Issue 153 June 2026

I used to go on dates at big box stores back when I was married. Targets mostly, sometimes Best Buy, once the Home Depot when I needed to pick up a new flusher for a toilet that wouldn’t stop running. I was always running to Home Depot those days—it was always the toilet or installing child-proof outlets or picking up this-or-that paint sample for my wife to disapprove of—but I only had the one date there. It was with a Jen or a Kat or a Cass, something short and sharp on the tongue but otherwise unmemorable. I do remember she drove a Honda Odyssey, and I thought she might want to use it, but there were booster seats in the back and a lingering scent of Uncrustables that she wrinkled her nose at, even after I told her it smelled nice. She preferred my clean, still child-free Suburban with its darkened windows where, from the far edge of the parking lot, we could watch shoppers emerge from the garden center, their flatbed carts loaded with impatiens and sod.

The last date was at the IKEA in the middle of winter. The woman—she went by Rey—said we should try the meatballs. She said they were the best. I told her I’d never had them, that I’d never been to an IKEA before even though my wife and I were there the previous spring to pick up a rug for a nursery we wouldn’t end up needing. This was before we realized we were tired of trying.

Rey cried out, Never? and slapped my chest and told me to get out. It wasn’t a light slap. She left a red palm print across my ribs like a stain.

Rey wore a platinum wedding band with a large square stone, much bigger than I could ever offer my wife.  She had equally large hands that were good for grabbing and pulling; it didn’t take us long to finish.

After, Rey said she was serious about the meatballs, and she forbade me from driving away without at least going inside with her. I looked at my watch, tried to tell her I had to get going, but those large hands were tugging again, pulling me out into the wintry daylight of the parking lot, pulling me across the slushy asphalt and through the shushing automated doors and up the escalator to the showroom level. There we drifted slowly through facsimiles of sensibly designed living rooms, through pretend child bedrooms with their stuffies and wooden trainsets, through kitchens and bathrooms and offices with fake computers. Rey pointed out the lamps she liked, the dressers with their unencumbered lines, the shelves that appeared to float against the walls. She leaned into me as we walked, still holding my hand, said her husband would never do this with her. We found an unpronounceable day bed with orange and cream throw pillows the exact color and texture my wife would despise—a dirt trap, she would call it, and not practical at all. We sat.

We didn’t try the meatballs. We didn’t even go to the food court. Whatever hunger I had was replaced by something else. Not fullness, but a gnawing hollow that nestled below my throat. Perhaps Rey felt it also as we watched actual shoppers pass us. Couples, yes, but lots of families also, with kids tugging their parents along or haggard dads with infants strapped to their chests. Occasionally, a thin woman or man around our age would glide through the space and stare at the room’s furnishings. Their eyes would pass across us but never land on us, as if we were a pair of ghosts. Or, maybe we were mislaid accessories to a fake room and nothing more.

At some point our hands separated and we shifted. Rey left first. I knew I should go too, but I stayed on the day bed. I wasn’t sure what I was waiting for. It was ugly. It was a dirt trap. It wasn’t comfortable at all.

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Ⓒ Joshua Jones Lofflin