Them - a micro fiction

There was a moment when nothing really ever seemed to go wrong and it wasn’t that they couldn’t think of anything to say it was that there really was nothing to say.  They had been married for several years and it wasn’t until recently that they finally realized that they were not coming up with anything new.  He would go out to the shed and not work, but look over his tools as if they were museum pieces that were too delicate to touch.  Meanwhile she would sit in her study looking over her library of books - of which there were hundreds - and she couldn’t bring herself to re-read any of them.  In her mind she made up excuses as to why it was illogical to even purchase a new book because there was a lack of shelf space.  In truth all she had to do was purchase another bookshelf and she could once again fill them, but she found it cumbersome and unnecessary.   It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy working with his tools, or that she suddenly became indifferent to the novel, it was that they both knew they were in their respective rooms to avoid the cumbersome boredom of trying to have a non-conversation with one another.   They had been together since high school and in truth had experienced everything together.   They still got excited about things together, but they both were excited by the same things so there was no thrill of convincing anyone of how great something was because as the collective that they were they already new.   It was years since they had pushed their friends away and decided to be exclusively in each others company so it was their own faults that they were stuck with one another.   The love was still there but the surprises had disappeared.  It was not a question of passion, for they still very frequently found themselves in lust for one another and had spent hours in various parts of their home attacking one another in heated copulation.   The outside of observer would have thought they were sick of eachother, but that was not the case.  They had in truth become sick of the familiarity.  The pair of them were not enough, and each of them had had the thought of having a child about the same time.   She had been sitting under the stream of the shower when the thought occurred to her and he had been tucking in his shirt into his khakis before setting out to the office.  He in one room and her in another under the same roof.  This mental observance was never shared.  They thought so much alike that neither of them wanted to be the couple that had children to fill up their time.   They didn’t want to have children to stave off their boredom even though they knew those miniature people would bring hours of entertainment and stress.   They couldn’t be those sort of people.  Without any such family meeting, they as husband and wife silently agreed with each other that that wasn’t the answer.   When he sat in his shed one fateful afternoon he wondered, as he second guessed himself that maybe he was ready for a child, but she was laying in a hospital bed finding out that she couldn’t even if she wanted to.   There were certain things that men and women can physically tell of one another, but in this way he was lost.  He had no telepathic revelation of her discovery so that when she got home with her face red and puffed from a stream of tears he found in himself a great fear.   And they comforted each other, and he tried to understand what he couldn’t, because they were a unit and tragedy did not change that.