Amani finally understood what people meant when they said walking on eggshells. The first time he heard it was in kindergarten. His teacher said it at a parent teacher’s thing. He didn’t remember the rest of the conversation, only that he immediately thought about Jones beach. He thought about chickens running on the beach and cutting his feet on a mixture of broken sea shells and the eggs with the blue stamps his mother said were the best.
It didn’t make sense then. It didn’t make sense later when this virus stuff spun up and Marsha was pissed about her job, because she couldn’t say what she wanted to say about what was going on. Marsha worked dispatch for an ambulance company in midtown. She came home to him every night those first two weeks complaining about the kind of calls she was getting and how all of it was just a hoax because people needed to be distracted from what the government was actually trying to do to them. She said the eggshells line and this time he thought about weight displacement and saw in his mind dozens of half shells spread out across the floor so tightly packed that you could run across the surface of them and not one would break. They’d just bought a new king-sized bed and the advertisements showed people throwing eggs onto the bed and they’d bounce a few times and be okay. He wanted to try it the day they got the bed but she wasn’t having it. So he waited until she went to work one day and he did it himself. It wasn’t nearly as interesting to do it alone. And the third egg broke anyway.
It was another few months before Amani had his moment of clarity. She’d been on the warpath again. It was hard not to be when they’d been cooped up together for so long. He thought all the good things about their relationship had been trampled flat like the fibers of an old rug, because they hadn’t had any actual time apart and, despite how much they loved each other, they were getting on each others nerves. He said as much, and she said, “if that’s how you feel,”
That was it. She hadn’t said another word to him for what was going on three days now. When he thought about how it felt he thought of that eggshell phrase. He got it now. He got that he didn’t know what to say to her or how to act because they were still in this space together, and his last few words had lead to the lasting silence. What would happen when he opened his mouth again?
So he didn’t. Maybe he’d get used to silence.