The Chair

     The chair had seen better days.  Worn leather cracking around its curves held up his aging frame.  She watched her husband bent over the desk scribbling from the doorway.  He had insisted the desk be flush against the windows so he could look out over the yard while he worked.  The chair creaked, a sound she knew so well after 30 years of watching him from behind.  He used that chair for everything.

     In their younger years, she had slipped into the office at night to seduce him, slipping her fingers under his collar until he responded in kind.  That old leather chair had seen a lot of action.  Squeamish at the sight of blood, he sat there waiting for her sister to call him from the hospital and announce the arrival of their daughters, Sara and Michelle.  While she writhed in the agony of labor, she pictured him sitting there, hunched over the desk, smoking in silence, every noise setting him on edge.  It comforted her.  But those years were long gone now.

     The chair used to be like her, vibrant and shiny, but time had wrinkled them both, removing the glossy sheen of youth.  She wasn’t sure if he loved her still, but she knew he loved the chair.  A new chair was out of the question, too expensive, he claimed, when she tried to replace it with a high-backed ergonomic model a few years ago.  She held back her laughter thinking of him in a new chair; he was right, it was impractical.  He did everything in that chair, read to his daughters, signed his will, and retired from his job as a computer programmer.  The chair had become a part of his body.

   She slinked up behind him, just as she had done years ago.  She pressed the cold metal barrel up against the back of his head and whispered, “you deserve to die here,” as she pulled the trigger, sending bits of his forehead onto the photograph of him with his secretary at an office party from five years earlier, the daughter he fathered by her clinging to his other arm.