#7

“Your credit card was declined.” The liquor store clerk told her, his eyes enjoying this moment of humiliation for this attractive and seemingly wealthy woman.

But she shrugged, handed him a different card, and busied herself with an examination of her cuticles. By the time she walked to her car, she had completely forgotten about the exchange.

Seven bottles should do the trick. She set them on her marble countertop in a straight line, labels facing outward. “Sweet Release” was the name of the first bottle, a Cabernet. A good enough place to start.

She thought a knife might be the best solution–she reached for the biggest chef’s knife in the block. Occam’s razor, she thought, as she tapped the blade against the countertop. Or was it Occam’s cat? She couldn’t remember, but was fairly certain one of them had something to do with quantum mechanics and nothing to do with how she was going to solve her problem.

The problem was the couch. The fabric was a cream color with raised lines like pinstripes. She bought it at one of those furniture stores that pretended everything was high-end but was just arbitrarily expensive. She had just been promoted to account executive, had put in an offer on her condo, and had paid off her last student loan. This couch signified that she had made it. She stood there, staring at this couch, sipping her wine methodically every fifteen seconds or so.

Her glass was getting low, so she teetered the remains of Card Trick over the edge of the glass and filled it back up, spilling only a little bit. Her legs felt so far away as she walked the short distance from the kitchen to the living room. The glass walls of her condo, so high above the city, painted a fuzzy reflection of herself as she stared out into the dark. She remembered the realtor praising the “open floor plan” of the condo, which just meant “no walls.” There was a bit of sadness in her, somewhere to the left of her heart and a little bit in the tips of her fingers as she ran them over the edge of the couch cushion, feeling the tiny bumps in the upholstery.

Tossing back the remainder of her wine, setting the glass on the ground, she began to tear the couch apart with the knife. After an hour or so of slicing, pulling, clawing, and then pausing to refill her glass, (Wicked Woman, Spite, Con Man, Liberty Bell, Black Out, No Ragrets were all delicious, each bottle somehow out-performing the last) she stepped back to view her handiwork.

The majority of the couch lay before her on the ground, little tuffs of white and green fuzz. The knife was still stuffed in one of the cushions, the tear from the blade gaping and empty. She would sleep well tonight.