Short things that don't go anywhere are much easier to write than long things that do. As evidence, I submit the following:
The plates and bowls had been broken several months ago—virtually all of the dishes, in fact, save for a few inadvertently passed-over items. There was, for instance, in the deep-set cabinet over the seventies-style Frigidaire, an espresso cup, used perhaps once in the thirty years it had been sitting there. One of a set, it had been bought for the man and his wife as a wedding gift. The cup was good bone-china, white and translucent, but covered in dust. When the man had tramped wildly on the dingy linoleum those several months ago, the cup had sat trembling on its dimpled saucer, a witness. “Help,” it might have said, if it could talk, or think. But it was an espresso cup, hardly bigger than a shot-glass—a thimble, almost, for the fat and ham-handed. And as for its porcelain fellows, there were still little white pieces caught in the plush, cut-pile carpet—paper-thin shards like finely-slivered garlic. The man had swept the kitchen, days after the shattering, and had tried to vacuum the carpet in the next room, but had only managed to pulverize the craggier pieces, and to work what was left deeper, down to the backing. He had whipped the Hoover back-and-forth, mad, frenetic. He had tried to pick the pieces out one-by-one, but there were simply too many, and he succeeded only in pricking his fingertips. As a consequence, his carpet was patterned with little flecks of reddish-brown—blood, but it didn’t look like it. From his hands, mostly, but from his feet, too, those first few days when he didn’t care, when he hadn’t bothered with socks or slippers. One day, he tried a lint-roller—not so much out of desperation, but curiosity. (He didn’t entertain, or have anyone over. He had no neighbors. His children hadn’t visited in months.) While his moth-eaten suits and sport-coats gathered dust in the closet, while his trousers’ pleats were slowly being undone by disuse, the man crouched unsteadily, knees cracking and wavering, and passed the lint-roller over his carpet as if he was skimming a pool. He came up with a few shards, but most of what he captured was hair. The longer, lighter strands were his wife’s. The coarse, dark tufts were his dog’s. His dog—he’d forgotten. He’d have to do something about that, too, now that he’d recovered his wits.
