S.L.Luck

August 27, 2020

My husband and I celebrate 16 years tomorrow. (Yay us!) He’s not a card kind of guy unless there’s a hockey player on it and there’s nothing we need and nowhere we can fly off to, so I figured I’d put my writing skills to use and write him the perfect day. Our oldest daughter watched me cry-laugh as I read it out to her (clearly I’m not as funny as I think I am), but I think it does justice for the ball of fun that is my favorite guy. (For a little bit of context, we returned to Canada a year ago from Serbia. We LOVED every second of living there and exploring all that the country and the rest of Europe has to offer and we can’t wait to go back.) Enjoy, Dear Readers!

“Christopher’s Perfect Day”

Christopher woke late in the morning, the spindly chords of Toma’s “Ej, Branka, Branka” playing from the kitchen as he smelled coffee brewing. He rubbed his eyes, tired still from the previous night’s free UFC on TV, and sat up. His wife, even now incredibly youthful and insanely gorgeous in her 40s, carefully carried his latte into the room and kissed his head. “One hotdog or two?” she asked sweetly.

He sipped his coffee, considering. “Three too much?”

“Sounds perfect to me,” his wife agreed and left the room.

The sounds of his children whispering quietly came at him and when he looked out his bedroom door, he saw his daughters, one carrying the morning paper and the other with a new box of hockey cards fresh from the mailbox. They presented these gifts to him along with quick hugs and promptly went downstairs to clean their bedrooms. Christopher stretched, drank his coffee and read the paper before turning to his phone. Not five minutes later, three hotdogs and a tall glass of chocolate milk adorned the nightstand beside his bed so he tossed his phone aside and searched for the remote. His wife, too, searched wildly for the contraption. She stretched, bent, leaned over him and…well, the remote was found and the TV eventually turned on. There, on the screen in front of him, fast men with quick sticks proved their worth as the Habs won the Stanley Cup and would swiftly begin the regular season the very next day. Christopher skipped into the shower, singing.

He was just drying off when his wife banged on the door. “Chris! Come quick! You need to see this!” She panted and screeched and Christopher suspected trouble but when he finally opened the door, his wife took his wrist and drove him to the window, where she jumped and pointed. “There! See it? Look!”

And there it was. Right beside their very own house, in the middle of their quaint residential paradise, a new building had been erected. Halifax Donair. On the freshly emblazoned widows were the words, FREE FOR NEIGHBOURS. Sometime later, Christopher woke on the couch. “What happened?” he asked, confused, rubbing his head.

“You fainted, but don’t worry. You were only out for a second. The owners saw you through the window and wanted to make sure you were okay. They asked me to give you this.” From behind her back, his wife produced a bag from which she pulled a donair that was bigger than his oldest child when she was born.

He ate, admiring the new view out of the window when he heard scraping sounds coming from the basement. Christopher put his donair down and went to investigate. Taking the stairs two at a time, he found the sounds coming from the laundry room. He peeked in and saw two sets of hind legs and two tails poking from two litterboxes. Scrape, shuffle, scrape, shuffle went the sounds inside and Christopher cleared his throat so as not to startle his cats too badly. A grey head and a tabby head emerged, pulling with them two small scoops. His smallest daughter barrelled in. “Mommy taught them to clean up after themselves,” she exclaimed jubilantly. “Isn’t it funny Daddy?”

Christopher steadied himself against the wall. “Amazing,” he admired. Upstairs, his phone beeped and he looked at the message on his screen. A new floorball association was being developed and would he like to play? Yes! He quickly typed. Yes!

In the evening, as he ate ćevapi and enjoyed Zorica and Đani on Spotify, he checked his lottery numbers from the night before. Of course, he won.