Utopia

By Alexis Kublin

My hand finds the button before the alarm clock even has a chance to sing out. I used to get eight hours every night, but now I keep waking up a few minutes early. No matter, I suppose. The cool shower water wakes me up, as does my morning cup of coffee. The machine hums a little louder today as the coffee drips out.
‍ ‍What about this place? you had asked me when you saw the ad in the paper after three days of the two of us saying we had to get out of there. You showed me the photo and I knew it was perfect; I would have cried right then and there but we both knew there was no time.
I put my mug in the sink and, for the first time, I notice a fleck of paint has chipped off the wall. I reach out to trace the edges of the gash, and when I pull my hand away, paint crumbles, ever so small, sleep on my fingertips. And when I walk down the hallway, a corner of the carpet, right over there by the bedroom door, has lifted up, as if waving. Or maybe smirking.
‍ ‍I’m in love with the air here, you said as we carried in the last of our boxes. We had left so much behind that we were settled in on the same day we got the key. The sweet air filled my lungs with notes of ripening berries and soil after it rains. We called each other by our new names and laughed because of how ridiculous they sounded, but our laughter stopped when we remembered how necessary they were.
‍ ‍We’ll be safe here, you had said, wrapping an arm around my shoulders and pulling me in. A fresh start. Leave everything behind us. Nothing to worry about now. And I felt the corners of my mouth tug up and I beamed so fully for the first time in a week just looking around at our house that glowed neon with hope.
But this morning, I’ve forgotten to get the newspaper from outside like I do every day before drinking my coffee. I leave the bedroom for the front stoop but stop short right before it—the front door is gone, torn right off the hinges, leaving a gaping hole I fear would suck me in if I take just one more step. The front yard is now another room but it’s much, much larger, with a bed and a dresser and a TV so enormous that they feel like monsters and for a moment I stop breathing. I feel myself falling backwards and I wait for you to catch me but I remember you left early this morning and I hit the ground and the fall knocks air back into my lungs. I quickly turn around to see the living room, except the house is different. The candies in the bowl on the coffee table are now chewy plastic. The air is suddenly hot, too hot, and I try to open a window but I can’t, it’s just a painting on the wall. And the wall is made of cardboard. Flimsy, shaking cardboard. Nothing but cardboard.
I’m in a dollhouse—all plastic and cardboard. It’s nothing stable. It’s nothing that can support us.
Then I remember you’re not here.
It’s nothing that can support me.
‍ ‍Nobody needs to know had become your motto when we suddenly realized how far away we had to
move.
I see the water stains on the ceiling before brown water begins to pour down, and I think maybe a pipe has burst or maybe it’s me who’s erupting now. I run through the hole where the doorway used to be and bend down for the newspaper because it feels like the only stable thing. My hair is soaked with pipe water and it spits onto the front page of the newspaper, blurring the photo, the one that takes up half the front page, the one that, even through the water, I can tell is of me. I scan the words but you’re nowhere to be found. And then I remember you never told me where you were going so early today. Or how I could find you. Or why you double-checked the box under the loose floorboard last night.
Looking at the inky me bleeding out over the page, I can imagine well enough the color of my own face draining out. The ceiling cracks under the panic of this storm, and I’m not sure how or when but my knees find the floor and then all of me finds the floor as the dirty pipe water runs over me and floods my face, or maybe those are tears, or maybe it’s my ink pouring out.
I know it’s only a matter of time before they find me here and you manage to escape again while my cardboard house caves in.