Broke
[فارسی]
He knocked on her apartment’s door. She looked surprised to see him but quickly composed herself and let him and the big package he was carrying in. She opened the package that he has now had handed to her. It was an art piece she really liked. She knew how much he had paid for it: forty-five hundred dollars plus tax. That’s more than three months’ worth of mortgage payment and condo fees for his small one-bedroom apartment eleven kilometers west of downtown which they cohabited for last of the three years they were together.
They have been broken up for a couple of months now. It was during a beautiful Sunday afternoon that Summer when she got attracted to the art piece in a gallery window during one of their strolls down West Queen West. It was three panels of barn wood, mounted on a large slab of thick glass, painted on top with stained candle wax and mixed material. She moved out a few weeks after and moved right into a smaller one-bedroom apartment of her own, for which she put down just five percent down-payment; all her savings, from a big bonus at work after she paid up her student loan and credit cards.
She excused herself to her room for a moment and closed the door. Toronto was having one of those cold Falls this year and the all-glass windows did not help keeping the place warm either. He checked out the apartment she now called home: The white sofas which they have had jammed next to his own when she moved in a year earlier; the rain boots; her favorite handbag and raincoat. She must have just got in. All her familiar things in an unfamiliar place. He scouted the walls for where she might hang the piece; the last string of hope that connected him to her.
He could hear her call her best friend through the privacy of the thin drywall. “Listen. Frank is here. If you don’t hear from me in an hour, call the police.” She hung up. His heart sank, and finally broke.
23 January 2017
Menlo Park
[CC BY]
