Wonderful Life

              The rain had stopped ten minutes earlier, but everyone was still driving as if it was pouring down. People seemed to lose some of their common sense when faced with water. Amelia tapped her fingers against the steering wheel as she waited for the cars in front to slowly edge their way forward in traffic. It was an ordinary Wednesday, and she was on her way home from work. Six o’clock in the evening in late January meant that it was already pitch black and the headlights of the car behind her were hurting her eyes. It had been another stressful day, the office silent with everyone so focused on the mountain of work they had to get through so that social interactions had been few and far between, and she could not wait to be back at home to disappear into her bed and forget the world. This was the half-way point between her flat and work, so the next traffic light felt like a barrier she just could not wait to climb over. Her usual playlist was a comforting soundtrack for her drive and as Nik Kershaw sang about how wouldn’t it be good if we could live without a care for the hundredth time in her car since she got it, Amelia approached the traffic light separating her from one of the city’s biggest crossroads.

She must have seen the puma before anyone else did as the light turned green and she started driving.

It stood in the middle of the road like it owned the place. Sleek, deliberate, a ripple of muscle under its shiny fur. Cars behind her slowed. A cyclist nearly tipped over trying to yank out his phone. Someone behind her honked, not in anger but in awe.

People on the sidewalks were paralysed with surprise, clearly not knowing whether to run or to take in the sight.

She did not brake.

She adjusted her grip on the steering wheel and slowly angled her car around it. She looked in her rearview mirror as she drove away. The puma turned its head once in the direction of her car, its eyes glowing in the glimmer of lights, and then slipped off the asphalt and into the brush nearby as silently as a thought withdrawn.

When she got home that evening, she cooked dinner for her and James, prepared her lunch for the following day, had a shower and got into bed to read and have a cup of tea. James said he still had something to finish up before bed and when she tried to go to the bathroom to brush her teeth, he was there. Only then did it occur to her to mention it, however she did it the way someone might mention minor inconvenience.

‘There was a puma on the road on the way home,’

James looked up from where he was tinkering around the sink, holding a new chrome towel ring in his hand ‘A what?’

‘A puma,’

‘Like the animal?’

‘Mmm,’

‘A real puma?’

‘Yep,’

‘What was it doing there?’

‘I don’t know,’

‘Did you get a picture?’

‘No,’

‘You didn’t stop?’

‘It was in the way,’ she said.

He frowned, not at her but at the missed opportunity. ‘That’s incredible. You never see stuff like that. Have you looked at the news to see what that was about?’

‘It didn’t occur to me,’

She shrugged and went to wash her teacup while he was still finishing up in the bathroom.

Later, she stepped into the room to finally brush her teeth and felt, without looking, that something had shifted. The towel was hanging differently. Lower. The old brass ring was gone. In its place, the chrome gleamed too brightly under the light, almost offensively.

‘Oh,’ she said to herself.

It was a towel ring. It held a towel. It should not have mattered.

But she stared at it longer than she had stared at the puma.

*

At work, someone had pulled up a blurry photo of the puma from a neighbourhood forum. People gathered around a desk, zooming in, arguing about its size. Was it young? Was it dangerous? Should the council be called? No one knew where it had come from or where it had disappeared to.

She glanced at the picture and felt nothing but a distant recognition. Yes, that had been there. Yes, it had existed in front of her. However, Amelia still didn’t feel moved by it. She kept her head down and focused on her work. She didn’t even tell her coworkers she had seen it because she knew that they would ask her a barrage of questions, and she felt too tired to answer them. There was a moment where she realised, she should be concerned that she felt nothing about this occurrence, that it was probably a sign of something sinister but even that seemed too exhausting to think about, so she just ignored the thought.

That evening she stopped by her favourite takeout place to pick up food. She’d asked James what he’d like beforehand, and he had provided a detailed order. As she was paying for her food, Amelia heard the two waiters discuss the puma:

‘It’s insane, isn’t it? Just appeared out of nowhere. What if it had eaten somebody?’

‘I know. It’s actually shocking that it didn’t.’

Amelia couldn’t take it anymore. She listened to the music playing in the background of the restaurant and pretended the conversation didn’t exist.

When she got back home, as they ate their food, James raised the topic again and before he even got his words out, she gave him a look that told him that she didn’t want to talk about it. And he didn’t.

*

Over the next few days, the bathroom kept changing in ways that were almost polite. The mirror was replaced with one that had a thin black frame. The soap dispenser became angular instead of round. The shower curtain shifted from a soft, faded purple to a geometric pattern that seemed to vibrate if she looked at it too long.

Each alteration was minor. Each was relatively reasonable, except for the fact that stylistically the changes didn’t really seem to come together. Yet each change was, on its own, defensible.

However, together they formed a quiet invasion.

She noticed everything. The new grout, too white. The cabinet handles, squared off instead of curved. The way the toilet paper rolled over instead of under.

‘Do you have to do it like that?’ she asked one evening, watching James tighten a screw.

‘Like what?’

‘Like … all at once.’

He laughed lightly. ‘It’s just a few upgrades. It’ll look great when it’s done, it’s all going to come together.’

When it’s done.

She had not been consulted about when it would begin.

She lay awake cataloguing changes. The faint smell of fresh paint from where he’d added a new colour on one side of the wall. The loud wallpaper he had chosen for the other side. The way the light now reflected off the mirror into her eyes when she brushed her teeth. The absence of the small rust stain near the faucet that she had grown used to, that had felt oddly comforting in its imperfection.

If she were reasonable, she would be grateful. He was improving their space. Investing in it. In them.

‘Don’t you think it feels better?’ James asked one morning, gesturing around the bathroom with a flourish. ‘More us?’

She opened her mouth to answer and hesitated at the word.

Us.

Amelia was not sure there was an ‘us’. For the longest time it had felt as though it had been the two of them, two individuals, trying to connect the way they knew how.

Something in her life didn’t make sense. The puma had stood in the road like a loud warning – wild, improbable, alive. People had stopped and stared. They had felt something pierce the ordinary fabric of their day.

She had felt the same dull weight she carried everywhere. A film between her and the world.

But here, in this tiled, wallpapered, painted room, she felt everything. The wrongness of the new light fixture. The way the bathmat no longer matched the towels. The quiet assumption that change was good simply because it was change.

Small things, she realised, only become unbearable when they are symptoms.

It wasn’t the towel ring. It was the fact that James hadn’t asked. It was the way he said ‘we’ when he meant himself. It was how she had stopped braking for wonder but could not stop flinching at a shifted soap dish.

One evening Amelia stood in the doorway while James was building a new bathroom cabinet. Once again in a style that seemed out of place.

‘Do you like it?’ he asked, softer this time.

She looked past him, at the immaculate lines, the careful improvements, the room becoming something sleek and unfamiliar.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. And this time it was not about the bathroom.

Outside, somewhere beyond their apartment building, the road to her work and the brush, the puma moved through the dark, indifferent to grout lines and chrome finishes.

She wondered, briefly, what it must feel like to be so entirely at home in your own skin that you could cross a road full of astonished people and not once question where you belonged.