The Stain
By Russell D. Marlin
Penny opened the door to her tiny clapboard house and stepped into a room that was dark and quiet – blissfully quiet. Not that long ago her good-for-nothing husband would have been propped up in front of the TV this time of day, already three sheets to the wind. But now things were better. It was nice to come home to a clean house at the end of the workday.
She turned on the lamp and then went into the kitchen to start dinner. Cooking for just one was still new, but she was getting the hang of it. Still, her most favorite recipes did not seem to scale well despite using a calculator to figure out how to cut down the measurements. So, her fridge was consistently full of leftovers. When she opened it now, one of these met her like an old friend, a chicken and rice dish covered with a creamy sauce, topped with crackers and poppy seeds.
“You’ll do just fine,” she told the dish and pulled it out of the fridge and put it into the microwave.
She sat at the small dining table and kicked off her shoes. With a grin, she let them fall in a heap on the floor. Burt would have blown his top if he’d seen her shoes in the middle of the kitchen, even though his nasty boots practically lived next to the front door. She giggled at the thought and then stood and carried her shoes to the bedroom where they disappeared into her closet.
By the time she returned, the microwave was beeping to indicate that her food was ready.
A hot pad went under the dish, and a fork slid into the steaming pile of chicken and rice. She grabbed a napkin on the way by the table and headed to the living room.
Her husband’s dilapidated recliner lay in a pile of ashes near the back of her property, but she barely noticed its absence as she settled into the reading chair that had taken its place. A quick click from the remote and the TV came to life, already tuned to a local station that would relay the day’s events and tell her about tomorrow’s weather. Yet another perk of living alone.
She could watch the daily news like a real person instead of twenty-four-hour sports.
Out of the corner of her eye, just left of the screen, she noticed a spot, a single stain on her otherwise perfectly clean wall. It drew her attention like a magnet. She tried to focus on the TV and put it out of her mind, but her eyes kept drifting back to it as if they had a mind of their own. It reminded her of a movie she had seen where a boy stepped into a mud puddle and caused muddy water to splash all over his friend’s new dress. She could still remember the droplets arcing through the air in slow motion and landing on the white material of the girl’s dress.
She shook away the thought and set her plate aside. Using her napkin, she went to the wall and rubbed at the spot. It came away easily and disappeared into the folds of the paper napkin, which in turn found its way into the trashcan under the kitchen sink. Returning to her seat, she picked up her dinner, and all was right again.
Later, after the empty dish had been put away and the news program had signed off, she settled in to watch something new. An advertisement for a cooking competition show had caught her eye, not that she was keen on competition, but the meals the chefs prepared looked divine.
Hopefully, she could pick up a few ideas for the next potluck at her office.
The show began by introducing the various competitors, giving details about their varied backgrounds. There did seem to be a common theme amongst them, though. Each had some particularly sad or difficult period in their life that they had overcome through food and their love of cooking. She saw herself in them, shared their sense of struggle.
After the introductions, the program went to a commercial, and she allowed her eyes to drift from focus. Without even realizing it, they found their way to the area on the wall where the stain had been just minutes before. Where it still was now. She blinked in confusion and stood from her chair.
Moving closer, she ran a hesitant finger over the wall. The stain persisted as if it had always been there, as if it always would. “Not if I can help it,” she said aloud and headed for the kitchen.
A bottle of cleaner and a rag came out of the cabinet under the sink. Back in the living room, she went to work on the stain, the contestants on the cooking program long forgotten. It came away easy enough but left a wet spot on her newly painted wall. No matter, she thought, it will dry, and it was much better than seeing the stain.
The cleaner returned to its spot under the sink along with the still damp rag, and Penny returned to her show, just in time to see the first contestant that was being sent home. The choice was a contestant that had been particularly annoying, one that the show’s hosts had obviously been pretending to like. She agreed with the choice to send them home, and once again, all was right with the world.
The show ended sometime later with a teaser for next week’s program where the remaining contestants were being whisked off to Napa Valley wine country. She wondered what that must be like, to eat good food, drink a nice wine, and just enjoy being alive. Not that she didn’t enjoy the recent improvements in her life. Things were immeasurably better than before.
In the interim between programs, a sound caught her attention. She strained to hear the new sound and recognized the buzzing wings of a fly. It buzzed past her left ear and appeared before her, looping through the air in great random arcs. Penny hurried back to the kitchen to retrieve a fly swatter from its perch atop the refrigerator. By the time she returned, though, the bothersome insect was nowhere to be seen, but she could still hear the sound.
After a few seconds, the buzzing stopped. It had landed somewhere. She looked all around the room to no avail. Finally, she forced herself to look back towards the television and slightly to the left where, sure enough, the stain had returned. The fly flitted around it on the wall edging ever closer.
She moved in for the kill, drawing the swatter back in a wide arc, but just before she brought it down, the stain expanded, doubling in size to encompass the section of wall where the fly stood. As she watched, the fly disappeared, sucked into the stain with a faint pop.
Penny dropped the fly swatter and took a staggering step backwards, catching her heel on the edge of the carpet and going down hard. Her vision blurred and a loud hum arose in her ears rising in a crescendo until it sounded like feedback from a microphone placed too close to a speaker. She shut her eyes tight, and the sound subsided only to be replaced by a dull throbbing at the back of her skull.
It wasn’t the first time she’d hit her head or been hit on the head. She would feel a little nausea for an hour or so, but that would pass. The throbbing would pass as well with some aspirin and a few cubes of ice. It would just take longer. By tomorrow she’d be fine.
As she lay on the floor, a memory fought to the surface of her mind, unbidden and unwanted. She had tripped, hit her head on a door frame, the one just behind her in fact. She had a distinct memory of telling this to a friend at work when they’d asked about the marks on her face, too dark to completely cover with makeup. But deep inside, she knew that this was just a story, a tall tale, which brought flashes of a very different vision to her mind—her husband yelling, his fist swinging, a reflection of something shiny, like chrome or silver. Then the memory jumped again, to her in the kitchen alone, using a knife to cut up a chicken, but not a chicken. The meat was red. So, a steak then?
She shook the thought away and sat up unsteadily. Not wanting to look, but unable to stop herself, she moved her gaze to the wall and to the stain. It was definitely larger now, the size of a quarter. There was no sign of the fly, or what she had thought was a fly. Maybe she imagined that part? Burt had always said that she was flighty. That was it, she told herself, the stain wasn’t getting bigger. She had just imagined that it had eaten a fly. Probably just an after effect of hitting her head. She rolled over onto her knees preparing to stand up. There, on the floor, was the fly swatter.
Her eyes remained locked on it for a long time, until the pain in her knees from sitting on the hard wood brought her back to the moment. Applause from the television program arose behind her in response to some unseen victory. She rose with it, getting to her feet and snatching up the fly swatter. Though she wasn’t much of a drinker, she’d bought a bottle of red wine at the grocery last week, and this seemed like as good a time as any to give it a try.
There were no proper wine glasses in the house, so a coffee cup would have to do. The corkscrew also presented problems of its own, but she quickly figured out how to use it and poured a good amount into the cup. She’d read that one was supposed to drink red wine at room temperature, but one sip had her doubting that advice. The cork went back into the top of the bottle, and the bottle went into the fridge.
Her husband used to do the same thing with vodka, she recalled, but he usually put that in the freezer. She was fairly sure that wine did not belong in the freezer, and maybe not the fridge either, but she left it there nonetheless.
The red liquid swirled around the bottom of her cup and reminded her of water swirling down the bathtub drain. Water wasn’t usually red though, brown sometimes with dirt, but never red. Even so, she had a distinct memory of seeing that twirling red pattern before. When had that been? In a movie maybe?
Back in front of the television, she began to watch a new cooking show, this one about traveling and eating food in exotic places, but her eyes kept drifting to the stain on the wall. The center seemed to be darker than its outer reaches, like ink soaking into a paper towel. A water leak behind the wall? No, there are no pipes in that wall, and it hadn’t rained in days.
An image flashed through her mind, one of being knee deep in mud in the pouring rain. There was a new flower bed out back. She had wanted to get everything planted before the rain washed away all of her hard work, so she’d stayed outside until the job was done. But her memory hinted at something else. Something not flowers. Fertilizer? She couldn’t remember.
Letting out a heavy sigh, she got up from her chair and moved to the television and the wobbly stand that served as its resting place. Grasping the end, she pulled it a foot to the left and then returned to her chair to inspect her work.
“Perfect,” she said aloud and sat back down. Now the television was positioned so that it blocked her view of the stain.
The stain would continue to grow. She understood this all too well. But for now, it was relegated to a dark corner of the room just as those dark, muddy memories were relegated to a darkened corner of her mind. They would reappear someday, rearing their ugly head. Someday her mother-in-law would sober up long enough to remember that she had a son and call asking for him. But for today, life was good, and her conscience was clean.
