Renata’s Couch
She sat at that couch, same one she always did, on the daily, as though she were a natural extension of said couch, an organic matter protruding from the leather cushions and wooden framework, adorned always by her houndstooth throw pillows and cast-iron popcorn bucket. Renata loved her TV shows, and her eyes stood glazed with widened aperture at these scintillating dramas, each episode concluding with an engrossing cliffhanger that just compelled her to watch the very next one. Though she lived an otherwise monotonous existence, lying there, periodically rising up, only to grab snacks from the snack drawer, behind those watchful eyes was a brain that, in its youth, had bore witness to many an unsettling thing. So it was best to ingest her energy drinks and keep awake for as long as she could, staring at those stars projected onto the television screen, for when she eventually dozed into dreamland she would be thrust into an unseemly cerebral plane.
There was her father and her mother, driving the family car, her baby brother in his booster seat, wearing his darling little monkey accouterments. And her big sister. She looked so hip and grunge in her torn denim jeans sitting at the other end. Out the window, a luminous panorama of cotton candy roads and Care Bear enchanted jungles. They sang themes from Saturday morning cartoons, Nickelodeon recollections, and Disney Channel delights raging all across this valley of fun. But that was not to last– she heard its roar before she actually saw it. Its nerve-altering sound, from the shrieks of its high notes to the quaking rumbles of its lows, shook her young body into a debilitating state of flight, fright. The thing gnawing through the sunroof, like a judgment from high up above.
She jolted awake the instant her husband unlocked the door. It always took him a second to rattle the keys in through the door until the right one finally fit in. A frightened burst of “oh dear lord,’ belting from the bottom of her frumpy chin. It was something she didn’t take too much into consideration, how these utterances to the almighty father were so deeply embedded into her psyche, even though it had been decades since she’d graced the walls of a church. Robbie stared blankly at Renata. There was no legible expression behind his square-framed glasses except maybe a hint of shame that he had awakened her from her slumber. He knew very well that she had trouble sleeping. It was easy to see the way she uncomfortably rolled about beside him on that old bed of theirs, the coils underneath chiming away at the significant shift in weight from one corner to the next.
“What' chu watching, hon?” he asked, staring at the TV in front of her. He couldn’t make any sense of the seemingly disjointed images playing out, one shot after the next of good-looking actors in some green-screen rendered fantasy setting after the next.
“Oh, just another silly little show,” she replied, heavy breathing yet still with a high-pitched familial chirp that almost had hints of sarcasm underneath. “It’s about a serial killer who can jump through different realities.”
“Sorta like Dexter meets Doctor Who?”
“Something like that… the guy they got playing him, he’s very handsome.”
Robert nodded.
“Don’t get jealous,” she chuckled softly, “You know big muscly guys like that aren’t my type.” She said it almost as a sarcastic joke, but she meant it with all sincerity. Back when they were both colleagues at the same traveling agency, what she never forgot initially attracted her to him was his affable, out-of-shapeliness and the understated confidence which he carried himself with in spite of it. Robbie had a realness to him that she seldom saw in these manufactured dramas she so religiously binged.
Robert quietly waddled over to the kitchen, where he instinctively looked through the freezer to pull out a plastic-wrapped chimichanga. “You want me to heat you up one?”
“No, thanks. I already had two today.”
She let out a breathy exhale as she looked back at her show, grabbing the remote so she could rewind to the episodes she missed during her dream. She wanted to tell him about the dream she had been having, repeatedly, again and again for the past few weeks. But she knew he wouldn’t have anything helpful to say, so she left it at that. She sat silently, listening to the microwave next door whir as she imagined a little frozen piece of processed meat rotating slowly under a bath of white light.
Then, the beeping stopped. He walked back towards the living room and stood beneath the doorframe, existing in the two rooms at once. He took a few bites of his meal, stuffing his face with his fork, blankly trying to make sense of what she was watching. “You like this?” he asked with a not-so-subtle hint of derision.
“I think it’s really cool, yeah, the way he seems so cool and calm, and yet he’s secretly this crazy psycho guy. It’s very realistic. Sometimes you don’t realize the most dull, normal people can have the darkest secrets.”
Robbie said nothing in response. He quietly walked past her and went into their bedroom to finish the rest of his meal in silence. So this was what her forties were like, she thought. She sometimes wondered if she would be better off living alone, but there was no point because this line of thought never went anywhere. She just kept bingeing her show, waiting for the arc to materialize.