'False Floor' by Sara Comito

What's with all the water? he asks over the top of his morning news. I'm bleeding mid-cycle, she half whispers. He flares his nostrils, ruffles his focus back to his stocks. The floor is also a raft. The Gulf Stream is disappearing with the Atlantic circulation. I might be getting old.

Spring tide leaps toward Snow Moon. At least parts of us keep the old ways. She dusts a photograph of her mother holding her dead granddaughter. She performs Kegel exercises to strengthen the pelvic floor.

He stays late at the office every night this week. On the table are five plates: roast beef with new potatoes, chicken cordon bleu with baby carrots, pork chops milanese with angel hair, petite sirloin with even more-petite peas – all congealed and molding –  and now his favorite: salmon en papillote with French beans. She pierces the parchment and steam rolls out, dispersing the flies. The linens are crisp.

A mobius strip glides his body over and under unseen. Cufflinks clink on the valet stand every 24 hours. Television, bed, treadmill, shower, coffee, paper, keys.

She saws off her high heels as handholds for a climbing gym. Training for higher water. He shuttles past asparagus crepes and her limbs spidering across the dining room wall.

The magnetic field is reversing itself for the first time in 700,000 years. By the time her womb claims its pause she will be swirling above the sargassum in a clawfoot tub. His body will glide past a gilded bowl of mussels meurniere. Parsley dotting the rim. A lemon wedge due north and south.

One night he might splash through a square of missing floor, dimensions matching the height of his wife. He might wonder where she's gone.