My nephew forced me to buy the chair at a yard sale. The "End
of the World Sale," the plywood sign called it, and the chair was propping
up the left side of the sign. The chair had only been owned for a week, real
leather on the arm rests, and real steel in the supports. Walnut brown with a red undertone and yellow stitching, not as elegant as black models, but distinct. My nephew said I'd
use it in my new writing room. He said I had to get writing again, which was
his way of saying I needed to get over my wife. Little did he know, little did
I know.
See, the seat cushion sighed when I sat on it for the first
time in the morning. The same sound as so many of Ruth's sighs, when she'd get
in after double-shifts and plop beside me to boot up Netflix. And I have this
habit of leaning to much to the left when I'm hesitating over a plot idea, and every
time I did, something in the supports grunted. I swear, grunted, like when Ruth
was upset at me, the minor upsets, like I'd forgotten the turn signal on a
vacant road, or put the toilet paper in facing the wrong way. I figured the
chair had sat on the grass too long and some dew had gotten into whatever gears
a chair has.
Then there was this Wednesday night when I wrote. Really
wrote, for the first time since I couldn't anymore. A whole short story in one
sitting, and I was at least a third of the way into another one when I realized
I'd been holding the same posture the whole time, my back never touching the
chair. I rubbed my eyelids and reclined, and the chair…
Man, I know that noise. I'm the only person who ever made
Ruth make that particular squeal. Me, and peppermint gelato.
I never got it to make that sound again. You know what
nephew said? To oil the chair. With peppermint oil. And people ask why Ruth and
I never wanted kids.
It's not haunted. I don't know if I believe in hauntings,
but I know I don't believe in this one. It's that one time I got the wrong
e-mail from my sister-in-law at the wrong time, and I sighed, and I know I sat
forward, and air escaped the cushion at the same time, and it sounded like Ruth
was sighing with me. And that never happened when she was alive, but I spent
the next two hours imagining how it could've. Wishing it did. I slept
downstairs instead of in the bed across from the office.
The urge is to write about this, or take it as a sign and
write about Ruth. Except I can't start a paragraph about her without devolving
into how much I fucked hate and don't understand what are aneurysms are, and I'd
need to research them, and I can't enter that word into Google. I can't bear
the sound the chair might make, or that it might not make a sound afterward.
That it might go as quiet as a floor model.