The Sofa

by Jeff Baker

The skies were gray and the grass was brown. It was in the cold of January when the narrative I am going to relate took place.

I had firmly believed the couch was out of my life, having been safely and discreetly dumped in a landfill. But to my abject horror I saw it days later on a street corner on the edge of town. Someone had doubtless fished it out under cover of blackest night and found it was too lumpy to comfortably sit on. Indeed, with what I had stuffed the big cushion, my late partner Griswold, I wouldn’t have wanted to sit down on it too.

But I couldn’t leave it there; someone might pick it up and take it home. They wouldn’t take long to investigate the strange lumps under the black vinyl. So I waited for darkness and stole a pickup truck. I tried to lift the sofa into the truck bed but I could barely get one end off the ground. There was a chain there in the back of the truck so I hooked it to the sofa and dragged it behind the truck, hoping to find a place to hide the sofa and Griswold again. Killing him was easier than hiding him.

I found myself driving through downtown during morning traffic, trying to look inconspicuous. Hoping Griswold wasn’t doing anything to attract attention.

They keep telling me that all they found under the vinyl fabric of the couch was lumpy fabric and a battered, worn frame and no sign of Griswold. I keep telling them he’s there. They say they checked the landfill where I dumped the couch and didn’t find anything. They say the couch I found either isn’t the one I used to have or I made up the story. I keep telling them it’s the right couch, that I killed Griswold, that I stuffed him in the old couch and disposed of it so they wouldn’t find out but the joke’s on me because he got out somehow and he’s laughing through bony fingers and toes and they say they can’t find him and I keep saying I killed him, and I keep yelling it and it echoes off the walls of the little room they have me in and echoes and echoes and echoes…

—end—

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Last week was the birthday of Edgar Allan Poe and I missed it in time for the weekly story. So, I put on my raven-feathered hat and worked this up. It went in more of an E.C. Comics direction, but I like it. So does Griswold. ——-jeff