Extra money

1. I was sitting on the long swirl-armed sofa in the living room. And in my hands was an unfolded newspaper advertisement. A large part of what the ad showed was green grass.

2. I already pulled down the shades of the two windows in the living room, so I could view the advertisements without any sunlight obscuring any of the words or pictures. And I relied on the light from the light bulb that was behind the flower-patterned lampshade of the standing lamp standing beside me as I sat on the sofa.

3. I was waiting for my dinner to be ready, and I was interested in the colorful advertisement page that appeared separately in today's Sunday paper. I enjoyed my life as an MFA graduate student at Johns Hopkins, in Maryland. I was 29 years old, and I was living with my wife. She was 26 years old. And we were in love, I thought.

4. In this particular advertisement I was looking at there were three lawnmowers pictured in the upper right-hand half of the page. And there was a patch of colorful flowers pictured in the upper right-hand corner of the green grass that was there. The green grass was too green, though, almost a bright lime green. And the lawnmowers seemed to be cut out and literally pasted onto the green grass.

5. And there were a few supplementary descriptive sentences printed upon each of these lawnmowers and green grass. The prices of each of the lawnmowers hovered above the lawnmowers in very large bold red numbers.

6. Jeez, am I glad we don’t have to worry about mowing the lawn. I would hate to have to buy a lawnmower, I said from sitting on the sofa in the living room, to my wife Lisa who was in the kitchen cooking dinner.

7. Really? Why, are they expensive, she said from the kitchen, while opening the oven door a little bit to take a peek at the onion rings.

8. I’m just glad we don’t have to worry about it. That’s what’s good about these townhouses. I don’t mind paying the extra money for the maintenance. There are so many different lawnmowers, I just wouldn’t want to worry about whether I bought the right one or not. And then if it breaks down! I said.

9. Why, how much are they? Lisa said, and she was now finished looking at the onion rings and closing the oven door.

10. The most expensive one here is $1,299 and 99 cents, I said, still sitting on the sofa in the living room.

11. That is expensive, she said from the kitchen.

12. Lisa was looking at the shiny Formica countertop. She was actually staring at the white gold-sparkled countertop. And she seemed to be particularly focused on a small space on the countertop where there was an unusually high number of gold sparkles clustered together. And while she stared at the cluster of gold sparkles, she imagined for a moment that the cluster was made up of actual gold pieces that could be available to her if she would only reach for it.




TO BE CONTINUED.




Technorati tags: first-person narrative, procrastination, master of fine arts, graduate student, paranoia, novel writing