Prescriptive By Roberta Lawson

This room is their bedroom, only larger. Somehow it is every bedroom she has ever known. Outside this room are animals and movement and life. Inside this room a spill of boxes, shiny, sporting loopy bows. She will open these boxes, these are the sum of her luckiness. So she sets to ripping through layers of wrapping. Her fingers are clumsy. In one box she finds a new camera, glinting silver. Another, a set of tickets. The tickets grant entry to places, offer journeys. She cannot quite believe that she will ever fully leave this room. In other boxes she finds pet collars, designer animal foods. Still more; baby mobiles, names on waiting lists for school places. Names that don’t yet exist. More: books of recipes for meals she will one day cook. In others, sex toys, lingerie. Oh, she thinks, setting scenes in her mind.

Clothes. Hats boots hosiery swimsuits. A kind of uniform. She supposes there is an order to these boxes, that she could lay them out and follow them like a staircase, though if doing so would lead her from this room or further into it she is not sure.

There he is in the doorway. He is in his dressing gown, which must mean this is morning or some late late night hour. I’ve been so busy working, he says. He gestures to the sea of boxes.Working to get you all these things you wanted. She can’t remember what she wanted.

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