WELL DONE! Chaos by Richard Stimac

Chaos by Richard Stimac

“Chaos is simply order we don’t understand yet,” Crystal said. She lounged on the red couch that she and her husband moved to the middle of the living room an hour ago.

She balanced a stemless wine glass of chardonnay on her right knee.

“Look what I can do,” she said.Mark, her husband, taped the bottom of a box together.“It’s your couch,” he said.

“No. It’s yours.”

“We discussed this already.” Mark tossed another taped box with a dozen or more others scattered where the dining room table had been.

Outside, a late depression from the arctic tormented the heartland. An afternoon April rain tapped its morse code against the glass of the window. No one deciphered it. Soon, the rain turned to ice, then the ice, to snow. Beneath all beauty is danger.

“What can I do?” Crystal lifted her wine glass as if in a toast.

“You can start putting books in the boxes.”

“What?”

“The books. In the boxes.”

Crystal finished the white wine.“I meant this afternoon,” she said.

“I should have known.”

“Don’t be nasty.”

“Trust me. I’m not.”

Mark set two boxes in front of a small set of bookshelves. He held two books in the air.

“Any of these you want?” he said.

“You were the reader between the two of us.”

Crystal was in the kitchen refilling her wine.

“I still am a reader.”

The wife of this couple leaned against the kitchen door frame.“Why do you read so much?” she said.

“I like to know things.”

“I’d like to know a few things that made sense with each other.”

“The more things you know, the more things make sense.”

“That,” the wife of the couple said, between sips, “is nonsense.”

By this time, Mark filled one box with books and began another. Crystal put the wine glass on the floor and began taping the filled box shut.

“This hasn’t been chaotic,” her husband said.

“I thank you for that.”

The one box taped, Crystal again sipped her chardonnay.

“When do we sign the paperwork?” The woman began to brush the man’s hair with the back of her hand. He waved her away, as if her fingers were flies annoying him as he worked in the garden.

Crystal stood before the now-bare windows.“It’s beginning to freeze.”

“The temperature?”

“The rain.”

Brow furrowed, Crystal spun on her heels to face Mark.

“If you think life has no purpose,” she said, “then you’re a fool.”

“That’s how I get through life.”

“Thinking life has no meaning, or being a fool?”

“Both.”

The sound of the freezing rain thudded a deeper bass than the rain, the message made clearer. Still, no one listened.

“You shouldn’t drive home.” Crystal sat cross-legged on the floor.

“I can’t stay here,” Mark said as he folded the flaps of another box filled with books.

The roads began to take on a glimmer, beautiful, with street lights shimmering as if a clear night sky fell to the ground.

Crystal watched her husband continue to put one book after the other into a cardboard box. She thought of all the boxes with all the things now gathered in the dark and sealed from prying hands and snooping eyes. Each box needed unpacking. Then each thing in each box needed exhuming and placement in a new location. But tonight, she was still married while nature brought its chaos to the world. In due time, she would put things back in order.

Richard Stimac has published a full-length book of poetry Bricolage (Spartan Press), over forty poems in Michigan Quarterly Review, Faultline, and december, and others, nearly two-dozen flash fiction in Blue Mountain, Good Life, Typescript, and three scripts. He is a poetry reader for Ariel Publishing and a prose reader for The Maine Review. Richard will be attending the 2023 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop.