The new walls were painted a fair lemon; the tiled floors a pockmarked white. Sticky August sunlight poured from the open window above the porcelain sink, dripping languidly on the table, set only with a bouquet of stiff-looking tulips, yellow as the sunlight, yellow as the chipped lemon of the walls. There was something lazy in the air, a desire to collapse on the unmade bed and lie still, waiting for the cool breath of the fan to pass over her face. She knew she should do something today, accomplish any random task just to say she had. But she could not bring herself to break her heat-induced stupor.
Eventually, though, she wandered in to the kitchen again, her thin, pianist fingers slipping over the stained counters, the cherry wood table, the fridge cluttered with faded magnets. Again she found the plate, pressing her fingertips against its smooth face, its lacey rims where the white china was peppered with tiny holes, like the edges of her mother’s ivory wedding dress. It was painted thinly with tiny designs in a striking cobalt, stark against its moon-pale skin. Pale flowers curled around crooked vine-like stems, and a slender woman danced to a silent song, a waltz lost in the space between air particles, her eyelash-thin hair swirling around her dark eyes. The set (which had included dinner places and saucers and elaborate napkin rings and teacups so thin you could see the darkened honey liquid through the flowers) had been purchased in Paris, and given to her grandmother as a wedding present in 1933. Her grandmother, a wispy blonde woman named Lila whose broken English was permeated by a thick French accent, had loved delicate things such as this, and had even allowed her small granddaughter to importantly sip tea from her thin cups, pinkie raised, served tiny pastries sprinkled in fairy dust sugar, because she had known that she too loved beautiful things with a heartbreaking intensity. Her grandmother had left the set for her in her will, knowing that no one else could love the delicate indelicacy of it the way she had, and she cried.
The plate was all that remained of that so treasured set, alone and abandoned in a desert island of mismatched dinner plates in the cupboard. The rest, she supposed, were just flakes of ash now, drifting like coal-blackened snow, perhaps caught in a far-away gust of wind, tangled in the branches of a tree, pressed in the creases of a bird’s wing. Sometimes she dreamed she dined on her plates with her husband, and the house was up in flames but they did not notice or care, and she watched his mad dancing eyes and musical laugh that escaped his lips in a surprised breath. It was if he and the plates had risen from the ashes in a crimson blaze, like a phoenix, bursting with a broken song, eerie in the murky half-light, dust particles of lost dreams floating in the sunlight between the darkened spaces of her sleeping brain. Her heart thumped against her ribcage to the rhythm of his laugh again, and she was home again in a place that did not exist.
When she woke, his side of the bed cold and tangled with kicked blankets, she realized there were tears dried to her cheeks and she would say it in a gasping whisper, a word said to friends at soccer practice before walking home, said to your sister as she left for college, said to cancer patients in a white ward, to dads as they left for business trips, but one she had never gotten to say to the person it mattered most. She would say goodbye as if there had been something left to say goodbye to, a gray corpse in fine clothes with neatly parted hair, but no, they did not have anything to bury and below the stone with his name on it there was only dirt, and grass. She found herself constantly saying it because her chance of saying of it had been ripped away, as if the words, printed with black curls of ink, had blown away in a thunderstorm. She said it with her fingers as they danced across the piano keys, she said it with her shards of glass eyes as they met their reflection in the mirror, she said it with her feet, tucked into a blanket as she read his favorite dog-eared novels, his favorite words floating between her ears, and she said it with her whitened knuckles when she grasped that single plate, as if to anchor herself to a sanded shore in a hurricane, the roaring wind and the gray crested waves frothing as if to drag her into the riptide.