Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Final Resting Place



            He hid the scissors. The only explanation. They were never in the drawer or on the kitchen counter or even on his desk. She’d found them on the TV, under the bed, between two cushions on the sofa and, once, in the bathtub in an inch of water.
            “Put them away,” she said. “Put them in their final resting place.”
            “I don’t know where they go,” he said.
            “I’ll show you,” she said. “They go in the scissors’ drawer.” She knew he hated that answer, but she did it anyway. Where’s the masking tape?  he would say. In the masking tape drawer, she said.
            The wine puller?
            In the wine puller drawer.
            That little flashlight I bought last week?
            In the flashlight drawer.
            On and on.

            So, when she’d been looking for the scissors, any scissors, for twenty minutes, she confronted him.
            He straightened up from the workbench where he was clamping strips of wood he’d glued together—another model boat or airplane or helicopter to hang from the ceiling.
            “I don’t know,” he said. “Have you looked in the scissors’ drawer?”
            “Not there.”
            He shrugged, went back to tightening the tiny screw on the C clamp, a mockery of concentration.

            The first projectile—a wad of paper—missed him, but the wet rag she’d found on the floor hit him in the back of the neck.
            He didn’t turn to face her, but his big hand went to the cloth, caught it before it fell to the floor, and in one grand and graceful gesture he flung it back. She caught it, threw it, he ducked this time, so it slammed the peg board of tools, tangled in a row of screw drivers, and hung limply.
            He tightened the next clamp.
            “This is serious,” she said. “They’re really lost this time.”
            “What?”
            “The scissors.”
            “In their final resting place at last,” he said and crossed himself before going on to the next clamp.

© 2013 Kathleen Coskran

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