There were grooves in the carpet that needed to be filled, so we found a green couch on the sidewalk and brought it home. It slid right into the grooves and exhaled. The couch knew. Kinda like how I always know which drawer the spoons are in at my mom’s house. 

The green couch was pretty smelly, so we doused it with Febreze once in a while but we got used to it after a couple weeks. Some of our friends never got used to it and they made that somebody-farted face whenever they walked in. Fart face or no fart face, those weeks still turned into months and then years. Lots of people read books and slept and ate take-out Chinese food and fucked and clipped their toenails and wrote poetry and fell in love on that green couch. I dropped guacamole on it once, but nobody noticed. I just rubbed it in. One time, when my niece was doing a head stand on the green couch, she fell over and cracked her head open on the coffee table. Some of her blood got on the green couch.  It didn’t go unnoticed like the guacamole. Another time, somebody stubbed their toe on the green couch’s leg and we had to duct tape it back on. Not the somebody’s toe, but the green couch’s leg.

The green couch got patched and repatched and soiled and resoiled and we got older. Eventually, we got good jobs and decided to buy an expensive new couch. We set the green couch back on the sidewalk. I ran my hands across the cushions and felt history run through my fingers. Before I walked away, I leaned down and whispered to the green couch, “Sorry about the guacamole.” I knew it didn’t mind but I felt like I had to say something conclusive. It was the end of an era.

The expensive new couch was heavy and after we shoved it into the grooves, it didn’t exhale. It just sat there like a couch.

~ Green Couch
~ Amy Fladeboe is an MFA candidate and composition instructor at Minnesota State University-Mankato where she mainly writes fiction but dabbles in poetry and non-fiction as well. She co-hosts a radio show that interviews authors called the KMSU Weekly Reader and is a contributing author to a spontaneous flash fiction writing radio program called Tales From the Poor House.