[Nervous Venus]

A piece of a novel I wrote about a young couple living the suburbs. This is not the beginning. I was working on this novel for five years until I lost my back up file and this was what I could recall from memory, though I made some of this stuff up on the spot half an hour ago . :/

I am in the kitchen stirring a skillet of Uncle Ben's Spanish Rice when Will shuffles in. He hovers over my left shoulder for a second, waiting, but I don't turn to greet him. Disappointed, he sags into a chair at the kitchen table, and unfolds the newspaper.

" It's just a story, you know, " he says suddenly. " No reason to bear a grudge."

I sigh. " Well, I can't kill Othello. You keep trying to make me kill him off for no apparent reason," I say.

" How about Marsha? " he offers.

" No!"

" Well, why not?"

" For what purpose?" I cry.

" I'll tell you why. Marsha's a goddamned magazine cut-out. She's cardboard. Why are all your women so easy?"

" Because they're all beautiful!" I say, jabbing the spatula into the rice.

A lump of silence passes between us, and I'm already feeling sorry. I turn off the stove and turn to him.

" I apologize," I say, but Will is no longer paying attention.

He is busy scowling over the sports' section of the newspaper. Probably another mortifying loss for the Rams. I lean over him from behind and drag out the edges of the newspaper. On the front page, the winners - not the Rams - are doing a victory dance at the edge of their field: They are doing the jig, the worm; sagging faces from the losers. This time around the losers are very bitter, seeing as they have yet to win in the Nationals. Will swipes my hand away. He hates it when I take the paper away from him while he still has it, even if he's no longer reading the paper. He says it's an infringement. Once I told him to think of it as the intermission during the football game.

"Where are all the cheerleeders?" he had said. " Where are the beer commercials?"

"I'll be your cheerleader," I had said, shaking my hips. " You want some rah, I'll give you rah," which embarasses him to no end. But that was before he lost his job, and I don't joke around so often anymore.

"Let me see that after you're done," I say.

"Oh, I'm done. I'm done all right," he says, shoving the paper aside. It sags off the corner of the kitchen table and falls to his feet. I bend over, tuck in the advertisements for lace bras, silk underwear, and - what was that? - a coupon for fifteen percent off a bag of chicken breasts. I fold in the corners over the crowd doing The Wave after Barajas scored his touchdown - the touchdown - and drops the stack on the counter near the stove.

Later I will scour, much later. Not in front of Will though. He complains that the scraps fall all over the place, and he's the one that ends up sweeping them into the trash, not me, and that he can't for the life of him understand my compulsion to collect junk. By junk, he means articles on catastrophes: Earthquakes, mosquitoes carrying the Nile Virus, tsunamis in some nation or other. To him they are like finger nail clippings. After the initial first few seconds he will have lost interest.

"Someone should die in the end," he says.

"The Rams or the Hawks?" I say, thinking he wants to discuss the game. He doesn't.

"In your story," he says. " That would make it more interesting. You should get rid of Marsha. I don't like Marsha."

"Why are you so bent on killing someone? Is there a point?"

"Not just someone."

I sigh. " Does Marsha have to die in the end to make you happy Will?"

"If that's what it takes," he says, " then yes."