From the kitchen, Steve doesn’t hear Lina’s decompressing grunt as she peels her socks out of marshy sneakers. The music in his headphones is too loud. He doesn’t hear her stamp the hardwood with sweaty footprints as she walks into the living room. He doesn’t hear her plop into the brown corduroy couch. If he had, he would have paused his cooking to welcome her back. He’s thinking of her, though, thinking that she’ll be getting home about now. Two years of marriage and she hasn’t stopped coming home to him every evening. What luck!

When he finds her, she’s fallen into the couch and the armrest is dotted by drool. Her long black curls are floating around her. “Sweetie,” he says as he boops her nose, “dinner’s ready.” She blinks awake and cracks a smile. She follows him into the kitchen, and he watches her check that the burners are off before they sit down. He doesn’t like that she does this. It feels like a sign of distrust, which certainly hasn’t been earned after he’d only left the stove on two, no, three… okay, he thinks. She has a point. She asks,

“What are you chuckling about?”

“Just laughing at myself. Burner’s off, yeah?”

She nods, then pulls his chair out from the small oak table. Between them are two plates piled high with koshari. This is their sixth Supper Saturday. Once a week, he makes them a different country’s national dish. He hopes that she will like Egypt’s as much as she liked Mexico’s. It’s a good sign that she picks up a fork right away, briefly forgetting the order of things, before setting it back down, taking his hands, and closing her eyes so they can say grace.

After their first few bites, she asks, “How was your day?” It’s a simple question, but he had been enjoying a separation between his weekend’s work and Supper Saturday. He doesn’t need to respond, knowing that she understands his quiet expression. They talk about her work instead. Even though she isn’t the best storyteller, her stories from the hospital are easy to follow because they always center around extreme events. It could be difficult to keep track of a cast of characters and micro dramas if she had an office job where the month’s scandal was a broken printer. But she saw someone die today, and blames the oncologist she works with for going on personal leave a year ago, postponing this patient’s tests under the assumption that time was not of the essence, and therefore catching their cancer too late. Often, in the stories, she saves lives. Sorry, Lord, he thinks, but any man would feel prideful if he got to make dinner for Superwoman every night.

She suddenly makes a silly face and pauses telling about her day to slide one of his short dark hairs off a piece of elbow pasta. “Oops,” they both say in unison, before giggling. Her laugh sounds genuine, like she might really think it’s a lighthearted matter that he lost a strand in her food. But it’s hardly the first time she’s found a hair. Whenever it happens, they say oops, whenever it happens, they giggle. It’s hard for him not to wonder if she’s starting to get annoyed at these constant reminders that her husband is aging. She moves on too quickly, 

“I forgot to mention this other thing, you won’t believe what happened!”

“Yeah?”

“I was walking past the staff bathroom and I thought I heard someone screaming, like they were on horseback headed into war. I stood there for a second and listened… Guess.”

“A bird got into the hospital and got locked in the bathroom with a smelly poop that someone forgot to flush.”

“No. Seriously! Guess.”

He sits, straight-faced.

“Come on, honey, it’s really funny.”

“Ok then, tell me.”

“It was one of the surgeons belting Beyoncé! She froze when I knocked on the door. She thought nobody was supposed to be in that wing. Apparently it’s a ritual she does before every operation.”

“Oh, that’s a hoot.”

He questions whether this was a good response. Was it a sad story? No, it must have been a hoot. She’s smiling, after all. What was the story again? He pictures a fish’s mouth snagged on a fisher’s violent hook, thrashing for freedom. It’s an image that catches in his head every time they go through the hair-in-the-food ritual. She asks,

“Are you sure you don’t want to talk about your day?”

“All I did was write.”

He sticks firmly to the rule that the content of his poetry will be kept a secret from her until it, hopefully, is published. If he’s conveyed this rule misleadingly enough, she should think the secrecy is part of his writing process. In reality, it’s just unbearable to imagine her spending 127 pages contemplating his deterioration. “Frail” is the first word in Steve’s poetry collection, On Hair Loss. To him, everything resembles hair. For the past year, he’s seen their popcorn walls as follicles, beetles as lice, and the horizon at dusk as a hairline which moves up the sun as if it were receding. 

For as much of his 31 years of life as he can remember, he has wanted to be recognized as a writer. He works on this collection every weekend, believing it to be his best writing and his best chance at getting published. Still, that his acclaim should be earned by such a grotesquely self-deprecating body of work spoils the dream with shame.

Several months ago, lying beside Lina, their bedroom and selves invisible in the darkness, he asked her,

“Does my hair loss bother you?”

She ruffled his hair aggressively, and he worried that she was accidentally ripping out a bit in the process. He knew she didn’t mean any harm. She just didn’t know, with her lush and youthful curls, how feeble hair could be.

“Nope! I’ve got an early shift tomorrow. Let’s catch some Zs.”

He waited for her to fall asleep, grabbed his phone, and snuck off to sit on the toilet. Twenty minutes later, he cleared his search history of “do women find bald sexy reddit” and “what face shape for sexy bald men images” before sneaking back into bed.

Her “nope” sounded genuine that night, but her words always do. Like when she promised she wouldn’t throw him a surprise birthday party for the big three-zero, or when she said “oops,” as if the hair in her food meant nothing. Now, as they finish their koshari, she is visibly growing annoyed. The patience she had shown, to communicate with his facial expressions, is wearing off. He understands. Her stories from work deserve to be met with emotions and care. What is he doing that he can’t even provide a laugh? She’s Superwoman, dammit! He likes to think that he would do anything for her. Reacting to her stories should be a given. Squeezing his fist, he decides to let her in.

“Can I tell you what I’ve been writing about every weekend, Lina?”

“If you’re ready, Steve, I’d really like that.” 

She briefly raises her eyebrows as she says his name. It’s time. He tries to take a deep breath, but sucking in air feels like lifting an anvil. It’s impossible to make eye contact with her as he begins,

“I started writing my current project last year, when my hair began coming out in clumps in the shower. And I don’t have to tell you how bad it’s gotten since then. I can’t stand going through this and having you still act like everything is normal. Like we’re happy. I’m becoming too ugly for you and I can’t stand it.”

The image of the fish flops into his mind again. The animal flails, expanding the hole in its mouth that the hook is making. Blood swirls in the water around the hook. It could attract a shark.

“I’m not worried about your hair. You would look hot as fuck without it. Are you serious? Is this why you’ve been so damn distant?”

This was the response he had expected. It would be so nice to believe her.

“How can I know that you mean that?”

Steve snatches a shallow breath from the space between them. He rolls the air around in his mouth before gulping it down. It tastes neither calm nor stormy. Lina brings their plates to the sink, then walks up next to his chair, leans down, and gives him a tight side hug. It’s impossible to hug her back at this angle. His hands are clasped in his lap, each clenching the other. She walks off to the bathroom. After some time, he goes to the kitchen sink, puts a dollop of soap on each plate, and scrubs. The dishes are each clean after five seconds, but he scrubs for twenty.

He’s slumped on the couch and flicking on the TV when he hears Lina’s voice coming from the bathroom. She often calls the toilet her “office chair” because she spends so much time sitting on it and scrolling through social media. It sounds like she’s pacing in there now, though, and talking on the phone. The fluctuating volume of her voice is a battle between a hush of secrecy and an uncontrollable blare of urgency. Steve mutes his favorite documentary to eavesdrop. 

“I just don’t know how to make him see how handsome he is.” 

Judging by her tone, she’s probably talking to her mom. She goes on,

“I remind him constantly. And I certainly show him when we’re… eww. I don’t need to tell you about that, sorry. And I’ve told him everything I’m telling you! I’ve told him, several times, that I feel lost because he won’t listen to my words or my actions. I thought men were supposed to be cocky? But he doesn’t even have an ounce of earned confidence these days.”

Guilt creeps up on Steve for listening to this conversation that is clearly supposed to be private, and he unmutes the TV. He wishes Lina had called someone else about this. Her mom tends to be impulsive, and he spends a moment imagining her mom saying, “dump his ass.” It isn’t impossible that she would say such a thing, but surely Lina wouldn’t do it, even if her mother suggested it. He thinks back to another time when she had asked her mom for advice. 

A couple months ago, Lina told him that she wanted a new couch.  As the lesser spender of the two, Steve’s gut reaction was that it would be an unnecessary expense. They already had a cheap loveseat that worked fine. It was a nice shade of white, albeit quite stained, and why fix something that isn’t broken? Still, he asked her for a few days to mull it over. It seemed important to her, and he wanted to find a way to balance his frugality with his desire to make her happy. The next day, before he had come to a decision, he arrived home to find two strangers moving a brown corduroy couch into their living room. Lina was in the kitchen, and he asked her in a controlled voice to tell him what was going on. She had talked to her mom, who insisted that they needed a new couch. The old one looked “raggedy,” she said, regurgitating the word from her mother.

Now, with his eyes and ears glued to the TV but absorbing nothing from it, he prays that her mom isn’t suggesting she leave him over his hair loss. Or, to be fair, over the way he is reacting to his hair loss. Eventually, he decides enough time has passed that she should be off the phone. He mutes the TV again, and only in the absence of its noise does he realize how high the volume had been. Lina is still in the bathroom, but her talking has turned into singing. She usually has a smooth soprano voice, but now, in her song, he notices a metronomic quality that reminds him of a horror movie soundtrack. He recognizes the words of her favorite band, Talking Tissues, and tries to comfort himself by humming along.

I take over when times get hard

You take over when times get easy

Oh baby, oh baby

Tell me why these times aint easy

She crescendos into the chorus’ last line, and his hum follows suit. He only knows the words to that part of the song, so he goes quiet as she continues singing. There’s another noise coming from the bathroom. It’s a shallow sound, like white noise, under Lina’s singing. Maybe she turned on the fan? Again, all this listening is beginning to feel like an invasion of privacy.

Steve unmutes the TV. A man with a British accent is talking about overfishing. Steve must have watched this documentary a hundred times, so he hardly has to pay attention. There’s a boat, it can’t be larger than 20 feet, and a couple guys on it are holding rods, hoping for a bite. The British man says that this is what the fishing industry wants people to think of when they picture where their seafood comes from. Above water, the scene looks peaceful. Nothing like the violent image of a hooked and bloody fish that keeps popping into Steve’s head. The British man’s tone changes as the shot does as well, now showing an enormous net that sweeps up entire schools. A machine drags the full net aboard a vessel so large it might as well be an island. The scene changes again and the fish are lying on conveyor belts that move slowly towards a shredder. It rips them into strands and chunks, strands and chunks, all unrecognizable as anything once living. The British man says that their stories each begin as a unique combination of reefs they’ve seen, schools they’ve swam with, and things they’ve felt. But their stories all end the same. Steve decides he will find a different dish for the next Supper Saturday; he had planned on making Senegal’s national dish of rice, vegetables, and fish.

When he turns off the TV, Lina is no longer singing. There’s still a faint buzz coming from the bathroom, but it’s inconsistent. It plays for ten seconds, is gone for a while, then comes back again for another ten. He takes out his phone and opens the long document of notes for his poetry. At the top is the seed that sprouted his entire collection,

“There is no treatment for severe alopecia.”

At the bottom, he adds a new note, 

“To consider for a new poem: What if my writing about this wrought more violence than if I let hair loss be quiet, a fisher on a small boat, a single fishing rod, one that gently hooked and bled me through a hole in my mouth? If I had let it be that, would my ocean be calm? Would my ecosystem have stayed balanced? I’m both a fish and a fisher, a victim and a perpetrator. In whatever ways this affects Lina, she suffers the environmental consequences of me overfishing this subject.“

Phone off, he tucks it back into his pocket and sits still. There is no more noise coming from the bathroom, but he hasn’t heard the door open. She’s been in there for over an hour. If anyone else disappeared into a bathroom for this long, he’d be concerned, but this isn’t atypical for her. He strums his fingers on his leg, unsure of what to do next. He listens intently, for anything, but there isn’t a sound to be heard.

He goes back to the kitchen. There, his idle hands find themselves a task in organizing the overflowing spice drawer alphabetically. It was always a pain shifting around all of the spices to find the right one. This organization now seems obvious, and he thinks it odd he hadn’t done this sooner. When he’s done, the spices make a three-by-five grid. Basil sits beside two other spices in the front row, za’atar is in the back, and everything is easily guessable based on how deep into the alphabet its first letter is. He tests his alphabetical intuition by thinking of a few spices and looking for them in the rows he expects them to be in. On his first try, he’s able to correctly guess the rows for paprika, cardamom, and sumac. He lies back on the couch and leaves the TV off. He closes his eyes and allows himself to indulge in the satisfaction of having organized something. Then, he hears the bathroom door open.

He keeps his eyes closed as Lina joins him on the couch. She cups his face with one hand and shakes his shoulder with the other. Steve is afraid to open his eyes. It isn’t clear if she’s shaking him playfully, or with the necessity of a serious conversation. Finally, she says something,

“Look at me.”

She sounds odd. Neither serious, nor playful. There’s a begging quality to her voice that is starkly out of character. Like she’s the one who’s weak and needs him to be her rock. Like she needs his approval. He opens his eyes. Seven seconds pass.

“Lina.”

Her name escapes his mouth flatly. She responds,

“Join me?”

She’s holding up the trimmer he uses for his pubic hair. A couple long, curly strands hang from it. He grabs her head and jerks it around to see her from different angles. All around, it’s buzzed. “Ouch, stop it,” she protests. He lets go of her and whispers, “What the hell did you do?”

Over time, Steve adds new poems to his collection, edits existing ones, and removes some of what he once considered his best work. Finally, it’s all done. He deletes the old title and types new ones until he finds the one that feels right. This snapshot of his human experience isn’t just On Hair Loss. How tunnel-visioned that was! It’s On Being a Fish and Being a Fisher. 

On the Marriage of Obsession and Impulsiveness. 

On Slowly Cleaning a Clogged Drain.

On Lies Told in Bedsheets.

It’s Tangled.