CRACKS IN THE CEILING
by R. D. Robbins
Sam looks at the ceiling. Sometimes he looks at Alice, but mainly he looks at the ceiling.
Alice reads the Wall Street Journal. She mumbles about ATT and Nokia and General Dynamics and IBM and Sam looks up at the ceiling. “You are looking at the ceiling again.” Alice is sarcastic and mean-spirited. “Ever since you got fired, you’ve been looking at the ceiling.”
“It was just a job.” He lights a cigarette. Alice reminds him of a troll. Maybe he can talk her into taking up residence under a bridge, he thinks. “Do trolls live under a bridge?” he asks.
Alice gives him one of her famous looks, the one with the arched eyebrow. “What a bizarre thing to ask.”
“Do they?”
“What?”
“Live under a bridge?”
“How should I know.” Alice returns her attention to the paper. “IBM is up.”
“That’s good,” Sam says. He doesn’t care a wit, but it doesn’t pay to argue with Alice.
She looks directly at Sam and squints. “You should sit down,” she says. “And you should quit smoking.”
“I am sitting down, dear.” He blows a smoke ring at the lovely ceiling.
“You look as if you’re hovering a foot off the chair. Why do you do that?”
“What?”
“Hover.”
“I’m not hovering, I’m sitting, Alice,” Sam says. He feels for the chair just to make sure. He smiles. “You’re right. I am hovering.”
“Hmmm,” she says. “You should get a job and you should shave and get a haircut.”
Sam admires the intersection of a spiky crack with a straight one on the west wall of the kitchen, near the sink and over the fridge.
“You should get a job,” Alice mumbles.
“I can’t hear you, dear. I’m hovering.”
“Maybe you need a hearing aid.” Alice folds the paper into thirds and puts it into her designer briefcase, checks herself in the mirror, smiles at the image which smiles back. She smoothes her designer suit over her hips, picks up her briefcase and her high heels clackety-clack down the hallway and out the front door.
Sam floats four feet from the ceiling and watches Mona in the City. He is very concerned about Mona’s pregnancy and whether or not she will marry Pete. And if she does, will Pete be able to keep his job or will he get fired and if he gets fired will he be interested in the ceiling? Sam is sure Mona will subscribe to the Wall Street Journal. A yellow cartoon dog with floppy ears selling Bow Wow Breakfast Treats (“Wow, it’s Bow Wow!”) interrupts his reverie.
He looks up at the ceiling and notices that it’s lower. It has lovely cracks, very engaging. They branch and converge and form spidery inscriptions. The ceiling gets closer and closer. Intricate patterns of delicate tributary cracks collide and intertwine. He hardly hears Mona’s voice as she tells Pete she won’t marry him. Sam doesn’t care anymore. He feels very light and traces the patterns with his finger. He swims through the living room window and floats up to the roof.
He hovers six inches above the slate roof and practices raising and lowering himself. A gray and white pigeon lands near him. The pigeon clucks and coos and struts a few steps. “Maybe she won’t come home,” says the pigeon.
“Don’t worry,” Sam says. “If she comes home we’ll fly up into the sky and live in the clouds.”
Copyright: Richard D. Robbins/Carrie Robbins 2004
