Spare Nails and a Hammer

Your mother always yelled at your father to fix the nail protruding from the kitchen floor. “It’s going to hurt someone someday,” she would bicker, but your father hid his face behind his newspaper as she spoke. The nail remained sticking up from the ground, but you taught yourself how to walk around it just like you taught yourself when to exit and enter the room. Your mother’s heavy voice was like a fire alarm telling you to evacuate the scene and leave your father in the flames, but there was nowhere for anyone to go--- he forgot to build a fire escape. She tried to leave hints for him around the house: A hammer on his pillow, spare nails in his pockets, but naturally his fingers picked around them like playing a guitar. She had given him all the notes, but he preferred to play his own tune. Eventually she had given up on shouting, for she was tired of hearing only her echo. Each couldn’t feel the other. He could not hear her words that dropped like stones, she could not hear his weightless language of silence, and you could not speak in a house enclosed with two deaf parents. One day you came home and saw that your mother’s side of the bed was made nicely like it hadn’t been slept in for days. It was cold and stiff, preserved like a shrine. That same day you went into the kitchen to reach for the phone, but tripped over the nail emerging from the floor and went clattering down beside it.