The New Norm🔥

( prose poetry )
  
   
There’s a ubiquitous stain throughout the house, in every room.  A brown sepia that comes from the fires blazing over the low summits of hills from the coastline on a regular basis. The windows are perpetually shut tight but still the stench of burnoff seeps in. The ocean’s sea breeze has long become a wet-dream memory.  
   
Supper has long gone cold and sits abandoned in the small gas stove. It’s been an hour since she drew herself a bath only to lay her bareness across the double bed; its sheets disheveled and matted from the morning’s ulterior uprising.  
   
Where he’d be the first to get up, to throw on blue and yellow flannel no matter how hot it was going to get, along with faded denim, and boots. He’d throw open the curtains, knowing it would make her squint and leer at him.  
   
“You see?!!”, he’d growl and jeer, “This is where you wanted to live, not me!” But she’d refuse to join in the same old urban based shouting matches, knowing the useless, tiresome rant by heart.  
   
Back in a time in his youth when he dropped out of University and invested his inheritance to spend several years up in Alaska with the Inuit. Learning how they built their kayaks and umiak for hunting, traveling and  transporting. To even sire a child or two; he had never been clear. He was not allowed to keep them when he left the tribe to return to the states.    
   
She felt he was an utter fool not to have considered the possibility of this utmost denial. But it didn’t matter to her anymore, although it had made him a constantly bitter man, and older, piling on the grief.    
   
It became a daily commiserate as she’d lie across their bed before an evening bath, as she’d close her eyes and think ‘If only the soil would perform its reclamation on all of this.’  On them.
   
Suddenly on schedule: the front door, the stomping and banging into and out of the kitchen, and there he is standing at the foot of the bed, shouting.  
   
“It’s evening and here you are just lying there!  The winds are blowing again, flaring the fires back to the summit, and it looks like they’re gonna come straight for us tonight!!”  
   
She doesn’t react as in exasperation he reaches and lifts her bodily in his arms, to hoist and brusquely land her in the brimming bathtub.  
   
Her dry, dead utterance cracks, catching him unaware. “Haven’t you heard the news, sweetheart?” With glazed eyes, she gives a sly smirk in the faux candlelight. “It’s the new NORM.”  
   
Then she sinks under the water to help usher it in.