Jen Companik

Chandelier

When it was finally over, they walked out of their half-mangled shack through the side door because the front door was blocked by a fallen tree that had smashed through the living room window, sending a constellation of glass, and white flower-petals, onto the ancient, low-pile, dark gray carpet, making it look like a shabby, inverted night sky neither of them wanted to touch but which, because they had no place else to go—what with the roads flooded—they would clean together in an hour, squatting in rubber gloves and boots, his wife pointing to the tree joking, “There you go! The fancy chandelier you’ve always wanted” in the now powerless, water-less, sticky-hot shack they’d pooled their meager savings to buy though he’d wanted something grander, despite their fast food cashier incomes, because his brother’s house had more toilets than people who lived there, and his parents always compared him unfavorably to his banker brother—a thing he should have long since stopped caring about—only no matter how old he got (he was thirty-five now,) he could only manage to pretend not to care, which was one of the ways she’d talked him into buying a shack on the edge of a Florida swamp—God, he really did need to stop thinking of it that way and think of it more like she did, as their “fairytale cottage”—after all, she brightened any room more than could the most blazing of chandeliers, which was, of course, the other way she’d talked him into it, with her bunny-toothed smile and her “I dreamed about this house, Greg! Make my dream come true!” and, as he’d only ever wanted to be part of her dreams since they were kids scrubbing Mrs. White’s chalkboard in third grade detention, here they were, standing in their lawn-chair-and-roof-tile-strewn yard surveying the damage from the goddamned hurricane that had gone from a Category 1 to a Category 3 overnight, leaving them no time to evacuate (a thing they’d planned to do in the event of a Category 2 or higher, since the place was so ramshackle) and, now, with a blooming wisteria sticking out of their living room window, and his wife laughing about how pretty the house smelled and Greg, who’d thought of nothing but needing to get a second job to pay the deductible on the coming homeowner’s insurance claim during the storm, found himself flooded with a different thought upon hearing Ashleigh laugh—the thought being that it didn’t matter about the power being out, or the water being out, or the tree poking its head in their house (like a fairytale or a deeply impractical joke,) or the glass and flower petals on the living room floor, or the needing a second job to pay the deductible for the insurance, because Ashleigh was laughing, unhurt, separating the lawn chairs into piles of ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’, making it all bearable, funny, even, such that he lumbered to her through the mud, threw his arms around her hips, and slung her over his shoulder, saying: “The chairs can wait, but the bed cannot.”

Jen Companik

Jen Companik holds an M.A. from Northwestern University and is a fiction editor at TriQuarterly. Her debut collection, Check Engine and Other Stories, was included on CLMP’s “Reading List for National Hispanic Heritage Month 2021”. By engaging with her work you are participating in one of her wildest dreams. You can learn more about her at: jencompanik.com.