the summer, and so was left to his own devices there in the water. He had replaced the three generations of similarly-colored bettas that had swum and died in the same tiny, glass bowl since the man had purchased the first, Buddy, for the wife. The others had tolerated occasional fish companions. Not Charlie. He was exceptional.
In the mornings Charlie floated, nearly immobile, below the leaves of the real-looking plastic plant. In the afternoons he would move to the glass cherries that the wife had put inside and would hide just under the fragile, joined stems. The wife had said Charlie looked pretty there, a shimmering blue and purple fish with its flowing fins tickling the red globes. Lovely.
As the man stood at the sink waiting for the last of the coffee to swirl away, his gaze wandered to Charlie. The fish seemed to be looking at the brown coffee stain left on the white enamel of the sink. The man looked at the stain, too. “Never know when you might need more coffee,” he said to his fish.
The fish hovered, waved its fins, opened and closed its mouth.
“What’s that?” called the wife.
“Eeeeahhh,” the baby echoed.
He put the carafe down next to the rest of his dirty breakfast dishes and turned to the fish again. “It’s just coffee. It’s not a waste if you might need it.”
The wife poked her head into the kitchen. “What was that, Dear?”
“Nothing,” he said. His hand accidentally caught the empty coffee mug sitting on the counter and sent it skittering across the hardwood floor. The wife ran and picked it up.
“Can’t believe it didn’t break,” the man said. “There’s craftsmanship for you. Solid.”
She frowned. “It has a chip here on top,” she said, her manicured nail picking at a white, chalky groove that marred the shiny finish.
He looked back at Charlie, but the fish had turned to face the other direction. The wife left his broken mug on the counter and went back into her room.
Having his morning routine disrupted made the man irritable. At work his stapler, which had always been reliable, began making only mangled staples that poked his fingers when he touched them. His secretary Delores, whom he had chosen for her perfectly secretarial name, had put on too much perfume, which gave him a low-grade headache that his painkiller didn’t alleviate. His ten o’clock meeting lasted well past lunch, causing his sandwich to become soggy. At one thirty, he decided to walk across the street to the café at the corner and restore his equilibrium.
His boss was in the café at a corner table with another manager from the regional office. The man chose to sit outside so as not to disturb them, because making small talk with men who controlled his destiny made him particularly uncomfortable. The boss nodded once in greeting, but made no further effort at conversation. The man was glad.
He ordered an egg salad sandwich on wheat with sprouts, an expensive bottled water, and a side of fruit salad.
“What, no Caesar salad?” the waitress asked.
“I just felt like a change today, that’s all,” the man said. He turned his head to watch the people walking down the sidewalk, and she retreated.
His boss made his way over to the man’s table just as lunch arrived. The other manager had disappeared, though the man did not remember seeing him leave. Or perhaps he had seen and forgotten.
“Bill,” the boss said.
“Mr. Lentz.”
“Long meeting, eh?”
“Yes, sir. Not much got done, really.”
“Right, Bill. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I’m thinking of sending you over to the old plant, to make sure things there get done more effectively from now on.”
The man took a sip of his water. He put the bottle down in the center of the napkin, directly on the wet ring from which had come. “I’d prefer not to, sir.”
His boss rubbed his bulbous nose. It was an ugly nose, not to be taken lightly. “Well, Bill, it’d only be for a year or so.”
The man looked down at his plate.
“Really, we need you there. Otherwise … ” he trailed off.
The man looked up and his boss was already on the sidewalk, headed in the direction of the office. “See you at the three o’clock meeting, Bill,” he called over his shoulder. “You and the wife’ll like it down there. Lots of open country. Fresh air. Nice change from all this smog and traffic.” He disappeared into the crowd.
The last man that had been sent to the old plant had been laid off after two months. No severance.
The man bit his cheek twice while eating his sandwich.
The waitress brought the wrong change.
It was not a good day.
When he got home, the wife was in the kitchen cooking. He put down his briefcase and lined his shoes up near the back door. He walked to the pantry and pulled out the Grey Goose and poured himself a drink. When he pushed the ice maker tab on the fridge, the machine made a clunking and whirring noise as though it were trying to comply with its master’s wishes, but couldn’t. No ice fell into his glass.
“Every goddamned thing isn’t working in this house,” he muttered.
The wife looked over her shoulder at him. “Everything is working but the ice maker. I think it’s just jammed.”
“So why didn’t you call the repairman?”
“It’s easy to fix. I just have to open it up and pull out the jammed ice. Or you could do it.” She turned back to her cooking.
The man took his warm drink to the table and sat down.
“We have to move to the country,” he said. He looked up at the fruit picture, which was leaning to the left.
The wife bent over the counter and peered into the fishbowl. “You called after lunch and told me. Remember? But look at this.”
“I’m serious. About the country. I’m getting moved to the old plant. Soon.” He took a gulp of his warm drink. The baby crawled over to his feet from its position next to the counter. It tapped its father’s socks, tap, tap.
The wife slowly rotated the bowl to the right, once, twice, three times, until she had turned it full circle. “I can’t see Charlie,” she said. “He’s not in here.”
The man slid the baby across the floor with his foot and stood up. “How could a fish disappear? It’s in there somewhere. But didn’t you hear what I said? We have to leave soon.” He walked over to the counter where the wife was standing, her hair a frizzy mess, her face pale and set in a frown. Her clothes were a size to big for her. Really, she was looking a bit sick.
“I forgot to scoop out the bubbles last Friday. Maybe that made him upset,” she said.
“Fish don’t have feelings. And there’s nowhere for him to go.” The man leaned over and peered in the bowl, too.
As they looked for the fish the baby came around the corner of the counter, crawling as it usually did with one leg down and one leg up, pulling along the floor on its bum. It stopped mid-scoot, put both feet down, and stood up. It walked over to its father and wrapped its chubby arms around the man’s leg, nestling one cheek against a knee.
“You’re right. I don’t see it. Where the hell could it have gone to?”
“I don’t know. It was here at lunch. We got home from the baby’s six-month checkup and I fed him before I ate. He was right there.”
The man looked at his wife, then back at the bowl. “What the hell.”
“Exactly.”
As they waited for Charlie to reappear, the dinner managed to burn. They ate the charred chicken breasts anyway, in silence, while occasionally peeking over to the bowl to reconfirm to themselves that something out of the ordinary had happened.
The baby didn’t walk again that day.
The man had trouble sleeping that night, as did the wife, though neither realized the other was awake.
In the morning, the baby refused to go into the living room, positioning itself directly in the center of the kitchen floor and screaming each time his mother tried to coax him into her favorite room.
The kitchen seemed very crowded to the man.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” the wife said from the floor. She was on her knees looking at the baby. “C’mon, Honey, let’s go watch television, come with Mama.”
The baby played with its toes and refused to comply.
The man stepped around the wife and baby with his cereal bowl in one hand, his coffee in the other. He sloshed milk onto the floor. The baby stuck his hand in the drops and wiped the milk around the freshly polished wood. The man sighed and ate his breakfast as he stood beside the sink. He did not have a second cup of coffee at home; instead, he filled up a travel mug. He did not shave. He did not look at the picture of the fruit. He did, however, peer into the fishbowl again.
“I just can’t imagine what happened to the fish. Just tell me, did you take it out? As a joke? Because really, it’s not a good joke.” He scowled at his wife, who was still crouching on the floor.
“What, Dear?” She looked up. “I put some food in this morning to see if he was hiding or … or if he was invisible, or something. Some fish can blend in with their environment, I heard it on a documentary, and they look invisible. Like a flounder, I think. I mean, you can’t see them, but they’re there. But he’s blue. And he didn’t come up for the food.”
“Don’t forget, the company will call with the details of the move today, so you’ll have to deal with it.”
The baby threw a hard, plastic toy at the man, hitting him squarely in the knee.
“Ow, goddammit!” The man kicked the toy to the far side of the room.
“You’ll be late,” the wife said. “I’ll get a new fish today for the bowl, I just hate to not have a fish.” She got up from the floor and retrieved the toy and then she and the man looked in the bowl one last time.
The baby walked over to the telephone stand, kneeled, stuck his head and arms through the shelf on the bottom, and unplugged the phone. Then he sat down and played with his father’s discarded house slipper.
At work that day the man had little work on his desk. Everyone had been informed that he was leaving and they were now taking their questions elsewhere. He tried to fix the stapler, but he wasn’t very handy and only managed to jam it further.
At lunch, he placed his blue lunch case on his desk and opened it. Inside, lying beneath his wrapped turkey and Havarti sandwich on rye, was Charlie’s lifeless body. The whole plastic-lined case smelled faintly of seaweed, but not fishy like the man expected.
He picked up the phone to call the wife, to yell at her about her stupid joke. The line was dead.
“Delores,” he called. She stuck her head in the door. “My phone doesn’t work.”
“They disconnected it.”
“I haven’t left yet; I can’t see why they would do that,” he said. “Does yours work?”
“No.”
“What are you doing out there, then?”
She patted her curls. “I’m waiting for lunch,” she said, and went back to her desk.
He flipped open his cell phone but he knew it was a wasted effort since he got no signal in the building. So he decided to go home for lunch and bring Charlie along to show his wife that she had gone too far.
When he got home, everyone was still in the kitchen. The wife looked frantic.
“I tried to call you at the office, but our phone doesn’t work.”
“How did you know my phone doesn’t work?” the man asked. “Did they tell you that?”
The wife furrowed her brow. “No, I mean our home phone doesn’t work. There’s no dial tone. None of the phones work.”
“Did you try the cell?”
“The battery is missing.”
The man put his briefcase down near the phone stand and walked over to the bowl. A new Charlie was floating placidly around the cherries. This Charlie had a lovely red streak across its side and along the center of each fin. Its blue was more vibrant than the old fish’s had been.
The man opened his lunch case and took out the fish, which he had wrapped in the plastic wrap that had housed his sandwich. He took the body over to the wife and held it in her face.
“Why the hell would you do this?” he asked.
“What is that? Is that Charlie? Why did you kill him?” She began to cry.
“Damn it, I didn’t kill him. Why did you put him in my lunch case? It wasn’t funny.” He scowled at her.
“I didn’t do it,” she said.
The man rubbed the frown from his face and was quiet for a moment. He crossed his arms over his chest. She wiped a drip of snot from her upper lip. Her tears were already making black smears of mascara under each eye.
“So,” he said. “Did the company people call to arrange the move?”
She dabbed her eyes with her sleeve. “I told you, the phones don’t work.”
He walked over to the kitchen phone and picked up the receiver. He pushed the “talk” button but there was no dial tone, so he peered under the stand. “It’s not plugged in. You unplugged it.”
“Why would I do that? I never did that.”
“Who did it then? Charlie, before he died? You think he leaped out of the bowl and flopped over here and used his last bit of strength to magically yank out the phone cord with his fins?”
The wife just continued crying, making the man clench his fists, his jaw, everything on his body that was clenchable.
“Look,” he said. “This is no time to play stupid games. We need to move, this job is what pays the bills, so stop acting like a child.”
The man felt a searing pain on his shin and he jerked backwards two steps, stumbling on a toy and falling in a heap to the floor.
“Shit!” he said, rubbing his calf. “He bit me!”
“Who did?” the wife asked.
“The baby,” the man said. “He bit my leg.”
“Let me see,” the wife said, sniffling, and she bent down to look. She pulled up his pants and exposed four angry red tooth marks on the meaty part of the man’s calf. “He must be hungry.”
The man shook his head. “Why would he bite me?”
“He’s been in the kitchen all day. He won’t budge. He won’t eat. I think he’s sick.” She had stopped crying now that there was something new to divert her attention.
“You’ll have to take him to the doctor before we move,” the man said.
“I doubt we’ll get an appointment that fast, if we move before the month’s out. Besides, he just went for his checkup, remember?”
There was a loud crash. The man and the wife turned in time to see the baby step lightly over the fallen-over telephone stand and the papers that were scattered everywhere. He reached down with his pudgy hand, unplugged the phone from the wall jack again, stepped back over the stand, and sat on the floor next to the now-broken phone. He pushed some pieces of shattered plastic from one of his board books and began to thumb through it.
The man and the wife looked at one another.
“You’ll have to take him to the doc,” the man said again. His voice trembled slightly.
“But the phones don’t work.”
“Use my cell phone, then,” the man said.
The baby gurgled and laughed, pointing to the counter. The man and wife looked over just in time to see the new fish leap gracefully out of its water in a beautiful arc and land, flopping, at the man’s side.
There was no hint of sentiment on its face. The man knew better than to expect to understand what a fish was feeling by looking it in the eyes, but he did just that; he felt compelled. The eyes were open, wet, the mouth, gaping. After a moment during which it silently regarded the man, the fish bounced over to the baby’s leg and nestled against him. The baby smiled and showed the fish the book.
“Fish,” said the baby.
The man held his hand over his bruised flesh. He looked at his wrinkled pants, a large oval of slobber where the baby’s mouth had been.
“I’ll call the doc in the morning,” the wife said quietly.
“I’ll arrange the move from work,” the man said. “If I can borrow a phone.”
The fish died with its eyes open, its countenance still expressionless.
Illustration by Megan Amoss.
Desiree Parker
My name is Desiree Parker, and I live in Williamsburg, Virginia. I'm a freelance journalist, but my secret passion is fiction; I'm finally ready to come out of the closet. Learn more about me at my website.
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