Lisa positioned herself and her cracked porcelain skin closest to the window so that she could hear the drips and drops of rain as she sipped her morning coffee. She thought about how times like this let her feel as though nothing else mattered. A warm body walking down the stairs ended that thought. She quickly got up and gathered her things for work, desperate to avoid the impending conversation with the awoken vessel known as her husband, Daniel.  

The stairs cracked and cried out as a scruffy, absent-minded Daniel stumbled down, as if his body was learning to walk for the first time. He doesn’t take much interest in what she’s doing, thinking that she’s up to her normal routine in the morning and moves straight to the smell of coffee, like his life depended on it. He took the pot of coffee out from the holder and poured it into a cup, smelling the freshly grounded beans, while looking out at the window. It seemed to Lisa that he was worse than usual.  

She packed a small pink and white lunch bag for the day, along with a planner and some books softly stowed in a decently sized tote bag. She placed the bag near the door and sat down at the table to tie her shoes, messing up a few times from her shaking hands. She hit the table by accident, knocking over a picture of Daniel and his father. She set the picture right again.

“It looks like some dumbass knocked over our fence—I swear it was fine a few days ago,” Daniel said.  

Lisa froze. “Oh, right. Your father came by the other night.”  

“What for?”  

“To see you,” she said, “but was too drunk to remember you work the nightshift.”

Lisa worked at the local bookstore in town. She managed the day-to-day retail check-out and stocked the newly arrived books. She could’ve been a journalist in New York, maybe even working for a top news organization like The New York Times, if she hadn’t followed Daniel to this nowhere town, he called home. She found that Daniel’s father shared the same animosity. His wife, Daniel’s mother, died many years ago from an unidentifiable sickness—he grew to blame others for her death and eventually the whole town. Yet there was nowhere else for him to go. He was just as stuck as she was, which allowed her to freely speak to him, something she never did with Daniel.  

The clock ticked and tocked as Lisa headed for the door. Her heart ticked back. She placed her hand on the knob, waiting for her husband to say something else, something beyond the surface.  

A few days before, she was on the phone with her mother.

“I haven’t told him anything yet,” she said. “It’s best to leave things unspoken, seeing as generally, that’s how he prefers things. I plan to leave him after work.”  

A deep static sigh came from the phone into her ear rattling it with guilt.  

“You must tell him you’re leaving, dear,” her mother pleaded. “It’s the least you can do.”

And before Lisa responded the stairs spoke out, as it often did every time someone walked up and down, somehow varying in sound depending on the individual. She believed it had to do with how much pain a person carried, the louder the creak and cry of the wood the more unresolved issues, at least that’s what her father told her when she was a little girl—a year before he passed. In her parents' house she used to sit at the top of the stairs on the side, listening to everything and everyone that walked up. Both her mother and father made little to no sounds while climbing up and down, until one day after her father was gone, she heard the stairs creak as her mother came down. Her husband created a distinct noise that was unlike anything she had ever heard.  

Lisa had quickly shut her phone off and jumped into bed, pretending poorly to be asleep. The door creaked open upon the homely darkness and through the slit of her eyes, she saw Daniel getting ready for bed. He didn’t speak a word, just sat at the end of the bed, not moving and barely breathing. She thought for certain that he had heard everything, but in the days that followed he said nothing.  

She loved her husband, or she remembered she did at one point. She wished he would’ve opened up to her throughout the years of their marriage, but he was somewhere else in his head, never there. But she couldn’t stay, especially after last night. Pleading to her father-in-law about his son, she told him all her pain and fell upon sadness, and then they fell upon her bed.  

Her heart tocked forward and she went out the door without saying goodbye or hearing a single word from Daniel. She stopped outside of the house for a moment waiting and wondering if this would be the time that it would all end and he’d confront her about everything, preventing her from leaving—but the door didn’t open, not a sound was made, not a word was spoken from her husband. She was an empty vessel.