The old table would not do. It was marred, made of pine, ugly with acrylic paint stains, much too large for her tiny new studio apartment life. She was not an animist but she was superstitious and dreamy. The old table had absorbed too much wicked babble over microwaved macaroni and cheese dinners and cheap breakfast cereal. “You fuck all the wrong men. Shabby men. Men with bad hair and worse ideas.” “Oh, eat my butt. You remind me of a geriatric poodle.” “You’re crazier than my Pentecostal snake shaking grits with ketchup eating grandpa, you middle-aged floozy.” “You’re as exciting as a wall of white paint. Fuck off.”
A new table was the answer, the remedy, the miracle she would deliver to herself. It would be small and round, not big and square. It would have two chairs, not four. Maybe she would paint it cherry red. That would make sense. That seemed right. She would eat and fuck on the table. She would clean it with baking soda and water, not Lysol.
