Understory 2022

THE BROWN ROCKING CHAIR
by Elsa Snodderly

The chair wasn’t always brown. It used to be covered with a yellow fabric my mother tailored for its exact measurements. In the living room, the yellow wasn’t overstated, yet it stood out against the slate shag rug, the grey couch, and the large polished wooden sled that served as a side table for drinks and sometimes popcorn that accompanied our Friday Family Movie Nights. From my memory, my brother would not sit in the chair—he preferred the couch; on the other hand, my sister would take every chance to climb onto the chair and place her arms on the rests like it was some kind of throne. One time, far off in my memory, her arms did not lay on the armrests, but circled around me at some late hour. I mistook the lights on my new radio to be the red eyes of a monster. She rocked the chair with a small creak punctuating the silence of the witching hour, and told me a story of a goblin. The goblin—who was truly a good goblin—took unwanted things from people's rooms and brought them to ghoul markets, where fairies traded teeth for paperclips and goblins used candy wrappers to wallpaper their bathrooms. She told the story until I fell asleep to the slow rocking, the gentle groan of the springs, and her voice pushing against a yawn.

As I got older, the striped, slightly shiny fabric faded, and the hems frayed from our rabbits chewing indiscreetly on the forbidden fibrous chew toy. Still, the fabric covering stayed, and my father would fall into it after dinner with a bowl of Breyers ice cream and a “What are we watching?” My father’s voice was rough, coarse, distinct like the chair. The kind you could  pick out in a furniture loft or a grocery store, three aisles over. If I’m honest, I don’t quite remember his voice anymore. Sometimes I think I do. I fool myself into thinking I remember his baritone that droned on and on like the plane engines he worked on—the ones he smelled like—but it faded long ago like the fabric. What didn’t fade was the creak of his body shifting as he found a comfy position. The giggles of my sister as he scooped her out of his chair and kissed her cheek. His kiss, wet with the leftover ice cream on his mustache. Or the fear of him tipping over as he throws his head back in laughter when John Candy’s foot is crushed by a statue. I can never remember the laugh, but I remember the look he gave my mother as he leaned forward in his chair to hold her hand as she sat on the couch. The chair gave him the movement he couldn’t muster at the end of the day. 

The chair is still there, but the covering is gone. Thrown away or stored, I’m not quite sure. But the chair feels like it was skinned with the yellow cover pulled away to reveal the soft  brown fabric it was made with. It’s still in the same place—in the living room with the grey couch and polished wooden sleigh, but no one sits in it anymore. The springs don’t groan when the chair rocks forward. It just sits there, making an indent in the shag rug. For movies, an unlucky person has to sit on the floor since the couch can only hold three adults. Sometimes it’s me, with my back pressed against the brown chair. It’s just a place for clean folded laundry now because it’s not a place we can sit, but one that needs to be filled.

                                                                  
Elsa Snodderly is a senior pursuing a Baccalaureate in English with a minor in Creative Writing. She is an aspiring librarian who is rediscovering her passion for writing.
 

This page has paths: