1) Extra Bedrooms
You’d told yourself you wouldn’t have babies until you published your first book, but your husband says, “We’re buying for our future, not our present,” and so you agree not to look at houses with fewer than three bedrooms. You agree not to look at houses with unequally sized bedrooms, because you don’t want to show your future son or daughter favoritism. You agree not to look at houses with bedrooms on the second floor, because what if there’s a fire? What if there’s a fire at night, and your future son or daughter sits poised in his or her bedroom window, flames licking the curtains, and refuses to jump?
2) Finished Basement
You decide you will buy a house for all of the worst case scenarios. A relative tells you that during an earthquake and a tornado, the safest place to be is an underground bathroom, webbed in tubes and pipes concreted in place by dirt and molding. During the Cold War, your mother piled her damp, Pittsburgh basement with canned foods. Canned peaches, canned sardines, canned asparagus, canned beans. Every morning, she would fill a 50-liter tub with fresh water. Just in case today was the day the world ended.
3) Acceptable Paint Colors
• Honeywheat
• Antique bronze
• Lemongrass
• Squire Hill Buff
• Barley Harvest
• Coralsbud Canyon
• Lemon Soufflé
4) Man Cave
He will fill it with records made before his time. He will fill it with a series of hand weights that look like pieces of a vertebra. He will paint over the Honeywheat the day he turns thirty. The room will be Nocturne Blue through his thirties, Greywood through his forties, January Garnet through his fifties, and then Desert Cactus through his sixties and to the end of his life. Sometimes you’ll see him slide a wooden box under the couch in this room, a box he says is full of documents and old mementos. You’ll prove to yourself that you trust him by never looking inside.
5) Clawfoot Bathtub
You imagine a future when your children have grown and your husband works late (possibly he’s having an affair), and the only place you can feel not alone is between the folds of porcelain, water wrinkling your fingerpads and warming your skin young again. You imagine this scenario until you do find a house with the perfect bathtub. Pearl-white, deep-bellied, feet shaped like lion paws. “Let’s try it on for size,” your husband says. He helps you into the dry tub and then, to your surprise, follows you. Together you sit in the cramped space, knees and hips knocking. Your real estate agent stands embarrassed in the doorway and pretends to check her phone. The tub is curved in a way that keeps sliding you closer together, and you and your husband laugh as your butts bump. You’re imagining each other naked, imagining each other furred in soap bubbles. Your fantasy changes to one in which your love grows deeper and more rooted every year. Your husband always comes home in time to make dinner with you. Your house never catches on fire. You finish your book and people like it. You look across the tub at your husband to see if he’s imagining the same, but you can’t catch his eye.
You’d told yourself you wouldn’t have babies until you published your first book, but your husband says, “We’re buying for our future, not our present,” and so you agree not to look at houses with fewer than three bedrooms. You agree not to look at houses with unequally sized bedrooms, because you don’t want to show your future son or daughter favoritism. You agree not to look at houses with bedrooms on the second floor, because what if there’s a fire? What if there’s a fire at night, and your future son or daughter sits poised in his or her bedroom window, flames licking the curtains, and refuses to jump?
2) Finished Basement
You decide you will buy a house for all of the worst case scenarios. A relative tells you that during an earthquake and a tornado, the safest place to be is an underground bathroom, webbed in tubes and pipes concreted in place by dirt and molding. During the Cold War, your mother piled her damp, Pittsburgh basement with canned foods. Canned peaches, canned sardines, canned asparagus, canned beans. Every morning, she would fill a 50-liter tub with fresh water. Just in case today was the day the world ended.
3) Acceptable Paint Colors
• Honeywheat
• Antique bronze
• Lemongrass
• Squire Hill Buff
• Barley Harvest
• Coralsbud Canyon
• Lemon Soufflé
4) Man Cave
He will fill it with records made before his time. He will fill it with a series of hand weights that look like pieces of a vertebra. He will paint over the Honeywheat the day he turns thirty. The room will be Nocturne Blue through his thirties, Greywood through his forties, January Garnet through his fifties, and then Desert Cactus through his sixties and to the end of his life. Sometimes you’ll see him slide a wooden box under the couch in this room, a box he says is full of documents and old mementos. You’ll prove to yourself that you trust him by never looking inside.
5) Clawfoot Bathtub
You imagine a future when your children have grown and your husband works late (possibly he’s having an affair), and the only place you can feel not alone is between the folds of porcelain, water wrinkling your fingerpads and warming your skin young again. You imagine this scenario until you do find a house with the perfect bathtub. Pearl-white, deep-bellied, feet shaped like lion paws. “Let’s try it on for size,” your husband says. He helps you into the dry tub and then, to your surprise, follows you. Together you sit in the cramped space, knees and hips knocking. Your real estate agent stands embarrassed in the doorway and pretends to check her phone. The tub is curved in a way that keeps sliding you closer together, and you and your husband laugh as your butts bump. You’re imagining each other naked, imagining each other furred in soap bubbles. Your fantasy changes to one in which your love grows deeper and more rooted every year. Your husband always comes home in time to make dinner with you. Your house never catches on fire. You finish your book and people like it. You look across the tub at your husband to see if he’s imagining the same, but you can’t catch his eye.
Dana Diehl is the author of OUR DREAMS MIGHT ALIGN (Jellyfish Highway Press, 2016). She earned her MFA in Fiction at Arizona State University. Her work has also appeared in North American Review, Sonora Review, Necessary Fiction, Passages North, and elsewhere. She currently lives and writes in Tucson.