Judge me by my size, do you?

“If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you one HUNDRED TIMES, Mira…” Frederick started angrily.

“I don’t care,” Mira shot back, “I am never eating pumpkin stew again.”

“Well! Be it on your head then!”

“It will!”

“Yes! It will! Watch out for it!”

“I’ll do no such thing! YOU watch out for it!”

“Oh!” scoffed Frederick in watered-down disgust (because he had lost quite a bit of heart for this argument the moment Mira had mentioned stew). “Well if you’ll let me, I will very much oblige.”

“Don’t joke, Frederick, it’s never suited you.” Mira retorted, trying not to look at Frederick’s pants, because they were just too darn eye-catching and she would rather spend five days outside in the freezing cold eating nothing but cornflakes from the box than admit to Frederick that his pants were any good.

“I will joke, and YOU will listen, and I’ll record my jokes and put them on the internet and the WHOLE WORLD WILL LISTEN.”

“NO ONE WOULD EVER CLICK ON A LIKE.”

“There will be all sorts of clicks, Mira,” Frederick stared her down in a serious manner that was altogether too serious for this matter. “And some of them may be on a like, but others, well they will be on more interesting-”

“HA! The whole world will drop dead and then I’ll have to forage around in the apocalypse for food while you make haphazard conversation to wilting trees.”

“Don’t say the word haphazard, it makes your mouth move in an unflattering way. And trees do not wilt.”

“My mouth moves unflatteringly?”

“Very much so. I was afraid to tell you. Now I am not.”

But he did look a little sad. Mira could see the corners of his mouth turn down as he spoke, and a darkened shadow seemed to pass over his face, as if he had stood up without looking and his head burst through a rain-cloud. Mira straightened.

“Frederick,” she said as solemnly as her little frame and apparent ugly mouth movements would let her, “Know this. I shall never say the word haphazard again.”

“Agreed.”

“What, you too?”

“No!” Frederick exclaimed with horror, and hurried on with: “I’m in agreeance with your suggestion.”

“Oh, well…” Mira thought this through. Maybe she could get him to change a few things too. Some things, she thought irritably, did need to change in order for her life to run smooth, with course, and on time. “You could probably do with putting your shoes on in the correct order.”

“Correct order?”

“You know, left foot first.”

“What foolery is this?”

“It’s been proven!” Mira said earnestly.

Frederick thought this to be unlikely. He knew things. He knew of ways. He knew how the world worked and where things should be placed in order to maximise one’s own bargaining potential. There had been too many overseas trips where he had not received the correct price for goods, and this kept him awake at night. It irked his bedtime routine. It made him spread his lunchtime Vegemite sandwiches with the wrong thickness. His contacts had a way of feeling upside down. There always seemed to be gum wherever he sat or stepped. The elevator button always managed to be jammed when it was his turn to press. So, perhaps, this way of thinking was not unusual or something to laugh off.

“Mira,” he said gently and with the appropriate amount of mystery to catch her attention. He noticed her frown with suspicion and felt a little disappointed but pressed on nonetheless. “I have given this a great deal of thought-”

“Y-e-s--?”

Mira would never admit it but she was intrigued. She was so intrigued that she felt herself get a little wet. She clung to this captivation in a form of desperation so she would avoid Frederick’s pants.

Frederick was poised: one eyebrow raised, one side of his mouth perked a little in an anticipatory and celebratory grin, one foot slightly in front of the other (although that was just his natural posture, which Mira would have to also find time to correct).

Mira said, “And?”

“FENG SHUI” Frederick almost yelled in what looked to Mira like an oncoming spasm of anguish.

“A- what?”

Frederick lowered his arms and Mira realised he had raised them. Was there nothing he could do? Did everything have to be a form of ghastly re-enacted vomit?

“You’ve never heard of Feng Shui?”

Frederick should not have been surprised. He had often wondered about the limited space in Mira’s mind. It saddened him in places he didn’t know he had, organs he’d never heard of, it tested his patience like a melting ice cream on a hot day.

“I will tell you what I tell the rest of them-”

“Darling, Feng Shui is not something to be ignored.” Frederick could not believe that she had heard about it but was unwilling to partake in the sensational varying delights it offered. “There will be a time,” he breathed staring at her.

Mira rolled her eyes.

“There will be a time,” he repeated in absolution.

Mira remembered why she never talked about furniture in his presence. She liked to observe her nails in an obvious way whenever someone spoke about that Feng Shui nonsense. Any Ikea crap or motivational vase-placing, colour-matching, tea-stirring malarkey made her good vibes fall apart like grating a rusty pipe.

“Mira-”

“Frederick,” she spoke over him firmly, “Listen here. There will be no rug hung up in my living room (“our” he whispered), no thousand dollar cutlery set because the pattern is a carved lotus (“but they’re transformation!” he gasped), and definitely no three-hourly visits to a place of worship where we have to wear robes and kneel with our heads bowed over a dirty bowl of tap water praying for inner peace to a god that came from a fairy-tale book (“those gowns are made of silk” he inhaled a tortured breath).

While Mira was rattling off her demands, Frederick felt a new sensation. One overriding his current sense of doom. It was arousal. He stood in despair and watched her determined expression, her luscious hair falling past her shoulders, her one chipped nail from baking a batch of muffins earlier that day, and he suddenly knew. Feng Shui didn’t matter.

“Mira,” he announced in a flourish. “Let us bed with one another.”

“What?”

Mira often had the sneaky feeling that Frederick was a closeted stage performer. Every time he came bursting into the room where she was occupied, or started a sentence off with ‘sweetheart, there’s something important I have to tell you about my day…’ she would wait for him to confess his secret, and every time he did no such thing, causing her to enter a fury that lasted for days and that she could not explain to him for fear of sounding insane.

“I am turned on by you at this very moment,” he said in a low voice.

“Are you?” she asked, uninterested in his answer. She recalled earlier on having felt wet herself. She supposed one must carry on with that feeling.

“I am very much.”

“Well, I appear to be also.”

“Say it is so!”

“It is this very instant!”

“Let us go there!”

“Yeah, alright then.”