As if the appliances didn’t demand more and more stories though I’m sure they’ve heard them all a dozen times or more, the toaster pops out a request for a story about Lady Lydia. “Please!” he says, “a Lady Lydia story?” But there’s always something else in the way. Today it was a pogo-stick and a garage full of pancake batter. The river of trolls that migrated from the northern mountains finds sweet solace in the maraschino cherries stored in the cupboards above the washer. Having sat through the Christmas season unused, it was surprising how much fight they had left in them.
It’s not a dream she had. Not a waking reverie of castles and clouds that sustained her across the many lonely days. For sustained she was not; her evil bargain no bargain at all. Doomed to each day forget once more the revelations of the night before, and slumping cold-shouldered into the uncaring grey world of dawn, to lose the heart anew. Each day’s dawning sounding the knell of a graveyard elegy, with its poetry removed and a checkbook in its place. And as if the cement walls were not solid and solemn enough, even the dreams grew ashes and confused and pointless, no safe harbor for the wracked wreck of lives not worth living, and not worth leaving.
A sponge fell between the stove and the counter. Left alone it sat cataloging the dusty, hair-wrapped small change and food jetsam beneath the stove. A pen cap lay mute under the gas line, its dead gaze fixed forever upon the tube above. The sponge imagined that back in the darkness, away near the floorboards, past sticky dusty unknown masses, imagined she saw an old, once shiny key. Though she knew it must only be another coin dropped carelessly to roll behind the stove, she pretended it to herself to be a long-lost key. Would it ever be found, to unlock friezes painted in Atlantis millennia before? And every day, in her dreaming, the dust settled on her porous surface and soul, until one day she dried completely away, leaving only her filthy abandoned shell, still staring at the ill illuminated shadow that might have been a key, but that was almost certainly a wayward coin.