Teacup
By Benjamin Davis
It was Dostoevsky or Nabokov, or some other -ski or -kov, or maybe a -lov or -kin that coined the canals of Saint Petersburg veins and, if they were right, Saint Petersburg is dead, frozen solid, as I make my way home, following along in the footsteps of a much younger woman. No matter how I try to avoid them, her footprints swallow mine, my feet drawn into the breadcrumbs of her wake until I break from our path, back to my apartment, back to my wall, the wall at the end of the hall, across from the kitchen door where I pick and pick until some bit or other of the grease-stained concrete crumbles onto the floor.
Oleg asks me why my finger is bleeding, and I tell him I was bit trying to feed a stray dog. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t believe me. He leaves for work. I pick, and as I pick, I hear it; someone, somewhere, is laughing at me. Day follows day, each of them forming little cliques that become weeks as I pick and pick and pick until a hole appears that yawns wider, wider still.
I stand in my kitchen, looking through the hole at an old woman on a stool. She is made of gummed-up old newspapers and caked-on dandruff in a faded pink nightgown with flappy slippers. There is a teacup on a table. It is a regular teacup. The woman is laughing. It sounds like splintering ice. She won’t look at me. I rub my face and feel a wet streak of blood left behind. She leans forward, still laughing, takes hold of the teacup, and twists it fifteen degrees to the south. She gets a kick out of that. Nearly topples over.
When Oleg gets home, he moves around me, making dinner while I watch the woman until the teacup is facing north and Oleg comes to wipe the blood from my face, sweep up the wall crumbs, and hang a blanket over the hole without a word before he grabs my face with both hands and says, Will you do the dishes? This startles me. It reminds me of one of my mother’s many affirmations. She used to say it to my sister and I when we were feeling aimless, depressed, lost. She’d say: Just do the dishes, baby. It’s all we’ve got sometimes. And we would. So, when Oleg asks me to do the dishes, I do. After, we try to have sex, but I can’t because of the old woman’s laughter, so we go to sleep.
What feels like moments later, I am up again, wandering sleep-drunk into the kitchen, where the woman’s laughter has grown dry in the night, crackling on. I blink more and more the closer I get to the blanket. I pull it aside to find her quietly sipping her tea. This time, she looks at me. She waves. I wave back before realizing that she is not waving ‘hello’ but instead inviting me to let the blanket go and get on with my life.
THE END
Author Bio: Benjamin Davis is an American writer living somewhere outside of America with several short works appearing in Hobart Pulp, Bending Genres, Star 82 Review, Maudlin House, 5x5, Cease, Cows, and elsewhere.