Kitchen Sink Drama

The husband comes into the kitchen to find his wife pouring over work papers that he has brought home from the office. Behind her, a few cut pieces of fish and mixed vegetables are sizzling noisily in a greasy pan.

"Do you find them interesting?"

The wife looks up, her curious face contorted. "Is this some kind of financial evaluation of a major project? Are you building something somewhere?"

He smirks and pulls a chair. "Something like that."

She flips a few more pages, glossing over various charts and tables and projections of profit. She looks at one particular table for a few seconds, flips the page over, stares at a long paragraph, and returns to the first page, back and forth, digesting the figures.

The husband looks on. "What's for dinner?"

"Fish in hot sauce", she says, all humdrum.

He walks over to the freezer and gets himself a tall glass of fruit juice.

"Well, what is it?"

She turns the fish over. The pan sizzles louder. The piquant aroma of the hot sauce rises and fills the kitchen. She slows the fire down to a gentle flailing blue, and let the fish simmers in the sauce, now a reduced light stock of bright orange hue.

"What is?"

She sits down and draws the papers closer, showing much interest.

"The project", she points. "This thing."

"Oh that", he scoffs, sipping the juice.

"It's nothing. Plastics."

The wife puts away the spatula and starts thumbing the pages. The husband looks on amusingly, drinking his tall glass of juice. She reads on, sometimes vocalizing the words to herself, trailing the sentences with her index finger, moving from one paragraph to the next.

The husband looks on.

"Plastics is so 1980s", she says, suddenly. "You will no longer break-even within five years like you used to. Not in today's crazy market. What with China and all."

The husband giggles.

"What? What's so funny?"

"Oh, nothing, nothing." He tries to be subtle and graceful, and stops laughing, but fails miserably. He snorts and giggles. "You're so cute."

The wife rolls her eyes back. "You're being patronizing."

He giggles awkwardly.

The wife turns another page, and says sternly, "I am not cute!"

He stops giggling, knowing that he has crossed her.

The wife turns over a page, pretending to read. She is hurt deep.

The husband commits the grievous mistake that all husbands commit when they find themselves in these kinds of situation. He opens his mouth and he tries to explain, to reason, to give excuses -- when he should have said, "I am sorry, sayang", and lied to her about her looking pretty and sexy despite her age, "Macam anak dara!", or how he always thought of her while in the office, her scent on his work shirt.

The husband should never open his mouth and enters himself into an argument that he knew, against all wisdoms, he could not possibly win. An argument that would only end with Mister Smarty Pants sleeping on the couch, or returning from the office everyday to find a block of chicken sausages left to be defrosted in a metal tray in the kitchen sink. A post-it note on the freezer, scribbled in cold frigid text:

Please clean the microwave after you've used it

The wife throws the report onto the table, gets up, and smacks the fish around all over the greasy pan. The hot sauce stirs violently.

The husband exhales in disbelief, sighing. He does not need this now. He is simply hungry and tired. All he needs is some grub to calm the pangs before he hit the sack. All he needs is warm comfort food so that he could then signoff and logout.

The wife keeps silent, stirring the fish around unnecessarily. She is waiting for his apology. She is waiting for that bastard of a husband to beg and plea and wail.

But instead --

The husband finishes the tall glass of juice with a final satisfied gulp. He smacks his lips, rolls up the tight knot of his kain sarong, and marches toward the wife:

"Angry make-up sex, here I come."

This was written this year, sometime in January. I was driving home from work when this one struck. That night, I wrote it down on a piece of paper, just a simple draft with the main points jotted down. Like the wife is hurt but pretends to read or some action that follows a dialogue, like husband rolls his kain - makeup sex here I come. This was when I did not want to return to the blog and write it proper. Instead, I just put it in draft form and leave it as it is.