“Put some pants on, walking around like that,” Cobie told her husband in thick-accented English. She cleared empty coffee cups and breakfast plates from the kitchen table of the house they had rented four months earlier, their first in America.
“What?” Willem said, leaning against the kitchen counter. “No one can see.” He looked down at himself as if to prove that his wife was making a fuss over nothing: a loose white t-shirt, tight-fitting white underwear, bare, skinny legs with tufts of dark hair.
Cobie tended to an oversized metal tub on the stove, stirring its contents with a long pair of tongs meant for grilling. The container spanned all four burners, each on high. Inside, multiple pairs of white painter’s pants and white shirts were on the boil, each covered in multicolored paint specks and splotches like they were an abstract painter’s discarded canvases. Once per month, Cobie took on the impossible task of attempting to bubble away weeks of oil-based paint and stains. “Your daughter, she can see,” she said, her back to her husband, poking and stirring the contents.
Marcia sat at the rectangular table in her checkered flannel nightgown, a half-eaten bowl of cereal in front of her, feet dangling above the vinyl floor. She stared at her parents, only partially understanding what was being said in their new language.
A week after the accident, I made plans to meet the attorney my mother had hired at the storage lot where my father’s work truck had been towed. She wanted to take pictures for a potential lawsuit, and I wanted to see if there was anything worth salvaging: house painter’s tools of the trade like a sprayer, brushes, roller skins, perhaps some gallons of intact paint, maybe some work receipts or paperwork he’d kept in the truck. Remnants of what his life looked like that day.
“Be prepared for what you might see,” she warned me. She wore heels and tip-toed serpentine through the lot, damp and muddy from the previous day's fall rain.
“Yes,” I said. Words to live by.
"Small Comforts," The Swannanoa Review
"Normal People," Sycamore Review 2023 Wabash Prize for Fiction Finalist
"Posing," Ascent
"Baby," Other Voices
"Normal People," Euphemism
"Restorations," Rambunctious Review, First Prize
"Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grand Jatte," Rambunctious Review, First Prize
"The Girl on the Bubble," Warren Wilson Review
"A Place Called Normal," 2023 Central Oregon Writers Guild anthology
"The Measure of All Things," Willow Review
"Posing," (alternate v.), Willow Review, First Place
"Mourning," Willow Review
Copyright © 2024 Neal Lulofs - All Rights Reserved.
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