Death by Butter

For months, she’d been saying “That butter’s gonna kill someone” each time the heavy paper box thudded on the floor or fell onto her forearm from the refrigerator’s top shelf, whose plastic cover had somehow busted and would never again close down gently over a box of butter—which she couldn’t eat anyway—and she and her children laughed at her prediction of doom, but her husband never seemed to be around for the joke, or else he ignored it and their mirth a little like he failed to notice how often he didn’t rinse the grounds from his coffee spoon by the stove or load his dirty plates into the dishwasher, leaving them and other items to clutter the counter—the precious granite counter he’d insisted on, allowing her “recycled-bullshit-crap” only in the upstairs bathroom—despite the fact that he often loaded her mug and put away her spices when she was still using them and also regularly complained about the papers she left lying around (most of which were related to the children or her work but some, admittedly, were her writing), he somehow didn’t much care about the mess he made or about the butter’s missing plastic covering or about her impending death, which she predicted but not like this: with the butter hitting the carton of eggs, batting it out of her hand and causing two light brown orbs to jump ship from the pale gray cardboard and splat onto the hardwood floor where, in some awkward and far-too-late gesture, she slid on the goo, and just before her head was to knock into oblivion on the counter that cost as much as six weeks of sleepaway camp, she noted silently that although this was not the direct hit she had envisioned and more like the finale of a Rube Goldberg machine, still it counted, and they would have to acknowledge she was right, her final conscious thought being: “I fucking told them the butter was going to kill someone.”