By Liz Lavender

The empty space is his comfort—when the desk is clear, he can finally work.

He moves the piles from his desk and reforms them on the table beside it. He doesn’t have time to deal with them right now—the overdue credit card bills; a dirty collection of lint-adorned coins, an antique door handle from his grandmother’s house, those mismatched socks from weeks ago when he didn’t want to get the basket and find their counterparts. He’ll get to it later, he tells himself. He’s just busy right now. He works so much. He has to. For them. That’s more important than a few forgotten things.

And so the piles continue to grow, just elsewhere. An incomplete deck of cards he used to teach the kids a new magic trick last week; a man’s winter hat with the tags still attached; a photograph of him and his wife in front of an open field behind the elementary school where they watched the sun set, a decade ago, on one of their very first dates—the glass of the frame is broken, and to avoid getting cut, he adds even this to the pile, gingerly setting it on top of a coffee-stained mug. If he doesn’t see the shard of glass that’s fallen into the opening of a pink and yellow-striped sock, it can’t cut him, and he won’t see her wince later when she gives in and sorts the socks for him, and when that same sock prompts a thin line of red to peek through the skin on her ring finger.

And he won’t notice her growing dismay at this continuous transference of stuff, or the way her lips tighten as she moves thing after thing to its rightful place. He never wonders how he always has space to add more, despite years of building enormous teetering piles. He won’t notice her hunched back or her drooping shoulders, as her tired, sagging body moves about in a neverending back and forth, bearing the weight for both of them. He won’t notice the disappearing clothes; or the emptying bookshelves; or the rings, carefully placed in an envelope and tucked neatly underneath a stuffed kangaroo, at the very bottom of one of the biggest piles.

He won’t notice any of this until the Tuesday after next, when he reaches over to balance a ceramic pumpkin on top of a precarious stack of unread magazines, a brown fan blade missing one screw, and an empty ukulele case. Because the sound of the shattered gourd will fill him with surprising and overwhelming dread, and he will call out instinctively to her, but in response will hear only the echo of the empty space.