[
this is my contribution to the discussion of things found between couch cushions.]
It was a particularly awful day, in that it's awfulness was so un-particular; that is to say, Derek's day was awful in the precise ways it was always awful: so awful, and so precise, that it brought the full cumulative weight of the everyday awfulness home with such force that he was flattened on his couch as if dropped from a great height.
It was his nose, poking by chance between two cushions, that felt the corner of the folded note. He rose up on his elbows (and there the similarity between him and someone who had been dropped from a great height ended, for he rose with some dispatch and interest, and his organs had not been liquefied from the impact).
"I love you," said the note. It was written on yellow paper, unlined, in a careful script that seemed, somehow, to be a woman's hand. Perhaps it was the meticulously rounded period at the end of the sentence--there was care taken there. It was not merely a jab of the pen.
But, who? Who was loved? Who was the lover? Someone must've sat upon his couch, and lost the note. But, then, Derek could not remember the last person who had sat upon his couch. Except for his mother. And his mother was as uncapable of love as she was unfit to be loved; that she might have either written the note, or been the recipient of it, was unthinkable. The only possible way she might've interacted with it would've been to hide it there if she had thought it might have been meant for him, and she had felt there was a danger of it giving him some small pleasure.
But there, that was the thought, was it for him?
He thrust his hand back between the cushions, slightly gritty with whatever that grit is that forms between couch cushions.
There was another slip of folded paper; he pulled it out. "Yes, of course I'm talking to you, stupid. I love you."
Derek sat back and tried to run a hand through his hair but he hadn't any hair because he'd shaved it off because he'd felt he had to do something to atone for losing the Pratt-Wellsley-Fitcher account. Him? Who would love him? His couch? Did his couch love him?
He groped once more into the seam, but there was nothing there but some extremely old and fragile popcorn. He followed the space between the pillows back to the back of the couch, where his fingers touched paper.
"Of course I'm not the couch. Since when does furniture fall in love?"
"Since when do humans?" Derek asked aloud. If the couch was speaking to him--or someone speaking to him through the couch--he might as well speak back.
He yanked the cushion up, and when he tossed it into the corner of the room, another slip of paper came unstuck from the bottom where it had been glued on with decomposing candy. But this one was blue, and the handwriting was a little rushed, as if she were in some slight distress. "But we can never be together."
"Why not?" he asked. He flipped the note over.
"Isn't it obvious?" The note said on the back.
"Not even remotely," he said.
He reached quickly along the seam of the couch where the seat met the arm. No note. Along the back. No note. Was he alone again? He pulled up the middle cushion--there. Dark blue paper this time.
"I miss you already," it said. "I miss your touch. Your breath on my neck."
"But I don't even know who you are." He was careful to respond before flipping the note, so when he checked the other side he could see the answer:
"But it could have been like that. It would have been. Except..." And there they were, three little dots on the paper, trailing to nothing.
"Except what?" He snatched up the last cushion. "Damn it" Nothing. He groped under the edge. Nothing. "Come on. Who are you?"
He jumped off the couch and yanked it away from the wall, knocking an end table and sending magazines sliding across the floor. Dust-ringed divots in the carpet marked where the feet had been, but no notes. He threw himself to the floor and reached under, his hand finding springs stretched over canvas, and finally--a note.
This one was plain white paper, a little curled at the edge, as if it had been wet, then dried.
"Good-bye," it said. "We were fools. It was never possible, except in our dreams." The note was signed with a single letter, but the letter had been hit with a drop of water, and blurred into a streaked black smudge trailing down the page.
Derek sat between the wall and his couch and stared at the note.
This, at least, was awful in an entirely new way.
