Adventure

Dani run her hand against the grain of the old dining room table she inherited from her grandmother, a table that has shrunk progressively every year as she and Cecil removed leaves and pushed the ends together. Years ago, it had been the opposite: As the children were born they'd wrestled the old table open, each of them tugging at either side until there was a gap sufficient to accommodate first one leaf, then two, then, finally, three.

Dani sighs deeply. Cecil doesn't appear to notice: He's reading the newspaper, breathing heavily through his mouth, his elbows holding down the corners of the paper so that the fan blowing hot air behind him doesn't rustle the pages. Cecil's elbows perpetually hold two triangles of smudged ink. Yesterday, the number twenty-seven was inked on Cecil's left elbow. All day, as she waxed a spotless floor and wiped down counters already clean, she thought on that number. As she tried to assign meaning to a random number stamped on her husband's elbow, she realized something. "I'm bored, Cecil."


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