Mark's ceiling fan

The ceiling fan motor was buzzing and had needed to be replaced since 1997, but Mark had never gotten around to it. To tell the truth, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He was very conscious of the notion that it was the only trait of his house that took away the sterility of the emptiness between the walls. Taking away the sterility, in Mark’s mind, would make it something of a home.

He still wasn’t able to think about it for more than a few seconds at a time, but the sterility had arrived on a Thursday evening of yesteryear.

Mark and Julia had been living in their new house for only about 3 months, and in their first nights and weeks they would stay up late in bed– still so much in love that their marriage was a perpetual honeymoon– talking about their hundreds of ideas to decorate their new home. Mark wanted three or four Lay-Z Boys in the basement with an old pinball machine and a mini fridge for his favorite beers. He’d always wanted to be the cool guy with the best hang-out pad. Julia wanted a swinging bench in the garden where she could sit and watch the 2 sons they’d planned on having. There wasn’t any real rush, however, to get any of this done. Sure, the house needed to be painted and decorated, but it seemed like every time Mark would get out the paint bucket and drop cloth, Julia would distract him until they ended their afternoon by making love. No matter the state of the house, Mark and Julia decorated each others’ worlds; there was no real rush.

These days, Mark was a machine that ran like clockwork. He ran through the same routines day in and day out. His hair had turned white, purple, leathery circles had developed underneath his eyes, and as he would cross Central Boulevard on his walk to work every morning, he remembered his days as a varsity sprinter in high school and wondered if he could sprint fast enough to get jump in front of the 7:52 train that passed by.

The dishes had mostly gone: slipped from trembling fingers to shatter on the tile floor. Over and over again during the first weeks in January, 1998, so that only two plates and on drinking glass remained. This is what Mark had dinner with every day.

No one had ever suspected a tornado to pass through Denver, especially with no warning. But on a relatively warm spring day, it happened. In a grocery store parking lot, Julia got hit in the neck by a violent tree limb that ruptured her jugular. She died within 38 seconds as most of the blood in her body spilled into her throat.

Two days before Mark’s birthday in 1999, he stopped by the hardware store on his way home from work and picked up a can of WD-40, two small rotary cogs, and a handful of nuts and washers. When he got home, he had a boiled chicken breast, a yellow apple, and 3 glasses of water for dinner. He spent the evening fixing the fan until it  ran imperceptibly smoothly. The next morning– the day before his birthday– Mark got up, shaved and washed his hair in the shower as usual, and caught the 7:52 train.