By Rowjatun Jannat
Author’s Note: This fanfiction is based on Susan Glaspell’s one-act play, “Trifles”.
John always left the town in a pleasant mood, with the carriage driver listening to his worries attentively. The boy had a talent for socializing. If you asked John, he would tell you in great detail—socializing is no walk in the park. It took great skill to be a good listener, to be calm and collected and focus on the words around without uttering any on your own.
All you had to do was ask John, and he would explain, and praise the virtue of a good listener.
They were so hard to come by these days.
John himself liked to be in a quiet place, away from the madding crowd. He liked to hear himself think and talk leisurely rather than to speak awfully loud over the crowd to be heard. The town was an utter disgrace, he would say, it was nothing but a goddamn beehive waiting to erupt.
John’s house was away from all this hubbub, and he made it so that his house couldn’t even be seen from the road. It was a quiet, soothing home—just the way John liked it. When he got married 30 years ago, his wife used to be awfully chatty. Speaking a mile a minute, humming a line or two every so often, disrupting the soothing atmosphere in his home—she was as chatty as a damn parrot. It was awfully distracting, and if you asked John, he would tell you in great detail just how irritating it was to hear her sing. Oh, he could still feel the headache when she laughed at a kitten merely passing by, her voice so loud it shattered the peace and quiet of his home in an instant.
But she had learnt the error of her ways. Little by little, she had matured into the proper lady she was now.
John walked home after getting off the carriage, stepping on the unmarked path to get to his sheltered home. The cold temperature contrasted nicely with the warmth from the stove, and the cool tone of his home brought a sense of peace to John’s heart.
His wife walked by, handing him a cup of hot tea to warm himself up. Sipping on the tea, John sighed, and started to explain what he had been doing in the town to his wife.
His wife hummed in all the right places, but John suspected her not understanding even a bit of it. Her fingers danced over those horridly bright cloth-pieces she was sewing like she had her mind focused on it awfully so.
John clicked his tongue. Women and their useless hobbies—who would even use such a bright quilt? The colors would just hurt people’s eyes before they had a chance to wrap it around themselves.
Just when he was about to explain the virtues of a good listener to his dim wife, he heard it.
A high, languid trill in metallic tones, shattering the quiet of his home like fragile glass.
John could feel a vein throbbing in his forehead, his anger rising as sharp as his headache. He never could stand someone talking over him, singing over him.
His wife’s face looked awfully pale as John started to walk around, following the sound and trying to locate it as best as he could over the blood roaring in his ears.
It didn’t take much long, the culprit was found locked in a cage inside one of those pesky kitchen cabinets. The cabinets were stashed to the brim with fruit jars, and behind all those glass jars, there sat a fancy-looking birdcage.
John grabbed the jars hastily and slammed them on the counter, rage imminent in his strength. His wife finally put aside the horrid quilt, and tried to stop him with hesitating hands and trembling voice, “John, please–”
Even as John wrestled with the little door of the cage in blinding anger, trying to pull it out of its hinges, he felt quite smug. His wife knew not to confront him head on when he was angry. She had learnt it with time—and her fear fed his ego.
Rather than his anger, it was his ego that controlled his hands and wrangled the little bird’s head. His fingers twisted the head all the way round in a manic glee, so that the small beak rested at the opposite end of its breast.
His wife stared at his hands, at the little canary, stunned silent. Her eyes looked darker than the bird’s did, and John felt guilty for a split moment.
But only for a moment.
It was his house, his place to rest—how dare this woman bring a noise-making machine? Didn’t she already know how utterly John despised such useless things? Really, no matter how he went on about it, it was truly her fault that the bird was dead.
John gritted his teeth and spat out words that stung like venom, “Know your place, woman.”
She trembled in front of him, her face as pale as a sheet, voice quiet so as not to disturb the peace that came with the bird’s death, “I’m—I’m sorry.”
John sighed, irritated. Just as he went to throw the carcass out in the trash, she spoke up, hands reaching towards John’s with hesitation, “I’ll—bury it, it needs a coffin or—or else we might have bad luck.”
John scoffed at her words, not losing the chance to take a jab at her, “You shouldn’t have caged it in the first place if you were so scared of bad luck.”
Her hands trembled as she took the carcass from John’s hand, but her downcast eyes didn’t dare to look up.
For the rest of the day, she remained as absent-minded as ever, not even having the decency to nod at the right places when John spoke. Her fingers lost their grace when she picked up her quilt again, hands far too busy clutching at her scissors-box rather than threading the needle.
And more often than not, John found her staring out the window with eyes as calm as the forest, not getting frantic even as her dear fruit jars slowly turned cold on the counter.
That night, John dreamt of his wife. Unlike her usual position on the inside of the bed, she was sitting beside his pillow, and in her hand, she had a piece of rope, usually used to bind the farm animals to their posts.
Now, John could tell it was a dream, ‘cause he had feared indigestion after tonight’s dinner—his wife’s cooking was a little off. And so John laid there, unable to move or take charge of the dream, and only observing the hazy images.
His wife looked quite serene—her eyes as tranquil as ever, her skin paler than the moon. She looked so much like an esteemed lady, so beautiful and so dignified. John couldn’t help but try to call for her.
No matter how much he tried though, he couldn’t speak. There was an invisible restriction that robbed him of his voice, his consciousness. His lips shaped a word he couldn’t utter, a single word failing to spill from his lips before his breath left him.
Minnie.