An Un-lovely Clumsy Crash

Hailey Piper (she/her) is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Queen of Teeth, All the Hearts You Eat, A Light Most Hateful, and other books of horror. She has also published over 100 short stories appearing in Weird Tales and elsewhere. Find her at www.haileypiper.com.

The lovely moment began with an un-lovely, clumsy-sounding crash from the other room.

I’d been seated at my desk, working on my laptop when it happened. Flinching would probably be the correct reaction, but I only sighed. Crashes aren’t an unusual noise in our apartment. Sometimes the source is as tiny as a dry erase marker breaking loose from its fridge magnet, though more often it’s the shower curtain rod because I am Very Bad at putting that up in a way that stays.

This crash was a little different—the venetian blinds had broken from the window in my wife J’s art room and collapsed down the sill and onto the floor, dragging down a rainbow line of decorative flags with them. Our apartment windows face northwest, which means there’s only a particular stretch of mid-to-late afternoon when the sun splashes our rooms with light. And this is the only window in the art room. Meaning J needs the blinds, or else she gets a modern action movie sky laser’s worth of sunshine pouring in.

I waited until she came home from work and I was done with mine before pointing out what had happened. By law of noir cliché, venetian blinds aren’t supposed to fall. They’re for pressing down one blind with a finger and peering outside to see if that guy in a trench coat and fedora who’s been tailing your partner for five blocks is still out there. So, neither J nor I were experts on fixing these things.

Why did I sigh back when I heard the crash and looked into the art room? Because I was predicting a giant pain in the ass in fixing this, and I’m constantly busy with a hundred things, and I don’t like her space being disturbed with problems. It’s just a pet peeve of mine.

But something funny happened as I studied the blinds, their rod, found out they had these two little boxes that screwed to the wall, tried to screw one into the plaster, failed, started juggling the boxes, the rod, the screwdriver, the screws, these little doors that came off the boxes.

I started to smile.

J and I began passing pieces back and forth between each other, me on a chair I’d dragged in for standing on (did you know it’s easier to screw something in when you’re not having to reach way over your head?) with her standing beside it. I try to take a pride-in-your-work approach to clean-up that I credit to Hayao Miyazaki (think Sophie cleaning up the castle in Howl’s Moving Castle, the sisters cleaning up in My Neighbor Totoro, and so on). Repairs have been a different story.

But the way we worked together on this felt different. There were already a dozen holes glaring out from the drywall where I needed to screw in the blinds’ boxes, evidence of previous owners or tenants undergoing this same problem with these same blinds. Some of them had probably sighed, same as me. Some had someone beside them helping. A spouse, a parent, a sibling, a friend. Or maybe they were doing it alone.

Or were they? None of us ever knew each other, never met, but in that moment of looking at those little holes screwed into the wall, a single purpose had connected us all—putting these damn blinds back where they belonged.

I smiled wider and thwacked the butt of the screwdriver against the screw until it made a new dot in the wall. Gently—I didn’t want to make an oversized hole or have to screw it in twice.

Once that was done, J passed up the little blinds box. How many former tenants had to press this cheap piece of plastic against the wall? How many times did it take each of us?

As I had both hands up, one to steady the screw and box, the other to turn the screwdriver, I felt a wet, firm kiss on my side. I’d forgotten I was wearing a two-piece skirt and crop top, and raising my arms had exposed my midriff.

It broke me from smiling to laughing. This was not the traditional uniform for handy lesbian, so I guess I had it coming, but also I’m not typically handy. It was simply one of those moments where we could glance over what was wrong and intuit how to fix it so long as we worked together.

After a moment, J took her lips off my side. She didn’t want me to laugh too hard and topple off the chair in another un-lovely, even-more-clumsy crash.

But I couldn’t help still smiling. I slid off the chair long enough to grab the blinds while she took the screwdriver, and then I climbed back to fit the rod in. She passed up each door to the blinds boxes and I fit them back on. The last thing to do was straighten her line of flags.

When I got down, we hugged each other hard. Success! Not only had we joined the apartment’s legacy of residents trying to patch these blinds back over the window, we’d also joined them in succeeding. The window is healed now, and all is right in the art room.

But what surprised me more than anything was thinking to my initial sigh, and how that morphed into smiles and laughter. To think I had dreaded this task when it ended up making us proud of ourselves. I would’ve missed out on our haphazard passing of materials, or the sense of comradery with everyone else who’d lived in this space, or J telling me how bad she wanted to chomp into my side while I was standing there, making me laugh all over again.

Never would I have guessed, at the sound of that crash, that I would be grateful this place could be a wreck sometimes, if only so we can keep putting it back together.

Love Letters: Reasons to Be Alive is a yearlong essay series in which we acknowledge, celebrate, and examine the objects and experiences that keep us going, even through the hardest of times. The series is free to read, for everyone, forever.

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