Week Nineteen Prompt: Et tu, Brute?

The House that You (and Jack) Built

I stare up at your house; your beautiful, ridiculous house. I remember when you came to me, eyes shining and cheeks flushed -“We got the land!” and it had been my flippant idea to make a house out of cards. You had stared at me, and I had no idea what I had done until it was done. Cards, paper, strawbale, mudbrick, rammed earth – anything you could get your hands on, you did. You had me over to colour consult; there were taps and light fittings and trips to the tip for "inspiration". Jack would roll his eyes at me behind your head, a private joke, but you went ahead and you made it. You built a life there, a green, vegan, recycled life, you and Jack, Jack and you – it was the house that you and Jack built.

I had thought it would be raining. It’s the kind of thing you expect, for it to be raining when you tear the world apart, but it's Spring and there are birds and a light wind blows my dress against my knees. If I tilt my head to the side and squint, I think I can see your house swaying in the breeze. All it would take is a chip in the right place; a chip that, funnily enough, I'm here to provide. I know what I’m getting into, by doing this. I can hear the things you’ll say in my mind and I know the look you’ll give me. But I want you to hear me. I want you to hear why.

I want you to know that I would never hurt you, except that I did, worse than any friend could hurt any friend, worse than your worst enemy could. I wish I could say I didn’t mean for it to happen, like all those girls in movies do, but I don’t. I was sick of it, sick of your everything and my nothing when for all our lives it was the other way around. You had the problems, I had the answers. But then you went and got your own answers, and I got left behind, so I took yours. I took Jack, that night we went to dinner together but you went home early because you were sick, and there had been a look, and then it was a touch, and then it was me and Jack, Jack and me, and now I’m standing here at your front door working up the guts to ruin your life.

I didn’t mean for Jack to fall in love with me. I didn’t mean to fall in love with Jack. I didn’t mean for it to be anything more than a restoration of the balance of power between friends – between you and me, me and you. Sometimes we would lie in your bed, Jack and me, me and Jack, and suddenly it was my house, my husband, my bamboo cotton sheets we were lying on. Everything Jack and I were and are and can be is built on lies, but when I lie there with him, head on his chest, heartbeat to heartbeat, the world beats away.  The space between us, normally occupied by the memory of you, becomes space no one can touch.

I want you to know that I know you don’t want to hear this; that I know this will make you sick and that I know I’m the person you don’t want to know. I wish this hadn’t happened, except that I don't. I wish Jack didn’t love me, except that I don't. I wish I could tell Jack it’s over between us, maybe even slam a righteous door in his face, except that I don't.  I wish I was the sort of person who had the guts to say this to your face, instead of to your cardboard door. 

But I’m not. Instead, I’m going to knock on your door, and you are going to answer it. You will smile at me, and I will tell you I just dropped by for a visit. You will make us tea. I will pretend that I still have the right to call myself your friend; that there is no Jack and me, me and Jack. I will sit there with you and I will know that when you find out, when your house of cards clatters to the ground around you, you will remember this day, this warm Spring day with the birds and the breeze that blew my dress around my legs; you will remember the look in my eyes and my uncertain smile, and you will hate me more than I hate myself.

I raise my hand to knock on the door of the house that you and Jack built, and I can hear you moving around inside. There is a moment before you answer, a moment when the wind stirs my hair around my face, a moment when I speak to the air before me, words falling to the steps below me, words that tell you, before I see you, I’m sorry.

 would like to make it clear that this is a work of fiction inspired by this week's topic and by a play her sister was in recently, 'All's golden square in love and war'.

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Week Six Prompt: Food Memory

She owned a sauce company – Mama Rosa’s sauce company, to be exact. Well, her dad owned it, but her dad was kind of a dropkick, so it was up to her to run the family business. I met her out one night – there was a bar, there was alcohol, and that meant the night could last forever. She had an accent. She was beautiful. I was horny. I liked the way she said my name (Siiiiimon) making me sound like someone you’d heard of before.  She liked the way I asked for her number.
 
I didn’t even wait three days to call. Her voice was even, unsurprised – as though this sort of thing happened to her all the time. I asked her to a movie – she had a different idea.
 
She taught me how to make pasta – the real kind, from scratch. The closest I’d come to this before was a packet of maggi noodles – I’m more a meat and three veg kind of guy. She showed me how to fold the dough, using a speck of water and a tiny bit of salt, mixing my hands in with hers, lightly touching me on the shoulder to show me what to do next. I learnt how to thread the pasta machine, big hands clumsy in their motions, more used to tossing a footy around then spinning dough, turning and turning like the gramophone my granddad used to have. The pasta didn’t play a tune, but she put the radio on and we danced to our own music anyway. We got flour in places people shouldn’t ever get flour. Weren’t we the cutest things you’d ever seen?
 
My first bite – the flavours knocked me for six; there were olives and mushrooms and basil and tomato, so much tomato I nearly couldn’t breathe, but it was the best kind of not being able to breathe in the world. Suffocatingly hot; it was delicious. With that bite, fork held up to my mouth, grinning at me wearing nothing but an apron, she ruined my mum’s cooking for me forever. 
 
She took me to restaurants – Italian, always Italian – she showed me how you knew the food was good before you’d even tasted it. She taught me about colour, she taught me about smell. She had this weird idea that everything you saw or smelled or touched or tasted was yours, your very own to keep, bottled up inside of you, locked up tight so that no one could get at it but you. I told her it wasn’t healthy to keep things bottled up inside of you, but she laughed at me. She laughed at me a lot, and I used to smile because I liked hearing her laugh.
 
“She’s passionate,” I said to Jason when he asked me why I liked her. He had this look on his face I couldn’t work out, but I didn’t have time. I was too busy confusing feeling scared with feeling invigorated. She was a volcano about to erupt, she was an avalanche the second before it begins, pulsating with a tensile energy I couldn’t get enough of. Sometimes, I used to just watch her, watch the way she did things. I saw the quiet tension that bubbled beneath her skin, the tiny expressions that crossed her face when something annoyed her. I used to imagine that all those bottles locked away inside of her were quietly simmering away; boiling over into everything she said and did. She didn’t like it when I watched her.
 
Sometimes she was exhausting – she’d had another fight with her dad, she’d gotten drunk or high or both and called me up. “Why can’t you come pick me up?” she’d say. “My dad’s kicked me out.” Never mind the fact it was 6 in the morning and I was already at work, picking up extra hours because she’d been sick the week before and had needed me. “You’re never there for me. And now you’re going away and I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
 
She moved in with me the week before I went on my trip. I had booked it months ago, before her, before the Italian and the best sex of my life. I was going with Jason, we’d been planning to get out of town for ages, go somewhere no one knew us and just chill out. “I don’t get it,” she’d say, and move to sit next to my roommates Dave and his girlfriend on my couch, trying to punish me for being neglectful.  Suddenly she was everywhere, in my kitchen, in my bathroom, in my bedroom, trying to make me stay. She cooked me a meal the night I left – lasagne – and there were candles and wine and she was wearing her apron. “I’m sorry for the way I’ve been acting. It’s just. You’re good for me, you know?” She looked up at me from her plate, tears in her eyes. “Sometimes I just get scared about what might happen if you’re not around.” I held her and told her not to worry, told her she was beautiful, told her everything was going to be okay. That night, sitting on the plane, I truly believed that.
 
Three weeks later I returned home, and she met me at the door with a plate of handcooked ravioli, little mouthwatering pockets I’d never tasted before. We sat at the table together, her watching me eat. There was a long silence and then, she told me with a look I’d never seen her use before.
 

“I slept with Dave."
 

When I was fourteen, I’d been hit in the balls by a footy kicked by someone with terrible aim. I had gone down then, body wracked with the slow pain that throbs its way from the inside out, making you feel sick somewhere deep in your stomach, winding you from the shock of it all. This? This was worse than that.
 
Later, I realized that look on her face was sorrow; she was sorry she’d hurt me, sorry because she’d warned me and I hadn’t listened, sorry she cared enough about me to feel bad about what she’d done.
 
I don’t eat Italian food anymore.

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