Just the Two of Us

Artwork by Nadjellah Mendoza

The stillness of the bedroom unsettled me when we first moved in. The window has been locked and painted shut, and there is a long, thin crack in the door that looks like a painful wound. At the end of the bed is a hole in the floorboards about the size of my open hand, which the tenant before us had tried to patch over with layers of clear sticky tape. 

When I showed the hole to Jase, he said it reminded him of something vaginal. ‘Like a yoni,’ he muttered. ‘Long and pointed at the ends but kinda spread out in the middle.’ 

He leaned down to examine it, resting on his knees and bending forward as if in prayer. It is so dark that when you look down into the hole, all you can see is a blackness that goes on and on. 

Later, when he left for work, I slowly peeled off the tape and placed a small rug over the uncomfortable opening. 

I pretend the hole doesn’t exist in the same way I pretend the room can catch the fresh spring breeze. The same way I pretend that the steady airflow from the fan is something other than our own stirred-up breath recirculated. 

Last night we were lying on top of the sheets staring at the fan. Blades sliced through stale air, the outside of our thighs only just touching. 

‘Isn’t this nice, just the two of us,’ I whispered. And then, ‘Maybe it was always meant to be like this; maybe we were never meant to have a baby.’ I said it with a smile, but I could taste my tears as they rolled into my mouth. 

I looked across at Jase’s face. It was long and still, and tears had started to pool in the corners of his eyes. I ran my fingers across his scalp and his stubble as my tears ran down into the creases of my neck. I stretched his cheeks in an upward direction until it looked like he was smiling, and then we lay there together like that. Just the two of us, smiling with our eyes closed, ignoring the hole in the floorboards and enjoying the fresh spring breeze.