Allen Wrench
By Julia Breitkreutz
You ask me to pass you the Allen wrench, and so I ask you who’s Allen, but you don’t laugh. Instead, you mumble something about the cheap materials, about how things used to be made sturdier, and I want to tell you that you sound like my father, but I know that I will sound just like my mother, so I keep my mouth shut. They don’t put words in these manuals, I say as you twist Allen’s body—tightening the screw down into the pilot hole. I want you to say something about America’s failing education system, to rant about how nobody can read nowadays, but you don’t. You just sigh, stand up onto your knees, then your feet. I watch you rip open the third (and final!) IKEA box, and I help you slide the flimsy backing board into place.
While you gently nail down the edges (tiny nails dangling from the corner of your mouth), I think of those commercials starring attractive young people pretending to be in love as they stand in their spacious living rooms. They are always painting their walls some loud, obnoxious color—laughing as they dab paint on each other. Sometimes, they're moving furniture around, always grinning, always laughing like they’d just heard the funniest goddamn joke. The commercial always ends with the couple smiling at their completed walls or rearranged rooms—their arms wrapped around each other’s waists. How terrible those commercials are—the lies they tell.
When I start to feel the cynicism rise within me, I open my mouth to remind you of those commercials, of the polished couples and the ridiculousness of the love they display, but suddenly you are dropping the hammer and leaning back against the wall, holding your head in your hands. Fuck it. Why the hell did we start this today? And I cannot be cynical when you are grumpy. The two things don’t mesh, we learned that long ago, and so I try to cheer you up, try my best to give a little pep talk, but you’re not having it (not one bit) because the back panel is upside down, and the nails are all nailed in, and even though we can fix it, you don’t want to, not tonight. Just leave it be, you say, and I wonder how much more of it we can take, this leaving it be.
I grab my box cutter from The Art Cart (as you called it), plop back down on the carpet, and start slicing the cardboard boxes into strips—stacking the pieces into a neat pile. Material to burn in our fire pit, which has become a dumping ground for our leftover pizza boxes and emptied Amazon packages. You’re staring at me now, and I think I see the hint of a smile on your face. I am looking at you looking at me when I feel the blade run into my left thumb and then blood is cascading down that cardboard, across the wordless manual, and then you’re standing up, grabbing paper towels from the kitchen. You start unraveling the paper towels and end up wrapping way too much of it around my hand. It’s not that bad, I say. I stand up. Blood rolls down my forearm, lands on the back (the front) of the bookshelf’s backing. We abandon the shelves and the mess that we’ve made for the night. It’s not until the next morning that we decide the dried blood stain is symbolic. Of what? Neither of us can say for certain, so we don’t say anything at all. We never did end up flipping over the bookshelf backing, so the stain remained hidden—pressed up against the wall in the living room.
The last time you move that bookshelf, I will be gone, and you will tell the woman who helps you carry it to the edge of your driveway about that night all those years ago. In your recounting of the night, you will mention the Allen wrench joke and chuckle because things are shinier, funnier, when you look back on them. The woman will laugh, too, and maybe ask a few questions about me. You are a nice man, so you will say something kind about me as you write “Free” in Sharpie on a white sheet of paper before taping it to the highest shelf.
THE END
Author Bio: Julia Breitkreutz is a writer and middle school English teacher based in South Carolina. Her work has been published in X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine and Atticus Review.