The fainting couch had started watching me.
Pink velour. Victorian. Curved like it expected telegrams to arrive with bad news. I bought it during a phase when furniture felt like progress.
Lately it had taken on the air of something that had seen too many evenings end the same way. It had learned the shape of me better than most people.
Pink velour is not forgiving after midnight.
The replacement appeared online sometime around three in the morning while I was researching something else entirely. Emerald velvet. Victorian again, but calmer about it. The listing described the color as “deep, serious green.” The sort of green that suggested evenings might turn out differently.
The couch was in Red Hook, waiting. Leaving it there began to feel like a moral failure.
I stood up too fast and the room tried briefly to reorganize itself. Kitchen counter. Mirror check. A small morale adjustment. I told myself it was sinus maintenance.
Shoes. Keys. Door.
First key wrong. Second key ambitious. The third key took the bolt like it had always believed in me.
Outside, Cobble Hill had assembled its morning committee. Coffee cups. Dogs receiving briefings. People walking like their lives had minutes that connected properly.
I moved past them before the neighborhood could form conclusions.
The bus arrived. I boarded with the focus of someone transporting an idea that hadn’t been tested yet. The ride toward Red Hook unfolded through streets that looked wider than necessary, like the city had just taken a breath.
Warehouses appeared. Long sidewalks. The smell of salt and delivery trucks.
The building was a storage facility. Inside, a man emerged from behind a stack of lamps that looked like they had outlived several apartments.
“You here for the couch,” he said.
It sounded like a diagnosis.
He led me through a narrow aisle of chairs that had known better decades. At the back, the emerald couch waited under a sheet, shaped like something confident.
The man pulled the sheet away.
The velvet shifted in the light, darker and richer than the photos. The armrest curved like it had been expecting a hand for a long time. I touched it once and the fabric moved under my fingers like water.
“Solid frame,” the man said, knocking lightly on the side.
I nodded like that meant anything.
We carried it outside together. Furniture reveals things about itself during transport. The couch behaved well for half a block and then attempted to become an abstract sculpture.
A van rolled past, the driver slowing to watch.
The bus stop appeared before I had a better idea. The couch and I stood there together, both of us pretending this had always been the route home. My plan had consisted mostly of momentum.
A few people glanced over and then politely returned to their phones.
The bus arrived with the slow authority of public infrastructure.
The driver opened the door, looked at me, then looked at the couch. His eyes stayed there for a moment like he was checking the math.
“Aw, hell nah,” he said. “That’s a couch.”
“Correct,” I said.
“You’re not bringing that on here.”
“I think we should try,” I said. “For civic curiosity.”
He stared at me.
“People ride the bus,” he said.
“This couch is very respectful,” I said. “It’s had a long day.”
The driver leaned out of his seat and looked again at the emerald velvet.
“Where you going with it?”
“Cobble Hill.”
He nodded slowly, which felt promising.
“No.”
Behind me a small line of passengers had formed with the quiet patience of people who suspected the outcome but wanted to see it anyway.
“Look,” I said, lowering my voice. “It’s one couch. I’ll keep it out of the aisle.”
He glanced at the couch again.
“You gonna carry it yourself?”
“That’s the dream.”
He watched as I attempted it. I lifted one end confidently and immediately discovered the couch had a deeper relationship with gravity than I did.
The velvet slid in my hands. One leg caught the curb and refused to discuss alternatives.
The driver sighed.
“Hold up,” he said.
He stood, stepped down onto the sidewalk, and grabbed the other end with a kind of competence that suggested he’d done this before.
“Lift,” he said.
We angled the couch toward the door. For a moment it seemed possible. Then the couch met the bus steps and reconsidered its life.
It seemed to prefer the street.
We adjusted.
A man behind me said, “You’re close.”
“I can feel that,” I said.
The driver shifted his grip and together we tilted the couch sideways, like convincing furniture to participate in public transit.
The velvet brushed the doorway and then, suddenly, the couch was inside.
We stood there for a second looking at it.
“Well,” the driver said, returning to his seat. “Now you gotta ride with it.”
I nodded and followed it down the aisle.
The couch occupied two seats with quiet confidence. It looked composed. Like it belonged.
The other passengers accepted this arrangement the way city passengers accept most things: with professional denial.
An older woman across the aisle studied the velvet for a while.
“That’s a beautiful couch,” she said.
“I’m replacing a pink one,” I said.
She nodded slowly.
Back in my apartment I set the emerald couch where the pink one had conducted its long investigation of me. The room shifted slightly, like furniture had just settled an argument.
I sat down carefully on the emerald velvet. The cushions accepted my weight without complaint. I leaned back a little farther to test the fainting potential.
The couch handled it beautifully.
The pink one watched from the hallway with the patience of a retired actor. It had heard all of my excuses.
The room seemed willing to start over.
~
Jonathan Daniel Gardner is a writer from the American South living in Brooklyn, New York. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Berlin Literary Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Forge Literary Magazine, Maudlin House, Identity Theory, Stanchion Magazine, Tahoma Literary Review, and others. He is a winner of The Letter Review Prize for Short Fiction. He holds a degree in creative writing from The New School and is at work on his first novel, In Moon I Keep You. Find him at jonathandanielgardner.com.