A Good Marriage

Short Story by E.P. Lande

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I decided. I needed to rid myself of all the paperwork stowed in my basement, in drawers, on closet shelves, in hallways, in filing cabinets, in boxes on floors, and on various desks I maintain all over the house. I didn’t know how much longer I might have, and I didn’t want strangers sifting through my life.

I started with the tax returns dating back thirty-plus years stored in the basement; my accountant told me I must preserve those from the past seven years … in case ... and these were kept in one of the bedrooms on the second floor. I turned on the light at the top of the stairs. Descending, I cleared away the cobwebs spun since the last time I visited the reliquary — except there was nothing holy about old returns. I hauled eight heavy boxes back up the stairs and set them on the rug in front of the fireplace. Taking out the ones from 1987 — the year of a stock-market crash for which I most likely received a nice refund — I rolled a large number of its pages, placing each roll between the grates at the base of the fireplace.