Splintered
/Jennifer Fliss
When laughing over something the neighbor says, Katie slaps an old picnic table. This is the first splinter. It embeds itself quickly, inserting itself so readily, it is as if her skin is dough. She squeals at the intrusion and Josh insists on using a needle to get it out. They fill the small bathroom with their two bodies. Beneath Katie’s feet, the tile is cool, but still she sweats. Josh too, she can see it on the sides of his face and in the darkened patches of his t-shirt. He closes one eye and scrape, scrape, digs. It’s not a needle but a safety pin. He hasn’t sterilized it, but surely it doesn’t matter, he tells Katie. She struggles not to pull her hand back from his as he squeezes her pinky as he works. He is not successful, and Katie sucks her finger the rest of the day between bites of Greek salad and taco dip.
The next day, Katie holds tight to the railing as she ascends the steep steps to the back door. There is a piercing into the flesh between thumb and forefinger, that delicate space. She gasps, usually splinters don’t hurt so much. This is the second splinter. The ladder from the garage. A half-done birdhouse. The deck she’s been meaning to clean up. These are the third, fourth, and fifth splinters. Josh says maybe she has particularly tender flesh. His eyes shimmer as he says it, looking almost like they are filling with water, but she knows better. She doesn’t feel like sex but doesn’t say so. While Josh is in her, steadily moving his body over hers, Katie studies the most recent splinter near her thumb. It seems large and it should be easy to dislodge. She will try later with some tweezers.
The house is cold. Katie is always cold, no matter the season, so once dusk sets in and the house takes on colors only visible during those few minutes a day, she arranges the wood in the fireplace to set a fire. She cries out. Six.
“You okay?” Josh shouts from the kitchen. He is making dinner. She hates salmon, but he insists it’s healthy for her.
“Fine,” she says.
“You want me to do that? I can set the fire.”
“So can I.”
“I usually set the fires,” he says. It sounds like he is eating something, mouth filled with masticated things.
“I know,” Katie says and flips the vent switch.
It is not as if she decides to leave the foreign objects there, embedded in her skin. But no amount of coaxing seems to work. She scrapes along her surface, skin flaking, her own self dropping like snow. She tries tweezers and needles, sucking and fingernails. She remembers something her father had told her when she was young: if you don’t take splinters out, they stay there forever. They become a part of you. Her father had wanted to abrade her skin away. You might have to get amputated, he had said. Cut it off completely or it will become infected. He had come at her with a sharp object, its tip and his eyes glinting. She had envisioned her skin gradually losing its softness, hardening, turning to bark. Her imagination took her further and further until she was a tree in a field, rooted down, unable to move, birds flitting into her branches, sap running down her middle. Anyway, her father was a beast. He would not allow her to even climb her own trunk.
It should also be said Katie works with wood. She never thought this is something she would do as an adult. She had been recused from the woodshed in summer camp after ineptitude with a vise. She hadn’t even gotten to saws. But now she makes birdhouses and dollhouses and small tables, sometimes carving out small necklaces like puzzle pieces. She sells these at local craft fairs, one time venturing as far as Portland, three hours south. Katie has attempted an online store, only to find the intricacies of e-commerce daunting. Plus she likes meeting her customers, knowing that what she creates with her hands would be a part of their houses, their lives.
She is packing up some recently made items into plastic storage containers. Today she has rented a stall at the local flea and farmers’ market. She will put up colorful bunting that reads Katie’s Kwality Wood. She hates the name, Josh had come up with it, and in a fit of productivity had made all her collateral with the name on it. She has a stack of business cards, matte, not glossy. She’s made little slabs of wood which will act as display shelves. Those go into boxes along with mini plastic bags for jewelry, a cash box, a credit card reader, five birdhouses, two dollhouses, and three small stools with paisley designs carved into them. She has a few brochures that say she can build custom items: stools with children’s names in them, wedding décor, cutting boards. She can bend wood, but this isn’t easy and she doesn’t do it often.
She hugs Josh, she is that excited. He smells like hotel soap.
“That smell’s making me nauseous,” she says.
“Nauseated.”
“You too?” she asks.
“No, it’s nauseated.”
“Whatever. The new soap or new cologne or whatever is making me sick.”
“Bitch,” he says and waits ten seconds before he smiles and punches her shoulder like it’s a joke.
“Okay, I’m going,” Katie says.
“Where to?”
“The market. Remember I told you,” she says filling the trunk with her wares.
“We have the party at Andy and Marie’s today,” Josh says.
“Well, I can’t go. This has been on the calendar for –”
“Fuck the calendar,” he says. She looks up at his eyes. They are dark and he goes to stand in front of the car, blocking her way out.
“Josh,”
“It’s Andy’s fortieth.”
“Tell them I’m sorry.”
“You tell them.”
“Josh, I’m going to be late. I have to set up.” He puts his hands on his hips and she imagines that this is what he looked like as a belligerent five year old. She had hoped to have a child of her own one day. But she is thirty nine, not too late, but getting there. When they were dating, Josh had said he wanted kids too, a whole brood of them, but he had said little about it in the recent years.
Katie gets into her car and starts the ignition. Through the bug smattered windshield Josh looks like he wants to be a superhero, as if he is waiting for someone to save. Arms still on his hips, head cocked slightly upwards. One of her splinters begins to pulse. Mostly they do not cause her pain after they lodge into her body, but they had stayed put, none of them giving up, not a one allowing her to pry it free.
She revs the engine and Josh smirks. She rolls down her window. “Josh, move!”
He doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t budge. She can see Philip from across the street, eighty-nine (he tells everyone) and nosy, kind and widowed. He is standing in his driveway no longer occupied by a vehicle and watching the scene at Katie and Josh’s house.
Katie revs again. “Maybe I’ll come later,” she shouts. “I’ll meet you there, okay?” She won’t. She has the stall until the end of the market which is until six. She will come home, take a bath, and calculate her revenue for the day, determine if it is a loss or not given the time she put into it. But at least she will have alone time. That is valuable.
She allows the car to jerk forward a foot or two. It works and Josh jumps out of the way into the long grasses and pretty purple flowers that are in fact weeds.
Her stomach lurches as she drives past her husband and turns out of the driveway. She waves at Philip, smiles big like she is happy.
She had been. When she and Josh were dating, everyone said it was a match made in heaven. Her father, long widowed, his abusive ways fading away like his grief, now took Josh into his confidences. Threw a fat arm over his shoulder, told him he was getting the deal of a lifetime in his daughter. No one mentioned how dangerous matches can be in the wrong hands. It wasn’t until years after they got married that the matches ignited. A little at first, small flames snapping. A child would help, Katie had thought and then said. But she couldn’t get pregnant. At first months, then years, and now here she is at thirty-nine, no kids.
Josh had made love to her on those days marked on the calendar with a heart. If she said she was feeling a little sick, he brought her cold water in bed. They didn’t have money for fertility treatments or special doctors. They talked about selling land; their house was situated on the front end of a large double lot. It seemed like a hassle. Anyway, he had said, he liked having that space.
It’s been three years since that last cold water and they rarely use their backyard.
The market is a success. Katie sells almost everything. She would have to continue this course, way better than an online store. She talks to so many people and they all seem happy to see her. As she putters back into the driveway, she sees that Josh’s car is gone. Right, Andy’s party. Should she go? He was Josh’s friend, really, an old college roommate. Andy came before her. She would unpack and then decide. Slipping her feet out of her shoes in the mudroom, she feels an elation that the house is empty. Once inside though, her foot immediately stings. She feels the splinter in the soft of her foot before she sees the mess.
The hallway is covered with piles and piles of wood. Fragments, two-by-fours, dowels, slabs, her tools scattered like buckshot on the floor. She breathes heavily, sidesteps the collection, and begins to return the pieces to her workshop. No, she will not be going to Andy’s party.
After she is done getting her shop in order, she sits. The task has winded her. She checks her email and flips through social media on her phone. Ice cream cones in front of colored walls, carefully placed bikini bodies, latte art, yoga positions in far away places, smiling children at dance recitals and on beaches. Then she sees a photo of Josh on Andy’s feed. He is assisting a young blond with a frothy white drink. One hand is at the back of her neck as if holding her up. Katie doesn’t know who she is. She stands up, and falls back down again, dizzy. She allows it to pass and slowly makes her way through the hall, now only shards of wood threaten each step, almost unseen. She tiptoes through the minefield, slips her shoes back on, and gets back in her car.
When she gets to Andy’s she can hear music even though her windows are rolled up. She goes around the side of the house and Marie is immediately at her side with a beer.
“So glad you could make it!” she exclaims. Katie shakes her head at the drink.
“Really?” says Marie.
“I think I’ll just have a pop,” Katie says.
“Pop. Ha. So cute. Your little Midwestern ways,” Marie says and bounds onto the deck and returns with a sweating can of artisanal cola. Katie would’ve preferred a simple Coke. She scans the crowd. A lot of young blond women. A piñata shaped like a poop emoji. TLC’s Waterfalls is playing. It had been a favorite when Katie was in school. She knows all the words and can’t help but mouth them as she walks over the perfect grass, sidestepping lawn chairs, beer cans, and discarded tiny cocktail umbrellas. A crew of men are playing beer pong with red cups. Who knew forty was so…Katie doesn’t even know how to finish the thought. She sees Josh alone in the shade of a tremendous maple tree picking grass. She must have misunderstood the photograph. She approaches smiling.
“Made it.” She sits beside him. It takes him a moment.
“Hey!” he says and stares into the distance.
“I made, like, seven hundred bucks.”
“That’s great,” he says distracted. She follows his gaze. The blonde from the photograph is headed straight for them, two drinks in hand. In her peripheral vision, Katie sees Josh shake his head at the woman, but she looks puzzled and keeps walking.
Crocheted bikini top, denim cut-offs, barefooted. Twenty-five, Katie would guess. Presumably one of the models that Andy works with. Her name would be Madison or Hayley. Maybe Taylor.
“Hi, I’m Hayley,” she says and offers Katie the drink. Hayley isn’t as dumb as she appears.
“Friend of yours Josh?” Katie says and takes the drink from the girl, pulls out the cocktail umbrella, and puts the drink down in the grass behind her. She sucks the froth off of the umbrella, piña colada. Katie twirls it in her hand, feels the sharp tip.
“Um, yeah, we just met. She’s a nanny,” Josh says.
“Is she?”
“I just love kids,” Hayley says.
Then Katie is overwhelmed with nausea. Her every pore is suddenly filled with sweat. Bile collects in her throat – it is like so much she wants to say – and she is unable to hold it in. She vomits. Hayley startles and jumps back. Says she’ll go get some napkins.
She doesn’t return.
Katie and Josh go home that night in one car. We’ll get mine tomorrow, he says. Katie sticks the cocktail umbrella in the radiator vent.
Perhaps she is pregnant.
At the doctors, she pees in a cup and they wave a wand.
“There’s a small house in there,” Dr. McManus says with the air of someone saying you need rotate your tires or your oil must be changed.
“A house,” Josh asks, a puzzle on his face. He has come to the appointment and Katie thinks maybe they had been right. Maybe this will help.
“What are you talking about?” Katie says. “Am I having a baby or what?”
“Yes, it is strange. I suppose you could call it a baby. But you know in this field, we see all kinds of things,” Dr. McManus says and leaves the room in a whoosh of sterile paper.
They sign a lot of paperwork. There are needles inserted into her, which, given the spate of recent splinters, is no big deal for Katie. Calendars are looked at, appointments made. She is a geriatric pregnancy, they tell her. She bristles and wants to punch them, but they say it with a smile, purple mouthed, saccharine – not real sweetness, but it still tastes similar enough.
Katie pulls the little cocktail umbrella from the car vent. What a useless piece of shit. In bed she tears off the canopy of the umbrella, snaps the little ribs that hold it up, purple bits of paper scatter around her on the bed like confetti. She unwinds a tiny piece of paper that looks like a very small Chinese newspaper. What she is left with is a toothpick. A sharp thin piece of wood. She jabs herself, it draws a pinprick of blood to the surface. She puts it in her bedside drawer.
Later in bed, Josh says, “Remember that time in Florida?” For their honeymoon, they’d stayed at a $700 a night beach resort. Breakfast in bed, the sun baking them as they ate overpriced hummus plates by the pool. Cucumber never tasted so good. Two days in, she had stepped on a Portuguese man-o-war and howled like she was a wolf. Josh carried her, always carrying her, across the dense sand, up the wooden stairs, past the pool and bar where they’d spent hours drinking frozen daiquiris, and into the cool marble floored lobby. Someone help us! he had shouted. The concierge wore a suit, but he bent to her wet sandy body, made the right phone calls quickly, and it wasn’t long before Katie and Josh were back at the poolside bar drinking daiquiris, but hers now virgin because of the medicine she’d been prescribed. They laughed about it later, often, but Katie still remembered how much that sting hurt. Never before had she experienced such pain. Labor is worse, a friend had told her. Much worse.
I will protect you, was what Josh had said then and repeats in bed as he cleans up the purple umbrella confetti from the sheets. From what, is a question Katie only now thinks to ask.
He does not apologize for the woodshop incident and she doesn’t bring it up, but she still sees splinters around the floorboard edges just waiting to stab someone. At night she pulls out the former cocktail umbrella and lightly pushes it against Josh’s sleeping skin. He snorts and rolls over. She pushes again at the flesh on his upper arm, the skin starts to give, that tiny cleaving. He waves his arm in his sleep, mumbles, Not today. I’m not ready. Katie puts the fine piece of wood back in her drawer.
At another barbeque, this time celebrating Andy’s job promotion, Marie approaches Katie. “Wow, you’re a house,” she says maneuvering her hands around Katie’s girth.
“What?”
“You’re as big as a house,” she repeats.
There is no question it would have to be a C-section.
They put it on the calendar on an otherwise unadorned Monday. It would be a full moon the calendar told them. They look at pregnancy books but when it says their baby should be the size of a lentil, a peach, a papaya, she thinks this is not my baby. My baby does not look like a piece of fruit.
The full mooned Monday arrives. Needles are installed in her body, drugs pushed in. In a surgery that lasts triple the time it normally would, the surgeons pull a small wooden house out – a shack, it could be called.
At home, Katie caresses it and places it on the mantle.
“Are you sure that’s the right place for it?” Josh asks.
“Don’t you think I know how to take care of it? I carried it for nine months,” she says.
“Ten,” he says and she staggers from the room, the staples in her abdomen itchy with fire.
The shack grows into a cabin which expands into a cottage and is showing all signs of healthy growth. Katie outfits it with small furniture, procured from online, thrift shops, and estate sales. She makes tables and shelves herself. She creates its own accounts on social media, @LittleHouseOnTheCherry. They live on Cherry Lane and she finds her nostalgic wordplay hopeful. Her little abode has over nine thousand followers already. She sews tiny bedding and rugs. It is a lovely little place. Someone could fall in love with it, in it.
Josh grumbles about how much time she spends with the small house.
“This is what it needs,” she says. “It needs its mother.” He occasionally reassembles rooms and pokes at things that could become problems.
“I know houses,” he says. She thinks, he does not.
Katie worries about its future. Would it ultimately become a McMansion? The same as everyone else on the block? Dance recitals, cute utterances, videos posted to social media? She approaches Josh with research.
“We could use the lot out back,” she says. “It’s getting bigger and we don’t use the space anyway and isn’t that what we said we wanted when we bought the place?”
“I don’t remember that,” he says.
“We said that one day, we would have children running around out back, naked in the sunshine,” Katie says.
“But we don’t.”
“We do. Kind of,” she says.
“I want my land,” Josh says and Katie clams up and stews quietly about what to do about her progeny.
It’s growing colder; fall is approaching and Katie sets a fire in the fireplace. Above, on the mantle, the little house is lit by tiny fairy lights. It is outgrowing the mantle, so she moves it to a nearby table. It looks homey and she thinks that so far, she is doing a good job of being a mother.
It is eight-thirty and still Josh isn’t home from work. Katie eats pickles from the jar and pushes to find any soft spots in the wood of her little house. She finds that it is pretty sturdy, no splinters jutting out from its baseboards or walls. She is proud of herself.
Then Josh gets home. She hears it first; he has hit the mailbox. He comes in staggering drunk and babbles and spits about his unhappiness, leaning into Katie. If he got close enough to the fire he would ignite. A conflagration of their marriage, all up at once. He points at the cottage.
He says, “This is just trash. It should be thrown out.” He lunges for it, Katie is too slow. He shakes it and shakes it and pieces of furniture fall from its open windows. The door hangs by one screw and he rips it off.
“Josh! Stop!”
“It’s not real, Katie.” He throws the door into the fire.
“Stop! You’re killing it!”
“This is not your baby.”
“It is.”
“It is not our baby,” he says. She cries out, tears fill every crevice on her face. There are more now that she is forty. Each split in her skin to hold more, a crevasse where you can no longer see the bottom. The aging body is a kind of topography.
Josh is shaking the house, profanities issuing from his mouth. He smells astringent, like a bathtub of gin. He pries off a piece of the roof, throws that in the fire too.
“Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”
“This is shoddy,” Josh says. “You should know that. Shoddy design, made like shit.”
Katie had abandoned Katie’s Kwality Wood. She only cares for the little wooden cottage now. But she believes she is putting her best work into it. She spends late nights sketching designs, talking to it, though it does not talk back. Josh complains from their bedroom, stomping out to work in the morning without looking back.
The doorbell rings. Framed in the open doorway is Philip, the old neighbor. Katie and Josh stop, Josh holding the tiny house above his head.
“The door was open,” Philip says, surveying the room. “The car door is still open too.” The crackling of the fire and the tick tick tick of the grandfather clock are the only sounds. Katie’s heart is booming. Outside a car whooshes by. Katie can see out the window, that the car door is in fact open, the interior dome light still on.
Josh lowers the house an inch and she snatches it. He storms out past Philip to the car. Slams the door, but stays outside.
“Thanks Philip,” Katie whispers.
“You’re welcome dear,” he says and limps out not even turning to look at Josh.
The next day, while Josh is at work, Katie pours a small foundation out back. Places the cottage just so and Josh says not a word. A week later, she has people in to hook it up to water, gas, and electricity.
The house is still fairly small. She returns to her shop to create wooden people. She sets them up in the house in tableaus of domesticity. Four of them at dinner together. One sleeping while the rest cook a surprise cake in the kitchen. The mother caring for a small wooden baby in a tub while the father gets the other wooden child ready for bed.
Every day a new scene. Josh comes and goes, occasionally commenting on how she is wasting her time.
Eventually someone knocks on their door. Katie rises to answer and is met with the fat pink face of a city official.
“I hear you have an illegal ADU,” he says.
“What’s an ADU?”
“Accessory dwelling unit.”
She closes the door on him. But not two minutes later sees him in her backyard.
“You can’t be here,” she says. “This is private property.”
“Ma’am, I have to issue you a citation.”
“Fuck you,” she says. “Get out of here.” She slams the door, closes the blinds but watches through a crack as he measures her small house and takes notes.
“What do we got here,” Josh says that night, as he comes in with a handful of papers. “This was at the front door.”
“It’s nothing,” she says.
“Doesn’t look like nothing,” he says.
“Fuck it. Ignore it.”
“I’m not going to ignore it. I don’t want to be doing anything illegal Katherine.” There is grease in his mouth and his eyes have gone predatory. She recognizes it immediately and knows she is the prey.
“You called,” she says. “It was you.”
“You yourself once said we could use that land to make money.”
“You’re an asshole.” She gets up and pummels his chest. He doesn’t strike back. Holds his hands up as if he is saying, I didn’t touch her. I didn’t do a thing. “FuckyouFuckyouFuckyou,” she says. One jab knocks his glasses from his face. Another brings blood to his nostrils.
Three days later he files for divorce. She tells Josh she won’t sign anything. He doesn’t come home from work the next day. Again she sees Josh on Andy’s social media feed. He is prone on a deck lounge chair. Hayley is beside him. They aren’t touching, but the smile on Hayley’s face mirrors Josh’s.
She calls Marie who does not call her back.
That night she hears voices from out back. Her little house has grown into a three bedroom, two bath, with a deck out back and an eat-in kitchen. As Katie steps into her garden shoes, she sees lights burning in the den, which she has outfitted much like her own, fireplace, L-shaped couch, coffee table with magazines fanned out. She looks back at her and Josh’s house. All the lights are extinguished except for in the kitchen. She had been preparing a microwaved bowl of mac and cheese, a childhood favorite now rendered into congealed cheese sauce and undercooked noodles. The house out back looks so warm and inviting. A light shines over the front door. Katie doesn’t knock and turns the doorknob. The door gives and she follows the voices into the den. There is a man on the sofa with a book in his hand, thumb in the spot where he had paused his reading. He is assisting a woman, who is nursing a baby. The baby falls off the nipple and issues a bleat, which turns into a full-blown cry. The woman pats the baby’s back, shushes softly into her ear. The man rubs her shoulder with his thumb. Katie sits on the rug in front of the fire, and then curls into a nautilus. She closes her eyes as the fire heats her skin.
The cries of the baby, her baby; she’d know that sound anywhere.
Jennifer Fliss (she/her) is a Seattle-based writer whose writing has appeared in F(r)iction, The Rumpus, The Washington Post, and elsewhere, including the 2019 Best Short Fiction anthology. She can be found on Twitter at @writesforlife or via her website, www.jenniferflisscreative.com.
