Play Date
- May 31, 2019
- 3 min read
by Matt Muilenburg
I game-planned in the midst of ecstasy, laying my work shirt over the dresser so I wouldn’t have to iron out creases before returning to the back half of my nine-to-five. I kicked off my cheap loafers and peeled down my dress socks, leaving them at the foot of the bed for quick retrieval. Laurie, then my fiancé, had already laid her workplace casual over the closet door and awaited me beneath the comforter, the taste of the leftovers we’d hurried through lingering in both our mouths; there would be no romance this lunch break. We had just enough time for primal instincts.
Laurie and I had been living together for a few months, the two of us fresh out of college and scraping by in an apartment filled with the necessities we’d plundered from our parents’ homes the day we decided to test-drive domesticity after three years of sleepovers. Our apartment was both an homage to our childhoods and a diorama of what we assumed adulthood should look like: a dartboard above a flower vase; board games below a mass-produced print of The School of Athens; a refrigerator stocked with yogurt tubes on the top shelf and white wine on the bottom, the front of the fridge furnished with upcoming bills held in place by magnets shaped like fruits, vegetables, and breakfast cereal mascots. Even our bed was mismatched: the queen size mattress sat atop a full-size box spring, several inches of overhang keeping us from snoozing or schmoozing along the perimeter. That mattress had come from Laurie’s aunt, who’d received it as a hand-me-down from the previous generation. It was old and lumpy, and we’d spent much of our first few months together breaking it down further.
Laurie motioned for me to hurry, not out of eagerness, but because our lunch breaks were thrusting toward apocalypse. I jumped up on the old mattress and towered over her, grinning and unbuckling my belt as I played at spontaneity in brief. I unzipped my pants then lifted my leg in an attempt to yank them off, but the old mattress swallowed, ingesting my foot and thrusting me off balance. I wobbled, catching myself by stepping backwards—right into the path of the ceiling fan. One-hundred-ninety RPMs of faux wood propeller whacked me in the back of the head like an angry parent, slapping me down to the queen-size. The springs buried within screeched, laughed like my very own studio audience, and I tumbled off the bed, grabbing my head and moaning in a mockery of the moans I’d been so eagerly anticipating. Laurie rolled about the mattress, arching her back and howling; in another context, I would’ve been thrilled.
From the floor, I watched the fan regain its revolution and blow the last of my pheromones out of the bedroom and into the living room. They floated past the dartboard and the flower vase, the sports drinks and the light beer, the baskets of dirty clothes that we had to wash and fold ourselves, and the dishes that we’d have to scrub after work. They floated past those bills hanging on the fridge like chore sheets, bills we had to pay with our own money. And before escaping our apartment like runaway children, those pheromones floated past the picture frames we’d taken from our parents’ homes, the snapshots within showing a time when neither of us knew the other even existed, when our parents were around to kiss our boo-boos better, when we had no idea that we wouldn’t always have all the time in the world.
Matt Muilenburg teaches at the University of Dubuque. His creative nonfiction has been featured in Barrelhouse Online, Southern Humanities Review, Storm Cellar, Superstition Review, Atticus Review, and elsewhere. Matt holds an MFA from Wichita State University and is an associate editor (fiction) for Southern Indiana Review. He lives near the Field of Dreams movie site.
