top of page

Optimism

Elle Boyd

David doesn’t notice the low-gas indicator light until he’s pulled his car into the driveway. He idles for a moment, staring at the light, mentally gauging the amount of time and effort it will take to drive back to the gas station and fill up. Screw it, he thinks, and kills the engine.


Still he sits in the car despite the rising temperature. Without the air conditioning the interior becomes stifling in a matter of seconds. He stares at his house—large, white with black trim, too big for just the two of them but Stella refuses to downsize—and continues to sit.


His phone pings. Stella has sent him a text. What are you doing out there?


David turns off his phone and steps out of the car.


Stella calls to him from the kitchen. “Finally! You drove up an hour ago.”


“I drove up three minutes ago.” He shucks off his shoes by the front door and unbuttons the top two buttons of his shirt. He goes down the hall to the half-bath and washes his hands. In the mirror above the sink he inspects his hairline. So far, so good. He can live with the greys creeping into his dark hair, just please don’t let it start to recede. If—when—his hair retreats to the point of contemplating the dreaded combover, he’ll shave it all off. Better to be bald than risk looking silly.


He wipes down the counter and turns off the light.


The coffee table in the living room is cluttered with books, magazines, old coffee mugs and wrappers. David sighs and starts to straighten up. One of the coffee mugs is stuck to the table. With effort he pulls it free, but he just can’t be bothered cleaning right now and puts it back down. Stella really should have taken care of this anyway; it’s her mess. He can imagine the clutter in their bedroom, piles of stuff moved from one spot to another rather than put away. If David had his way, he would burn it all in the backyard.


The spartan one-bedroom apartment from his single days seems like paradise in retrospect.


On his way to the kitchen he weaves around a laundry basket of dirty clothes and a delivery box full of packing peanuts. “What did you buy?” he asks.


Stella hums to herself as she pulls something out of the oven.


“Stella? What did you buy?”


“I hope you’re hungry,” she says. She places a loaf pan on the stove. “The recipe was so big I ended up making two.”


David leans close and sniffs, then wrinkles his nose. “Meat loaf?”


“Yup. Two loaves of it.” She laughs.


“Stella, I hate meat loaf. You know that.”


“You said you hated your mother’s meat loaf. Mine is totally different.”


“Stella ...” David slides his hands down his face. “What did you buy? What was in the box?”


“The box?” Stella looks behind David. “Oh, just a new mixer. That’s all.” She smiles, showing her teeth. There is red lipstick on her front tooth.


“The living room is a mess.”


“No worries, I’ll take care of that later. How was your day?”


David removes one of Stella’s sweaters from a kitchen chair and sits down. He slouches forward. “Shitty. The printer was broken and no one knew how to fix it, even after having tech support try to walk three different people through it, so no one could print anything all day, which means after the tech comes in tomorrow there will be a lineup to print stuff and I’ll bet the thing will break again, it’s old as the hills—”


Stella pats his shoulder. “I’m sure it will all work out fine tomorrow. Did you get out for a walk on your lunch?”


“No, I was stuck on the phone my entire lunch, we were short-staffed today and my stupid manager waited until the last minute to ask for a report on the—”


“Well, it’s supposed to be a beautiful day tomorrow. In fact it’s supposed to be lovely all week. Lots of opportunity to get some sun.” She grabs a dirty glass from the table and puts it in the sink. “Set the table and I’ll get dinner finished.”


I hate meat loaf, David thinks. He pushes himself up from the chair and opens a cupboard above the counter, looking for clean plates. There aren’t any. He grunts and opens the dishwasher. Dirty. In the sink are more dirty dishes.


“Use the paper plates,” Stella says as she pulls the second loaf from the oven.

“Why wasn’t the dishwasher run?” David asks. He stares at a smear of dried ketchup on the back of Stella’s arm. It looks like an artist’s brush stroke. “We’re reduced to using paper plates in a kitchen full of dishes. What did you do all day besides shop online?”


“It doesn’t make a difference, does it? It’s just one meal. And easy cleanup.” She grins. Red seems to be today’s colour in all the wrong places. As she saws through the meat loaf (David hadn’t noticed if the knife came from the drawer or the sink), Stella regurgitates some gossip she heard from a neighbour today, someone David barely knows and probably wouldn’t recognize on the street. Something about another neighbour whose son is running for council. An actual councillor in our neighbourhood in a few months, isn’t that amazing? David points out the election hasn’t even been called yet and there’s a big difference between running and winning, but Stella says the son sounds very bright and will probably win in a landslide, and they should put his sign on their lawn in a show of support.


“How can you be so cheerful and optimistic all the damn time?” This comes out louder than he intends, but as he sits with a chunkier rendition of his mother’s meat loaf in front of him, he keeps going. “This house is a bloody mess, your crap is everywhere, you waste money we don’t have on more crap. And have you seen the living room? You sashay around here all sunshine and rainbows and meanwhile we live in a pig sty. I work myself to death at a stressful job all day and can’t even relax in my own home. And I told you, we’ve had this conversation a hundred times, I don’t like meat loaf.”


Stella drops her fork. It misses the paper plate and clatters on the table. “I’ll have you know I work my fingers to the bone trying to keep this place decent—”


“I don’t see any evidence of it.”


“And what exactly have you done around here? When’s the last time you lifted a finger ...” And off they go on their well-worn track. It bores David, really: he can mentally check out of the shouting match and think ahead to the bottle of wine in the pantry he’ll pop open as soon as Stella has announced her intention to spend the night at her sister’s. First he’ll be too exhausted, then too tipsy to clean anything up himself, though perhaps he’ll start the dishwasher as soon as she leaves so at least he’ll have a clean plate for breakfast in the morning.


Stella reaches the “I-gave-up-a-promising-career-in-dance-for-you” portion of the argument. David throws up his hands and goes into the pantry. He pulls out the bottle of wine and grabs the corkscrew from a kitchen drawer. At least this one utensil is clean. Stella falls silent as he takes the bottle into the living room. He flops on the couch and grabs the remote. His foot connects with the mug on the coffee table; it lands on the carpet with a light thunk. Stella stomps upstairs. He can hear her drag out her suitcase from the hall closet and roll it into the bedroom. He wonders just what she takes with her that requires a suitcase for only a couple of nights. Next comes the teary phone call to her sister, which he thankfully can’t hear from his spot on the couch.


Stella humps the suitcase down the stairs. “I’m spending the night at my sister’s,” she declares.


David puts the bottle to his lips. “I’ll drink to that,” he mumbles.


“Augh!” Stella slams the front door. A moment later David hears the car start. No matter; he can ask his friend Marty for a lift to work tomorrow.


Or ... he can take a page out of Stella’s book and look on the bright side. She tends to stay with her sister for two or three days, plenty of time to bring in cleaners, a junk removal company, a real estate agent. Perhaps he’ll even have that bonfire in the backyard. He’s always wanted to minimize, downsize, declutter. Stella has actually given him a wonderful opportunity, an opportunity to upend their lives for the better, give them new fodder for their arguments. He looks around at the mess in the living room. Yes, he will take the rest of the week off work and set their lives to rights. Things must change, and change in a big way. No more useless small appliances, skirts and blouses with the tags still attached, bits of costume jewellery that never get worn. Everything is going. He can imagine the look of surprise on her face already.


David smiles and puts on a boxing match. In the meantime, he hopes Stella notices the low-gas indicator before she gets to the highway.

AUTHOR BIO

Elle Boyd lives in Nova Scotia, Canada, with her husband and their feline overlord. Her work has appeared in Otherverse Magazine, Vocivia, Orchid’s Lantern, and Recesses, among others. Elle can be found on Bluesky (primarily) and X (rarely) @TheElleBoyd.

JUDGE'S REMARKS

author photo official cropped_edited.jpg

 

FLASH FICTION JUDGE

Amy Debellis 

Amy DeBellis is a multi-genre writer and the author of the novel All Our Tomorrows (CLASH Books, 2025).

MORE ABOUT AMY

bottom of page